 Shanghai: A Century of Photography, 1850-1950
Place:
Loewentheil Photography of China Collection - New York, 10 West 18th Street, USA
Date:
Mar 19, 2026 to May 19, 2026
Detail: March 19 – May 19, 2026
Opening Reception: Wednesday, March 18, 6-8pm
Exhibiting at: 10 West 18th Street, 7th Floor
Asia Week Hours: Tuesday to Thursday, 10am-5pm
We are excited to present Shanghai: A Century of Photography, 1850-1950 during this season’s Asia Week New York. This exhibition traces one hundred years of photographic art in Shanghai, from the city’s earliest paper photographs of the 1850s to its vernacular photography of the 1950s. Shanghai was one of the earliest locations for the emergence of photography in China. The city attracted foreign and pioneering Chinese photographers who captured the unique imagery of the cosmopolitan treaty-port era.
This exhibition presents some of the earliest photographic records of Shanghai, produced when the art of photography was developing in China. Early albumen views of the Bund, waterways, gardens, and commercial districts show how photographers responded to a rapidly transforming urban landscape, experimenting with scale, clarity, and vantage point. Shanghai remained the central locus of photographic art, modernist experimentation, and art publishing and distribution in China from the advent of photography into the 1950s. The city was a hub not only for images of Shanghai, but for photographs printed and circulated throughout the China and the world.
The exhibition brings together rare nineteenth-century views, portraits, and landscapes. Its range of twentieth-century vernacular works charts the evolution of photographic vision in Shanghai, combining art, commerce, and modernity. A rare and important group of gelatin silver prints from the 1933 Liangyou National Photography Tour documents an early effort to advance photography as a modern artistic medium in China.
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