A Visual Misalignment of Modernity. Documentary Photography of Contemporary Urban Transformation in Shanghai

The built environment of contemporary Shanghai has accumulated relatively continuous historical fragments, providing a unique, complete and diachronic sample of urban transformation for documentary photography. As an objective and material fact, how the transformation has become a subjective and cultural fact that was visualized by photography remains a significant issue.  A series of art movements in China since 1976 thrived the individual’s expression, artistic or documentary, by photography. Before long, the unprecedented and nationwide urbanization realizing the comprehensive modernization after the Reform and Opening up Policy in 1978 has far surpassed the construction of the past. During the urbanization in Shanghai, architectural spectacles and highly mixed urban development has emerged, meanwhile, the historical trace of everyday life has inevitably either vanished or transformed. It is a significant interaction between the material transformation pursuing the Chinese subjective modernity by codifying “Plans” to realize the comprehensive modernization and the visualization of the specific spatial impact that reconstructed everyday life underlying the overall transformation.  Concentrating on three representative and sequential photographers whose long-term documentation illustrated the urban transformation in contemporary Shanghai: Guo Bo acted as a professional architect and a photographer as well who depicted the everyday life in vanishing residential lanes “Lilong” after the Reform; Lu Yuanmin delved into the street and gleaned the surreal micro-reactions during the transformation; And Xi Zi applied his lens to produce an urban specimen of the remaining existence of the crumbling residential housing amongst new developing areas, this paper discusses how the visual misalignment as a distinct feature and approach of the recognition of the urban transformation was revealed by documentary photography. Although focusing on different motifs, their representations with self-consciousness as an intertextuality of urban transformation demonstrated a common sense that brought the overall transformation as a material fact of the comprehensive modernization in Shanghai back to everyday experience as a cultural fact. The coherence and distance, the intimacy and indifference, the familiarity and strangeness in the documentation endeavor sensitively to represent the visual experience of modernity in everyday life which reveals a phenomenon of misalignment in visual culture of the urban transformation in Shanghai.