Lu Xun And Photography

Lu Hsun who was born in Qing Dynasty took photos for the first time when he was in Japan in Guangxu 28 years of Qing Dynasty. The first photograph being lost, the picture as memento of braid cutting in 1903 is the earliest one from which we could see the young Lu Hsun in his 22.Many daily activities mentioned in Lu Hsun's diary are in connection with photography:press photo reading, official group photographing, picture sending, single or family shooting, photo gallery purchasing, scenery pictures collecting. Those things mentioned, as a matter of fact, have embodied the experiences of photography of people in the ROC.The specialness of Lu's connection to photography might be brought by his "Photography Theory" written in 1924. Focusing only on several "little things", this article turned a deaf ear to those photography practices in China regardless of their diversity after its ten year's development. We couldn't help but wondering what on earth does he want to say about photography.The number of Lu's picture is not as many as other expression techniques such as portrait, sculpture and so on. Those expressions together with his photos have influenced the shaping of Lu's image especially in the mind of those people living in the period far away from Lu's time.His pictures being cut, smeared, or embellished, it's on longer secret that some features of Lu Hsun have been intensified. We used to attribute the reason for this to something outside ideology. If we analyze from a viewpoint of photography itself, namely associating Lu Hsun, Lu Hsun's pictures, Lu Hsun's image and Lu Hsun's outlook on photography to the process of Chinese photography and the process of world photography, the nature of photography would be obtained as well as the answers to many questions.