写照·影像·照相:近代中国视觉文化转型的一条线索

Portrait-painting,Shadow-image,Reflecting-likeness:A Clue to the Transformation of Visual Culture in Modern China

早期摄影概念历经以19世纪40年代的“写照”(小照)、19世纪中期的“影像”(照影、画影、照画)、到19世纪后期的“照相”(照像、照象、映相)为代表的本土观念变迁,至20世纪初,今日常见的中文命名“摄影”才出现并逐渐普及开来。由此,摄影概念在中国的接受和演变,也经历了从融入民间肖像画到实现媒介独立的过程,是中国传统视觉文化在与西方现代视觉文化遭遇与交织的半个多世纪中,推陈出新、走向现代的一个开端,也是中国近代视觉文化观念转型的一种缩影。

The naming of early photography in China developed from local concepts respectively represented by“portrait-painting”(“xiezhao”,or“xiaozhao”)in the 1840s,“shadow-image”(“yingxiang”,or“zhaoying”,“huaying”,“zhaohua”)in the mid-19th century,and“reflecting-likeness”(“zhaoxiang”,or“yingxiang”)in the late-19th century.It is until the early 20th century that the modern Chinese term of“photography”(sheying)appeared and gradually became popularized.Hence,the acceptance and evolution of the concept of photography in China has gone through the process from integrating into folk portraiture to the independence of the medium,which is a beginning of the modernization of traditional Chinese visual culture in the encounter and intertwining with modern Western visual culture for more than half a century,as well as a microcosm of the transformation of visual culture in modern China.