Panoramic view of the Sidney Gamble exhibit at the Capital Library of Beijing

Panoramic view of the Sidney Gamble exhibit at the Capital Library of Beijing.

Audiovisualities Lab Co-Director Guo-Juin Hong is in China this week for the opening of Beijing through Sidney Gamble’s Camera (June 16-30 & October 14-30, 2013). Beautifully installed at the Capital Library of Beijing, the exhibit features photographs from the Duke Library’s Gamble collection. Sidney Gamble was an American sociologist who worked in pre-revolutionary China, between 1917 and 1932. During his research visits, he took some 5,000 pictures of everyday life in urban and rural China. You can browse through digital versions of his photographs at the Duke Library website. To find out more about the Beijing exhibit, check out this Duke Today article.

 

Here’s Prof. Hong on the exhibit’s curatorial angle: “Unlike previous shows of Gamble’s extraordinary images, in this exhibit we wanted to emphasize how photographic events are reciprocal, and never a one-way street. We wanted to highlight not only how Gamble ‘sees’ China with his camera, but also how his subjects — Chinese people, their daily life and cultures — look back.”

 

Prof. Hong curated Beijing through Sidney Gamble’s Camera along with Duke’s Chinese Studies Librarian Luo Zhou and graduate students Jason Tonio Woerner (Cultural Anthropology), Ana Huang (Cultural Anthropology), and Kshama Kumar (History). Also on the curatorial team are undergraduates (rising sophomores) Jaeho Chang, Ouwen Huang, Christine Farell, and Sagar Patel. Be sure to take a look at the bilingual exhibit website, which includes photo essays by Woerner, Huang, and Kumar.

 

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