Reviving Ghosts ads at Wiles Colloquium

Revealing/Reviving ghost advertisements: Using street photographs to visualize outdoor advertising in modern Shanghai.”  Wiles Colloquium, 23-24 June 2017

On June 23, I will participate in the 2017 Wiles Colloquium entitled “New Lenses on China. 23-24 June 2017: Photography in Modern Chinese History and Historiography”, hold at Queen’s University, Belfast. The program is available here.

My talk will deal with “Revealing/Reviving ghost advertisements: Using street photographs to visualize outdoor advertising in modern Shanghai.”

Abstract:

Visual historians have often focused on press advertisements to examine and reveal the patterns of modern consumption or urban cultures in Shanghai. This paper will first show the value of using street photographs to engage with neglected forms of advertising within the city: billboards, neon signs, flags, tramway or rickshaw ads, and many other eccentric forms of outdoor advertising. Furthermore, photos may be used to shift the gaze from cultural representations or discourses to the material and physical, as well as social and political aspects of advertising. Photos may reveal how advertising artifacts participated in shaping urban landscapes; how they were perceived and experienced, either as a visual pollution, a beautifier for the city, or a danger for ordinary citizens in their everyday life. Yet one should not be blind to the limitations of photographic sources: dating, localizing, identifying brands, companies or people, tracing their genealogies and contexts of production, are but a few of the many challenges that historians have to face. This paper will eventually explore various digital tools that open new possibilities for using photos as historical sources or materials for writing visual narratives.

Cécile Armand

Ancienne élève de l'Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon (2006), agrégée d'histoire (2009), docteure en histoire (2017), mes travaux portent sur la publicité, l'histoire urbaine, les migrations intellectuelles entre la Chine et les Etats-Unis et les méthodes computationnelles appliquées à la recherche historique. Mes recherches ont reçu le soutien des fondations Chiang Ching-kuo, Coca-Cola, Andrew Mellon (Program DHAsia, Stanford), de l'Agence Nationale de la Recherche (Access ERC, ENS-Lyon) et du Conseil Européen de la Recherche (projet ENP-China, Aix-Marseille).

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