Adou. Horse, Building. 2006.

Courtesy of M97 Gallery, Shanghai.

 Photographic Ecologies*

WILLIAM SCHAEFER

From the flat, decaying surface of a wall, the form of a horse emerges from a
spray of liquid. Its legs are barely discernible from the murky ground of the darkly
printed photograph: They are planted among three overlapping boulders, while
the ground to the left is strewn with white and gray flecks and patches, apparently
trash. The horse’s shaggy hair and ears are blurred slightly from the slow shutter
speed of the camera in the dim light, as if the horse were still taking form.
Paradoxically, every drop of the spray the horse seems to be shaking off its body
appears clearly visible, in flight, as if captured by a rapid shutter speed. But, the
viewer realizes, this is just a trick of the flattening of the perspective from which
the photograph was taken: The spray is white paint splattered on the sharply
focused wall of the building behind the horse. Much of that wall, which parallels
the picture plane like a screen, is mottled with age. Along the building’s left edge,
traces of liquid drip down the wall, staining a patch of raw plaster where the skin
of the building has been torn away to reveal the bricks beneath. Iron bars are
barely visible in the dark windows on the left, while the window and door on the
right are as black and formless as the eyeless patches on the horse’s face. Attached
to the upper-left window, a stained sign is scarcely legible but for three characters:
屠宰场 (tuzaichang): slaughterhouse. And while the sky and mountain slope
behind are as mottled as the wall’s surface, the curved and jagged area of darkness
on the left edge of the building, perhaps an outcropping of foliage, appears like a

* I am grateful to Rong Rong for a gracious and thought-provoking discussion as well as an infor-
mative visit to Three Shadows Photography Center in Beijing, which were indispensable for this essay and
the larger project on contemporary Chinese photography of which it is a part. Steven Harris and the staff
of M97 Gallery in Shanghai very helpfully made available essential materials. I am also very much indebted
to Joanne Bernardi of the University of Rochester, Jean-Louis Bigourdan and Douglas W. Nishimura of the
Image Permanence Institute of Rochester Institute of Technology, Greg Miller of Film Rescue
International, and Taina Meller and Mark Osterman of the George Eastman House for generously giving
their time, in person and via email, to detective work about the visible artifacts of expired and decaying
film. Sabrina Carletti, Prasenjit Duara, Rachel Haidu, Andrew F. Jones, Julia Adeney Thomas, Eugene
Wang, and an anonymous reader for October, as well as students, colleagues, and audiences at Binghamton
University, Duke University, Durham University, Harvard University, Syracuse University, the University of
Rochester, and Zhejiang University, challenged and brought to visibility my arguments in this essay. I am
deeply grateful to all, and am alone responsible for all errors and misjudgments.

OCTOBER 161, Summer 2017, pp. 42–68. © 2017 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
44 OCTOBER

gash in space. It is as if the mountain and sky were a torn backdrop, a pictorial sur-
face opening into nothingness.
The photograph, Horse, Building, is one in a series, Samalada, by the Sichuan-
based photographer Adou, who came to prominence as part of a group exhibition
entitled Wai Xiang / Outward Expressions, Inward Reflections, held in 2008 at the
Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing. Over the past decade, Three
Shadows, co-founded by photographer Rong Rong and his Japanese wife and col-
laborator, Inri, has become a focal point for the display of experimental photogra-
phy in China. The work shown there is highly diverse—from the most intimate
and personal to the historical to the abstract. But for a group of contemporary
Chinese artists, including Rong Rong, Adou, Zhang Jin, Xing Danwen, Chu Chu,
and Zi Bai, I want to argue, photography is a key site for staging and rethinking
fundamental questions of the relations between culture and nature, landscape
and ecology, as they intertwine with the politics of space and place in China—and
thus for learning to picture, with fierce precision, the Anthropocene, the epoch in
which the human becomes the primary ecological and geological force. The work
of these photographers is contemporaneous with a renewed philosophical inquiry
into the relations between culture and nature in China and elsewhere, such as
Jiang Yuhui’s recent reconsideration of Chinese landscape painting from the per-
spectives of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, cognitive science, and envi-
ronmental aesthetics.1 But most of all, their work is driven by their engagement
with the intertwined conditions of the present historical moment, a time of mas-
sive displacement and migration of people from the country to the cities, from the
hinterlands to coastal regions; rapid urbanization and urban nostalgia for the
countryside and “native soil”; and widespread, catastrophic environmental degra-
dation.2 In their various inquiries, most of these photographers insist on using
film as a departure from digital photography—making film, as it were, a post-digi-
tal practice—even as the digital forces them to rethink the medium of analogue
photography. Because of the scale and severity of environmental degradation and
population density and displacement in China, the work of Zhang Kechun, Zhang
Jin, Xing Danwen, and Adou, among others, goes well beyond an investigation of
the nature of photography; it has become a harbinger of global futures, a kind of
test case of how to picture the Anthropocene and the questions it poses regarding
the nature of nature and the relations of human and nature.
The photographs Adou and other Three Shadows artists are producing can be
understood as not merely depicting the environment; rather, for these photogra-
phers, the materiality and forms of photographic images emerge from the interac-
tions of ecological processes and thereby allow the human to be seen as one among
many contingent actors within such processes. For instance, the horse in Adou’s pho-
1. Jiang Yuhui, Hua yu zhen: Meiluo-Pangdi yu Zhingguo shanshui huajing [Painting and truth:
Merleau-Ponty and Chinese landscape paintings] (Shanghai: Renmin chubanshe, 2013), p. 4.

2. On current Chinese documentary photography as a medium for thinking rural displacement

and urban nostalgia, see my “Poor and Blank: History’s Marks and the Photographies of
Displacement,” Representations 109 (2010), pp. 1–34.
Photographic Ecologies 45

tograph at first glance seems to stand in uneasy relation to its environment, nearly
indiscernible from the human-built structure with its imposing face and sinister sig-
nage behind it, and isolated by the building from the open spaces of mountains and
sky beyond. And yet the mottling of the building’s wall makes it appear to be of the
same substance, albeit a darker shade, as the mottled sky. Strictly speaking, sky and
wall do share a common substance: that of the film that depicts them. This common-
ality of materiality and depiction is, of course, true of any photograph—and, for that
matter, any medium—but it is a commonality much photography works hard to ren-
der invisible, as if the medium were transparent. One of the distinctive features of the
Samalada project is Adou’s insistence on the visibility of the substance of photography
by using expired film. At the time he shot these photographs, this film was already
twelve years past its expiration date and had been kept in unknown conditions with, it
seems, little control of humidity or temperature. At first, Adou recounts, he used
expired film because it was cheap; but the film’s unpredictable artifacts quickly
became part of his project’s aesthetic.3 Such photographs, with their decaying sur-
faces, at once document and dissolve the boundaries of their subject matter. In the
present photograph, the horse seems both to emerge from and merge with the wall,
shaking with blur and the fluid forms of life; the building, marked by death, cracks
and crumbles; but the entire film surface, as its emulsion decays and its silver particles
degrade with age, pulses with life: vibrant matter, to use Jane Bennett’s evocative
term.4 Despite the sharp focus of the camera’s lens, the smudged, blotched, and mot-
tled film dissolves the distinctions between persons, animals, and plants, human arti-
facts and natural forms, and building, earth, and sky depicted in the photograph.
A number of the images in Adou’s Samalada series seem to evoke ethnographic
photography, particularly those that explore the life of the Yi ethnic minority of the
Daliang Mountains in Sichuan province, southwestern China. The Yi have had a long
history of being what might be called photography’s ethnic other in China, whether
subjected to primitivist ridicule, as in a photograph featured on a full page in the
renowned illustrated magazine The Young Companion (Liangyou huabao) in 1934, or
to more sympathetic documentation by the photographer Zhuang Xueben, who, dur-
ing the 1930s, “captured the life and customs” of the Yi in the photographs for which
he became known.5 The reintroduction of Zhuang Xueben’s work to a contemporary
audience over the past decade has provoked a variety of reflections on ethnographic

3. M97 Gallery, “An Interview with Adou,” in Adou (Shanghai: M97 Gallery, 2013), p. 132.

4. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010).

5. Zhang Li, “Nei xiang de ‘wai xiang’” / “‘Outer Expressions’ of the Inner Self,” in Wai
xiang/Outward Expressions, Inward Reflections (Beijing: Three Shadows Press, 2008), p. 8 in Chinese text,
p. 11 in English translation. All further references to this volume cite the Chinese text first, English
translation second. I have at times modified the translation to bring it closer to the Chinese text. On
primitivism, photography, and modernism in early-twentieth-century Chinese print media, see my
“Shanghai Savage,” in Shadow Modernism: Photography, Writing, and Space in Shanghai, 1925–1937
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 180–220.
46 OCTOBER

photography. An article
appearing in a special
issue of Chinese
Photography (Zhongguo
sheying) in 2002 devoted
to Zhuang’s work makes
a rather familiar argu-
ment for the importance
of ethnographic photog-
raphy for preserving “dis-
appearing traditional cul-
tures,” especially of what
the article calls “back-
wards ethnicities,” in the
face of modernization,
an argument that the
article couples with a
faith in “veracity” (zhen-
shixing) as the guiding
principle of ethnograph-
ic photography. 6 The
authors, the anthropolo-
gists Zhang Jianghua and
Wang Zhaowu, write,
“When taking pho-
Adou. Funeral, Men. 2006. tographs, it is not permis-
Courtesy of M97 Gallery, Shanghai. sible for the photograph-
er to interfere in the nat-
ural setting of the photographed object [duixiang], and it is not permissible to manip-
ulate the photograph.”7 Interference with the “other” and its “natural setting” is here
equated with the manipulation of the photograph itself. Writing in the same issue of
Chinese Photography, however, the anthropologist and activist Xiao Liangzhong
reminds his readers that there is no objectivity to be found in ethnographic photogra-
phy, arguing instead that “true natives [zhenzheng de tuzhu] lose their voice, and even
hide their bodies,” when an encounter between photographer and the photographed
is “not mutually negotiated”—a notable exception, Xiao writes, being Zhuang
Xueben’s work from the 1930s.8

6. Zhang Jianghua and Wang Zhaowu, “Zhuang Xueben zaoqi minzuzhi sheying de renleixue
shang de jiazhi” [The Anthropological Value of Zhuang Xueben’s Early Ethnographic Photographs],
Zhongguo sheying [Chinese Photography] (February 2002), p. 26.

7. Zhang and Wang, “The Anthropological Value of Zhuang Xueben’s Early Ethnographic
Photographs,” p. 26.

8. Xiao Liangzhong, “Zhenzhengde minzuzhi sheying” [True Ethnographic Photography],

Zhongguo sheying [Chinese Photography] (February 2002), pp. 27–28.
S. T. Wang. Luoluo Women, in Liangyou
huabao [The young companion] 85. 1934.
48 OCTOBER

While Adou is aware of

Zhuang Xueben’s work and has
pointed out the influence of
documentary photography on
Samalada, his photographs
mark a clear departure from
and even a refusal of ethno-
graphic photography even as
they seem to evoke it. Zhang
Li, a curator at Three Shadows
Gallery, claims that Adou’s
photographs “do not have the
same significance as documen-
tary photography,” for his
“scenes do not focus on the
exotic customs or the living
habits of an ethnic minority,
but rather use almost random,
bland [pingdan] compositions”
and expired film—such as in a
Zhuang Xueben. Yi Funeral. 1930s.
photograph of a boy playing
billiards—to place “these peo-
ple who live between mountains and rivers into a time and space with vital con-
sciousness and historical feeling.”9 Indeed, for the most part, the artifacts of the
Yi people that Adou represents in multiple photographs—seeming to take the
place of the material culture of agriculture, housing, costume, and rituals that
were the focus of multiple pictures in Zhuang Xueben’s body of ethnographic
photographs—are various forms of screen. In Adou’s work, however, screens are
more often seen in the context of photographs such as Girl in Front of Backdrop.
Here embodying a compositional strategy similar to that of Horse, Building, the
screen is both a backdrop framing a portrait of a girl and baby (a setup that
evokes “scientific” photographs of ethnic “specimens”) and a barrier blocking
visual access to the environment of the Yi, even as that environment, represented
by an indeterminate mass of light and shadow, appears to spill through an open-
ing at the left edge of the backdrop.
But while Adou’s compositional strategy is to picture a variety of screens, in
all of his photographs the surface of the expired film itself functions as a screen.
To be sure, one effect of Adou’s deliberate use of expired film is to make his pho-
tographs from the early twenty-first century appear much older than they are. But
9. “A Round-Table Discussion on Outward Expressions, Inward Reflections: Young Photographers
Group Show,” in Wai xiang / Outward Expressions, Inward Reflections, p. 24/p. 53, and Zhang Li, “‘Outer
Expressions’ of the Inner Self,” pp. 7–8/p. 11.
Photographic Ecologies 49

their temporality becomes even stranger when we remember that Adou’s use of
expired film is, so to speak, a “post-digital” practice. As Zhang Li observes, Adou is
one of a number of photographers who have rejected digital images for being
“too clean, too perfect” and have instead “rediscovered the special qualities of
film,” drawing attention to its material properties.10 The many blank spaces in
Adou’s photographs, as in the area of sky pictured in Fog, Child, Pig, actually con-
sist of the opaque matter of the photographic emulsion and base made visible. It
goes without saying that what one literally sees in any film photograph is the emul-
sion. But in an image like this, what is visible are the surface artifacts of the emul-
sion, such as streaks, mottling, and spots that signify decay and age; the details and
information central to a conventional ethnographic photograph are precisely
what are rendered opaque. While for Zhang Jianghua and Wang Zhaowu it is
impermissible to manipulate an ethnographic photograph, Adou’s use of expired
film pushes their stricture to an extreme, allowing the surface of the film to take
on a life of its own. Indeed, Adou cites the very unpredictability of expired film as
10. Ibid., p. 38/p. 68.

Adou. Boy and Billiards Table. 2006.

Courtesy of M97 Gallery, Shanghai.
50 OCTOBER

one of his reasons for using it.

Contingency, accident, and unpre-
dictability are the surfaces on which
the lives, objects, and environments
(built and natural) of the Yi people
are screened—both in the sense of a
surface on which representations are
projected and in the sense of filtering
those representations. Despite Adou’s
close proximity to the people, ani-
mals, objects, and spaces he pho-
tographs, the surfaces of the pho-
tographs attenuate the surfaces of
much of what they represent. Indeed,
one of Adou’s complaints about “too
clean” digital photographs is that they
appear to be “too close” to him.11 Of
course, one can read Adou’s aversion
to proximity and cultivation of pho-
tographs that look old as a matter of
Adou. Girl in Front of Backdrop. 2006. removing his subjects from himself
Courtesy of M97 Gallery, Shanghai.
and his viewers in space and time—
and indeed, Adou does invoke this
possibility in some of his statements.
And yet elsewhere, in what I believe to be a far more revealing statement, Adou
refers to expired film as a “threshold” (menkan), a “little entry point, something to
bring you inside.”12
Adou’s statement comes late in a roundtable discussion convened by Three
Shadows in 2008 on the occasion of the exhibition Wai Xiang. This title, which lit-
erally means “external image” but in the exhibition catalogue is given the English
translation “Outward Expressions, Inward Reflections,” initially sets the terms for a
discussion that primarily concerns the mediation of self, other, and nature by the
camera and film. In an essay introducing the exhibition, the curator Zhang Li
defines the term “outward” (wai) in terms of the turn by Adou and other photog-
raphers away from prevalent concerns in contemporary Chinese art with “the
minutiae of everyday urban life” and toward images with which to “regard and
ponder the world . . . outside or beyond the consciousness of humans.”13 For
Zhang, this attempt to create images expressive of how humanity “cannot cast off

11. Ibid., p. 23/p. 52.

12. Ibid., p. 28/p. 57.

13. Zhang Li, “‘Outer Expressions’ of the Inner Self,” p. 9/p. 13.
Photographic Ecologies 51

impermanence and randomness” and is “subordinate to nature” begins in the

experience of how China’s economic development is “dramatically increasing the
disparity between its coastal regions and its hinterlands,” with greatly differing
“degrees of alienation caused by human-made environments.”14 And yet such
images, Zhang asserts, “project [the artists’] innermost feelings and thoughts onto
the outside world.”15 Zhang Li’s claims inadvertently articulate the problem of
coming to terms with the changing environment through images understood to
be beyond human consciousness and subordinate to a larger nature, when his
insistence on a clearly distinguished “interior” and “exterior” mediated by a rela-
tionship of projection seems to contradict such a conception of images. What
Zhang Li’s rhetoric indicates is the difficulty of conceptualizing images as part of a
larger nature when thinking photography in such deeply dualistic terms.
Much of the discussion that ensues questions and gradually dismantles these
distinctions between self and other, inner and outer, photographic images and
natural world. Indeed, the first intervention by Rong Rong, co-founder of the
Three Shadows Photography Centre, into the discussion is to shift the term “pro-
jection” to “refraction”: “Actually,” he says, “photography is also the refraction of
one’s innermost world by the lens.”16 Adou immediately picks up on this shift and
redefines the “mode of looking outward”—or, later in the discussion, pointing a
camera outward—as “refracting” one’s self rather than projecting it.17 While at
this point both Rong Rong and Adou reiterate Zhang Li’s dualism of inner and
outer, their shift from projection, or, in Chinese, toushe, with its sense of “throw-
ing” (tou), to refraction, zheshe, with its sense of “bending” (zhe), is a move away
from an understanding of representation that assumes a transparency of the medi-
um to one in which the medium itself bends or distorts those representations. For
to refract is to bend light—by a lens, but also by the medium of water, or atmos-
phere, or mist or fog. To shift from projection to refraction is to shift from an
understanding of representation centered on the self’s relation to the world to
one that recognizes the ways in which the environment itself affects the creation
of the images that depict it.
Indeed, over the course of the discussion, the distinctions between self and
other, external and internal, become increasingly blurred. While Adou interprets
Zhang Li’s idea of outwardness (wai) specifically in terms of the “natural world”
(ziran jie), for a moment his statements about “great, open nature” where “people
are really true” veer, as other participants in the discussion point out, between the
narcissistic and the clichéd.18 And yet, when Adou is subsequently asked about his

14. Ibid., p. 9/p. 13 and p. 7/p. 10.

15. Zhang Li, “ ‘Outer Expressions’ of the Inner Self.”

16. “Round-Table Discussion,” p. 15/p. 44.

17. Ibid., p. 16/p. 44.

18. Ibid., p. 18/p. 46.

52 OCTOBER

relationship to the Yi people he photographed and whether he feels he is “being

brought into their world,” or that their world is brought into his, Adou replies,
“Sometimes I have a feeling of wavering, as if it’s almost their world or perhaps my
world. In the end I can’t tell them apart . . . can’t separate them, it’s all mixed
together.”19 At the same time, Adou’s use of expired film stages a rethinking of
the relations between the vibrant matter of film and the photographer’s embod-
ied self. As Adou puts it in his introduction to Samalada, “When you become part
of the photograph, you do not need our shallow consciousness to impose itself
upon [it]. . . . Your self is just a vassal of the photograph, dust beneath the light.”20
The title of Adou’s photograph Fog, Child, Pig, for instance, emphasizes the
fog that nearly dissolves a pig into the featureless ground, as well as any distin-
guishing marks on the child to the right, and instead divides the ground of the
image into lighter and darker areas of gray crossed by the diagonal horizon line
(which itself threatens to dissipate to the left). This photograph does not repre-
sent the world, as the anthropologist Tim Ingold puts it, “as composed of mutually
exclusive hemispheres of sky and earth, separated by the ground”; rather, it
embodies what, in a discussion of ecological approaches to perception, he calls
the “need to attend . . . to the fluxes of wind and weather. To feel the air and walk
on the ground is not to make external, tactile contact with our surroundings but
to mingle with them. In this mingling, as we live and breathe, the wind, light and
moisture of the sky bind with the substances of the earth in the continual foraging
of a way through the tangle of lifelines that comprise the land.”21 The mingling of
human, animal, air, and earth in Adou’s photograph, however, is not only created
by the refraction and diffusion of light through a heavy atmospheric fog; that min-
gling is as much an interaction of the atmosphere and earth, human and animal
forms and diffused light, with the expired film and its chemical fogging, as is most
visible in the heavy vertical bands of light and dark that hang like the folds of a
veil across the image.
The fogging in Adou’s photograph, that is, makes visible to the viewer how
the medium of film and the atmosphere it depicts are of a larger ecology. Indeed,
as James Gibson suggested as a fundamental component of what he called an eco-
logical approach to visual perception, the atmosphere itself might be defined as a
medium. For Gibson, a medium is that “in which animals can move about (and in
which objects can be moved about) [and] is at the same time the medium for light,
sound, and odor coming from sources in the environment. . . . Instead of geomet-
ric points and lines . . . we have points of observation and lines of locomotion. As
the observer moves from point to point, the optical information, the acoustical

19. Ibid., p. 19/p. 48.

20. Adou, Samalada (Beijing: Three Shadows Press, 2008), p. 5.

21. Tim Ingold, “Earth, Sky, Wind and Weather,” in Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge,
and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 115.
Photographic Ecologies 53

information, and the chemical information change accordingly.” 22 Another

important characteristic of medium for Gibson is that, containing oxygen, it can
be breathed, a “ceaseless chemical exchange of substance” between an organism
and its environment.23 Gibson intended for his ecological model of perception,
which along with Ingold’s work has informed Jiang Yuhui’s recent phenomenolog-
ical reconsideration of Chinese landscape painting, to break with a photographic
model of visual perception in which “each fixation of the eye is analogous to an
exposure of the film in a camera, so that what the brain gets is something like a
sequence of snapshots.” Instead, Gibson’s ecological approach defines perception
as a relationship between a body looking around and moving through space and
the ambient light, texture, and surfaces of the natural and human-made world.24
It is telling, then, that over the course of the Three Shadows roundtable,
Adou moves from describing his relationship to the environment of Liangshan,
where he photographed Samalada, in terms of refraction to biological metaphor,
highlighting the permeable sense of the body when he says, “The environment
infected me.”25 When Adou first mentions his use of expired film, he does not
describe it in terms of its capacity to represent (zaixian), but rather in terms of its
capacity to “embody [tixian] through being a thing of the past.”26 And key to
Adou’s understanding of the relationship of photographic processes to the envi-
ronment in terms of a continuum rather than as a dualism, in terms of embodi-
ments rather than representation, is his rejection of “precision and control . . .
things that you can predict,” in favor of relying, through the use of expired film,
on “instinct and nature to let things develop [or ‘issue,’ fachu].”27
The term Adou uses for “nature” or “naturally,” ziran er ran, emphasizes the
idea of nature as process, as that which takes its own course or becomes according
to its own nature—much as the film surface in Fog, Pig, Child follows its own
22. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (New York: Psychology Press,
2015), pp. 13–14. Gibson’s theory is one of Ingold’s touchstones throughout his own work.

23. Ibid., p. 14.

24. Ibid., p. xiv. For Gibson, ambient light is crucial to an ecological approach to perception
because of the information it conveys through the complexity of its structure. Hence “the limiting case
of ambient light without structure” would be “if the air were filled with such dense fog that the light
could not reverberate between surfaces, but only between droplets or particles in the medium. . . . In
the case of unstructured ambient light, an environment is not specified and no information about an
environment is available. . . . Consider an observer with an eye at a point in a fog-filled medium. The
receptors in the retina would be stimulated, and there would consequently be impulses in the fibers of
the optic nerve. But the light entering the pupil of the eye would not be different in different direc-
tions; it would be unfocusable, and no image could be formed on the retina.” Gibson, The Ecological
Approach to Visual Perception, pp. 46–47. Adou’s Fog, Child, Pig approaches such a limit of imageability.

25. “Round-Table Discussion,” p. 25/p. 54.

26. Ibid., p. 23/p. 52.

27. Ibid., p. 27/p. 56.

54 OCTOBER

course as a stain of decay grows in the sky at the upper right, or black blobs grow
like corpuscles along the left edge. The expression ziran er ran emphasizes the
dual meaning of ziran as both “nature” and “self-so.”28 This dual meaning of ziran
is key to the foundational Daoist philosophical text, the Daodejing (fourth century
BCE), whose claim that “the great image has no form” (da xiang wu xing) is
invoked in passing during the Three Shadows roundtable. Just at the moment
when the discussion shifts from projection to refraction, Adou comments that the
Chinese term xiang (image or phenomenon or figure, or even figuration) con-
notes “a kind of thinking,” to which another photographer, Lu Yanpeng, responds
by quoting the phrase “The great image has no form.” This phrase emerges out of
the understanding of nature as a spontaneously “self-so” process of “way-making”
(dao) explored throughout the Daodejing.29 Such an understanding of reality as a
ceaseless process of emergence in which, as the Daodejing puts it, “determinacy
(you) and indeterminacy (wu) give rise to each other,” a “process of way-making”
that, “though vague and indefinite, [has] images [you xiang] within it,” was, subse-
quently, fundamental to the aesthetics of Chinese landscape ink paintings, most
recognizably, perhaps, of the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279 CE)—which, in
turn, Adou’s photograph Fog, Child, Pig evokes with its mingling forms of human,
animal, earth, and atmosphere that at once emerge from and dissipate into its
nearly indeterminate spaces.30 François Jullien has demonstrated how key Chinese
theoretical texts on painting have repeatedly drawn upon and reinterpreted two
key terms from the Daodejing that appear in the passages I’ve just cited: “you xiang,
what possesses a figuration, and wu xing, what has no form.”31 Chinese landscape
painting, Jullien writes, “consists not of depicting and representing what is before
one’s eyes, perceiving it as a spectacle,” but rather in “the figuration of a continu-
ous transformation of forms,” “surging up and fading away at the same time,” a

28. Ibid., p. 16/p. 44. For an illuminating discussion of ziran, see Dao De Jing: A Philosophical
Translation, trans. Roger T. Ames and David L. Hall (New York: Ballantine, 2004), pp. 68–71.

29. “Round-table Discussion,” p. 16/p. 44. See Daodejing: A Philosophical Translation, pp. 115 and 141.

30. Daodejing, pp. 80 and 107.

31. François Jullien, The Great Image Has No Form, or On the Nonobject through Painting, trans. Jane
Marie Todd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 18. While Jullien’s discussion constitutes a
thought-provoking and productive survey of this aspect of Chinese painterly thinking, it must be read
with great caution, as he needlessly disregards the disparate historical contexts of early Daoist texts,
eleventh-century painting theory, and an early-eighteenth-century text by the painter Shitao, among
others, and thus essentializes “the” Chinese painter. Jullien’s anti-historical essentialism leads him to
claim that “China did not know how, or was unable, to produce its own modernity,” a claim that is diffi-
cult to comprehend in thinking of the complex and critically selective relationships of late Ming–early
Qing painters like Dong Qichang and Shitao to multiple cultural pasts, as well as the rapid cultural,
technological, economic, and social changes characteristic of that era of Chinese history. Jullien, The
Great Image Has No Form, pp. 236 and 119. For an essential discussion, see Jonathan Hay, Shitao: Painting
and Modernity in Early Qing China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Photographic Ecologies 55

process in which the agency of figuration was understood to be dispersed; or, as,
for instance, the early-modern painter Shitao (1642–1707 CE) put it, “brush-
stroke receives ink, ink receives brush, brush receives wrist, wrist receives mind,
just as heaven initiates and earth carries through.”32 To be sure, understandings of
the formation of images as emergent within larger processes and of agency have a
long history in Chinese aesthetic and philosophical thought; the stakes of invok-
ing and reinterpreting such understandings as modes of ecological thinking—
whether in discourses such as the Three Shadows roundtable or Jiang Yuhui’s phe-
nomenological reinterpretation of Chinese landscape painting, or indeed in the
pictorial practices of photographers such as Adou or Zhang Kechun—is a topic I
shall explore in a future essay. Here suffice it to say that over the course of the
conversation at the Three Shadows roundtable, Adou gradually relinquishes his
agency to the spontaneous, self-organizing or “self-so” processes of nature as
embodied in expired film and its relation to its environment. This is the sense
Adou means when he declares, precisely at this moment in the discussion, that
expired film is a “threshold,” a “little entry point.”33
Adou’s understanding of photography as environmental or ecological,
rather than as primarily representational, was informed not by Romanticism but,
in part, it seems, by his interest in the Japanese photographer Moriyama Daido,
who is known for his “grainy, blurry, out of focus” (are, bure, boke) images from the
late 1960s and early 1970s.34 The unpredictable, aleatory artifacts, such as mottles,
blobs, and stains—marks in Moriyama’s photographs of the exposure to harsh
chemicals of the organic and mineral materials composing film surfaces—are as
much a visible part of the Japanese photographer’s work as his depictions of the
relations among humans, animals, inanimate objects, and landscapes or cities of
alienation and desire. The critic Minoru Shimizu interprets Moriyama’s well-
known style as an expression of “a kind of ‘subtraction,’ a means to erase the pho-
tographer’s self, his thoughts, subjective expressions, and intentions. In other
words, the photographs try not to see, not to think, and not to choose. As a result,
they do not deliberately show something; rather, they ‘emerge’ showing some
kind of alternative reality.”35 Indeed, Moriyama himself has described his practice

32. Jullien, The Great Image Has No Form, pp. 23, 203, and 2. I have slightly amended Jullien’s ren-
dering of Shitao’s text in The Great Image Has No Form, p. 195. For a full translation, see Richard
Strassberg, Enlightening Remarks on Painting by Shih-t’ao (Pasadena: Pacific Asia Museum, 1989), p. 66.

33. “Round-Table Discussion,” p. 28/p. 57.

34. Adou expresses his admiration for Moriyama’s photobooks in “Round-Table Discussion,”
p. 40/p. 71. Editions of Moriyama’s photographs and translations of his essays and interviews are
prominently displayed in bookshops in Beijing and elsewhere in China, as I saw during a research
trip in May–June 2014.

35. Minoru Shimizu, “‘Grainy, Blurry, Out-of-Focus’: Daido Moriyama’s Farewell, Photography,” in
Daido Moriyama, ed. Simon Baker (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), p. 60.
56 OCTOBER

of photography as “a means of expressing a message that is both physiological and

phenomenological. . . . One might say that I’m taking the pictures more with my
body than with my eyes.”36
In an untitled image from Moriyama’s seminal photobook Farewell,
Photography (Shashin yo sayonara) (1972), for instance, we see the forms of a
building, car, and street in a nighttime urban landscape. The windows and right
edge of the building are lit up in a garish fog of chemical developers, and to the
left, the building melts away into a blaze of emulsion. The random figure in the
image’s center appears like a conflagration of liquid and fire, its white form twist-
ing and folding into a shape suggestive both of a female body and a phallus, while
the traces of wave upon wave of liquid chemicals across the photograph’s surface
seem to flood and melt away the urban street. In a 1970 essay theorizing images
like this by Moriyama and other Japanese photographers in the Provoke group of
the late 1960s and early 1970s, the critic Taki Kōji wrote that “in photography, all
acts of expression are attempts to discover what real existence is by letting one’s
own body penetrate the elusive membrane of the phenomenal world. . . .
[Expression] may simply be enabling us to constantly dissolve and fabricate what
we see in front of us––the world itself––and push it out into the distance. . . . I
think a photographer might have been the first to realize most clearly that the
world exists beyond the self. The world is not equal to humanity, nor is it consti-
tuted by human consciousness. . . . The world is woven out of the totality of an anti-
human or transhuman structure and the raw concreteness of individuals.”37 Such
a transhuman structure could only be expressed, as Taki put it in a seeming para-
dox, by a photography that can provide “an adequately focused view” of the
“amorphous, ever fluid world.”38
The paradoxical relationship Taki’s statement identifies between the focused
view of the camera and the amorphous world has been at the heart of photography
since its invention. Long before photography, of course, at least since the time of
René Descartes, the camera itself has served as a convenient figure for a dispassion-
ate, objectivizing separation of perception from all the sensual, shifting phenomena
of the world. In his Optics (1637) and Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Descartes
used the structure of the camera obscura, at times explicitly and at others implicitly,
as a figure for a “representational” model of perception and of the separation of

36. Daido Moriyama, “The Camera as a Means of Confirming the Self,” quoted in Daido
Moriyama: Stray Dog, ed. Sandra S. Phillips, Alexandra Munroe, and Daido Moriyama (San Francisco:
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1999), p. 38.

37. Taki Kōji, “What Is Possible for Photography?,” in From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan,
1945–1989—Primary Documents, ed. Doryun Chong et al. (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2012), pp.
215–17. Also see Miryam Sas, “The Provoke Era: New Languages of Japanese Photography,” in
Experimental Arts in Postwar Japan: Moments of Encounter, Engagement, and Imagined Return (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2011), pp. 180–200.

38. Taki Kōji, “What Is Possible for Photography?,” p. 217.

 Adou. Child, Pig. 2006.
Courtesy of M97 Gallery, Shanghai.
58 OCTOBER

mind from nature and from world––the world, that is, perceived by means of repre-
sentations or images projected from outside.39 And yet, contrary to such oppositions
between the camera and the natural world, the idea of photography as in part a nat-
ural process has quite literally defined it from the moment of its invention. Joseph
Nicéphore Niépce, searching during the early nineteenth century for a name for the
first photographic process he had invented, tried out a series of alternatives, each of
which brought a different Greek term for a kind of image (e.g. graphé, typos, and
eikon) into combination with the Greek word for nature, phusis.40 Niépce’s list of
names, Joel Snyder observes, “suggests that unlike all other kinds of pictures (which
are made by hand), photographs come into being through a doubling of causal agen-
cies––by means of human activity and natural means.”41 For aside from the apparatus
of camera and lens operated by human agency, the other half of photography,
Niépce suggested, is phusis, which Descola has defined as “the principle according to
which a being is what it is in itself: it develops according to its ‘nature’”––a term
whose meaning is very similar to the Chinese term ziran, which, as we’ve seen, Adou
used to describe both the subject matter and processes of his own work.42 Niépce’s
difficulty in naming photography identifies the paradox inherent to the medium:
Photography––and particularly the camera––is a mechanism figuring a Cartesian sep-
aration of mind from world, human from nature, even as the processes by means of
which a photo-sensitive surface forms images through exposure to light and develop-
ment by chemistry are continuous with the processes of nature.
In a seminal and enigmatic essay, the Canadian photographer Jeff Wall has
returned to this conundrum, reframing it as a “confrontation of . . . the ‘liquid
intelligence’ of nature with the glassed-in and relatively ‘dry’ character of the insti-
tution of photography,” and setting out the stakes of this confrontation.43 By dry

39. See, for example, René Descartes, Optics, in Selected Philosophical Writings, translated and edit-
ed by John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 63–64.

40. Joel Snyder, “What Happens by Itself in Photography?,” in Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor
of Stanley Cavell, ed. Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer, and Hilary Putnam (Lubbock: Texas Tech University,
1993), p. 361.

41. Snyder, “What Happens by Itself in Photography?,” p. 365. As Snyder asks: “Should we . . .
understand ‘physautype’ as ‘nature impressing itself,’ or as ‘a self-impression of nature,’ or perhaps
as ‘self-impression by nature?’” (p. 361). See Terrence Deacon’s discussion of the problems posed by
the idea of “itself” as well as “self” in terms like “self-organizing” without recourse to attributing
agency to a homunculus in his Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter (New York: Norton,
2013), pp. 46–106.

42. Descola observes that the meaning of phusis, or nature, is very similar to the Japanese term
shizen (or, in Chinese, ziran). In a highly germane discussion, Descola goes on to claim that “shizen by
no means covers the idea of a sphere of phenomena that are independent of human action, for in
Japanese thought there is no place for a conscious objectivization of nature or for such a withdrawal of
humanity from all that surrounds it. . . . Here, the environment should be taken literally: it is what links
together and constitutes human beings as multiple expressions of a complex whole that is greater than
them.” Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, pp. 29–30.

43. Jeff Wall, “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” in Selected Essays and Interviews (New York:
Museum of Modern Art, 2007), p. 109.
Photographic Ecologies 59

intelligence Wall means the optical and mechanical aspect of photography, such
as the lens and shutter of both camera and enlarger––everything that is “calcula-
ble.”44 The meaning of “liquid intelligence” has proven more elusive.45 Drawing
together natural forces, their depiction in photography, and the materiality of
the medium of film, Wall’s term encompasses “complicated natural forms” with
their “unpredictable contours,” whether as depicted in photographs (such as the
explosion of milk in one of Wall’s most familiar photographs) or occurring in the
natural world. But liquid intelligence also encompasses the essential roles “water
plays . . . in the making of photographs,” the “liquid chemicals” used in process-
ing and developing film––that is, in “washing, bleaching, dissolving” film, pre-
sumably both its mineral component (the silver halide crystals whose darkening
by light forms the image) and its vegetable component (the cellulose support
whose opaque antihalation layer is dissolved and washed away when film is
processed). Unlike the dry intelligence of photography that is both calculable
and controllable, liquid intelligence is “unpredictable” and “incalculable”––
indeed, water “has to be controlled exactly and cannot be permitted to spill over
the spaces and moments mapped out for it in the [photographic] process, or the
picture is ruined.”46
Wall’s essay makes plain the paradox that while the “modern vision” of the
camera apparatus “has been separated to a great extent from the sense of immer-
sion in the incalculable which I associate with ‘liquid intelligence,’” film can only
produce images if it is quite literally immersed in liquid during processing in the
darkroom.47 But is this really a paradox? Or rather, as Wall suggests, is the com-
monplace dualism between liquid and dry (or, to use his other term, optical)
intelligence perhaps better understood as a relationship of emergence? That is,
can the “dry” part of photography be understood differently if the photographic
apparatus is seen not in opposition to nature but rather as “having emerged from
the mineral and vegetable worlds,” a “prehistorical” image of photography that
the “echo of water” in photography evokes?48 By insisting here that the liquid
chemicals of photography and the fluidity of natural forms and processes are all
modes of a larger liquid intelligence, Wall’s argument situates photography within
a wider ecology––even as a Cartesian understanding of photography’s optical
intelligence would dissociate photography from the ecology or nature from which
it emerges, and which it displaces.

44. Ibid.

45. See, for instance, Kaja Silverman’s discussion in The Miracle of Analogy, or, The History of
Photography, Part I (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), p. 67.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.
60 OCTOBER

The terms Moriyama, Shimizu Minoru, and Taki Kōji used to address this
seeming paradox of photography––terms according to which photography is a
means of expressing a message both physiological and phenomenological, pho-
tographs do not show but emerge, and the world itself is woven out of transhuman
structures––are powerfully evocative of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Key
philosophical texts by Merleau-Ponty had been translated into Japanese over the
course of the 1960s (The Structure of Behavior in 1964, “Eye and Mind” in 1966, and
Phenomenology of Perception in 1967), and they explicitly informed art discourses in
Japan at that time. More recently, in his 2013 reconsideration of Chinese painting
and the picturing of landscape, Jiang Yuhui has returned to Merleau-Ponty’s
rethinking of dualisms of mind and world, body and perception. Crucial to artists
and critics alike is Merleau-Ponty’s development of an understanding of con-
sciousness as emergent from and enactive with an environment, rather than a rep-
resentational model in which a subject is divorced from the objects that it per-
ceives by means of internalized representations, or one in which an external agent
works on passive matter.49
At first glance, Merleau-Ponty’s appeal to photographers might seem surpris-
ing. The philosopher frequently deployed the medium as a figure in his fierce cri-
tique of Cartesian dualism, arguing in his pivotal 1945 essay “Cézanne’s Doubt,”
for example, that “the lived perspective, that of our perception, is not a geometric
or photographic one,” and questioning the idea of substituting “for our actual
perception the schema of what we would have to see if we were cameras.”50 Yet in
the same essay, Merleau-Ponty explicitly situates such a Cartesian mode of under-
standing photography in relation to environmental processes and the ways pic-
ture-making can engage with those processes. Merleau-Ponty differentiates
Cézanne’s discovery through the process of painting of “the lived perspective”
from “a geometric or photographic” perspective in ways that anticipate how and
why Moriyama and other photographers would reject a Cartesian understanding
of “seeing as if we were cameras.”51 Merleau-Ponty’s proposal that, as Jiang Yuhui
puts it, the “core mystery of the unity” of embodied consciousness and world is
revealed through “painterly expression”––namely, “the use of its unique artistic
techniques to give appearance to ‘the natural’/‘taking-form’ [‘ziran’––‘chengxing’]
of the myriad phenomena of the world within the senses”––articulates the kind of
understanding of image-making that Moriyama and, more recently, Adou would

49. For a discussion of this aspect of Merleau-Ponty’s work, see Evan Thompson, Mind in Life:
Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), p. 13,
and chapter 4, “The Structure of Behavior.”

50. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” in The Merleau-Ponty Reader, ed. Ted Toadvine
and Leonard Lawlor (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 73–74.

51. It is telling that Merleau-Ponty’s bête noire in his essay is photography and not Italian
Renaissance painting, whose geometric perspective cameras and their lenses were later designed to
reproduce.
Photographic Ecologies 61

consider fundamental in their own work.52 In the passage to which Jiang refers,
Merleau-Ponty writes:

[Cézanne] did not want to separate the stable things which appear before
our gaze and their fleeting way of appearing. He wanted to paint matter as
it takes on form, the birth of order through spontaneous organization. He
makes a basic distinction not between “the senses” and “intelligence” but
rather between the spontaneous order of perceived things and the human
order of ideas and sciences. . . . Cézanne wanted to paint this primordial
world, and this is why his pictures give us the impression of nature at its
origin while photographs of the same landscapes suggest man’s works,
conveniences, and imminent presence. . . . The drawing [or delineation,
dessin] must therefore result from the colors, if one wants the world to be
rendered in its thickness. For the world is a mass without gaps, an organism
of colors across which the receding perspective, the contours, the angles,
and the curves are set up as lines of force; the spatial frame is constituted
by vibrations [or, according to an earlier translation, “the spatial structure
vibrates as it is formed”].53

Read in the context of the philosophy of form, organism, and consciousness

delineated in The Structure of Behavior, this passage is remarkable for the ways in
which Merleau-Ponty conceives of Cézanne’s painting of nature in biological
terms of matter taking on form, of “spontaneous organization,” and of the world
itself as “an organism of colors.” Already at stake in Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of
Cézanne are fundamental questions to which he would return in his later work
on nature.54 What is at issue here, as Diana Coole puts it, “is whether nature is
internally productive of itself––such that there is an immanent and irreducible
relationship between creating and created that renders matter a lively process of
self-formation––or whether matter is inert stuff that is worked upon by some
immaterial force or agency external to it.” 55 This opposition between ways of
thinking nature also suggests two ways of thinking relations among artist, artwork,
and world: Whether in terms of an artist as an external agent working on inert
52. Jiang, Painting and Truth, p. 34.

53. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” pp. 73–75, emphasis mine. The earlier, standard English
translation (of which the translation I have been quoting is a revision) is in Merleau-Ponty, Sense and
Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1961), p. 15. The Dreyfus translation glosses over the biological rhetoric (e.g., “organism of col-
ors”) of Merleau-Ponty’s French text.

54. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, compiled by Dominique
Séglard, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003).

55. Diana Coole, “The Inertia of Matter and the Generativity of Flesh,” in New Materialisms:
Ontology, Agency, Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2010), pp. 97–98.
62 OCTOBER

matter, or whether artist and artwork are mutually constituting as creating and
created within larger natural and cultural processes. As Merleau-Ponty writes,
“The image saturated itself, composed itself, drew itself, became balanced, it
came to maturity all at once. ‘The landscape thinks itself in me,’ [Cézanne] said,
‘and I am its consciousness.’”56
This conceptualization of the relations among artist, landscape, and the self-
organizing processes of image formation is profoundly suggestive for developing a
photographic ecology. Indeed, film photography, as the Provoke photographers of
Japan or a number of the Chinese photographers exhibited at Three Shadows have
practiced it, is the mode of representation that itself most explicitly stages the rela-
tions between culture and nature, not as a relationship of Cartesian dualism or sepa-
ration but rather as one of emergence.57 For Moriyama and Adou, among others,
the world, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, is an organism of monochrome tonalities.
And when Moriyama and Adou openly disavow in their verbal statements the cen-
trality of their own agency in photographic processes, they are making explicit what
their bodies of work explore: that to photograph is “to paint matter as it takes on
form.” Merleau-Ponty’s phrase, I claim, has a double sense. “To paint matter as it
takes on form” means making pictures that depict matter in the process of taking on
form, such as the features of an ecosystem or landscape––or, in Adou’s case, the
form of a horse emerging from a decaying wall, or the forms of a child and a pig
mingling with atmosphere and earth. But it also insists that the medium of photogra-
phy itself might be understood as ecological rather than as primarily representation-
al. According to this ecological model, the pictures that take form through photog-
raphy are emergent from but not equivalent to the self-organizing processes of the
silver salts clumped together because of the action of light, of the development by
liquid chemicals, of the layers of gelatin and cellulose that constitute it and gradually
decay, and of the natural and cultural environment of which the film and photogra-
pher and the landscape depicted are all a part.
In photography, in short, the work of forming images is situated at once
within and beyond human agency and culture. Adou’s use of expired film, in par-
ticular, makes apparent how photographic film is part of larger ecological process-
es. What expired film makes visible is that film is itself an ecology of animal, veg-
etable, and mineral matter: Its images are formed by silver halide crystals (miner-
al) suspended in gelatin (made from animal bones) and supported by a cellulose
acetate base (made of vegetable matter). 58 And to be sure, any photographer
working with film has always faced the unpredictability of photography’s liquid
56. Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt,” p. 77.

57. I explore these relationships further in my essay “The Life of Forms: From Zhang Jin to
Aaron Siskind,” ASAS/Journal 1, no. 3 (2016), pp. 461–86, and in the project of which it and the present
essay are a part.

58. Edward Blasko et al., The Book of Film Care, Kodak Publication No. H-23, second edition
(Rochester, NY: Eastman Kodak Company, 1992), p. 12.
Photographic Ecologies 63

intelligence, the problem of when to stop the processes of exposure and develop-
ment once they have started, and the problem of controlling, as Wall puts it, “the
spaces and moments mapped out” for water in the photographic process; but, as is
made visible in the decay of the cellulose in Adou’s photographs, film itself con-
tinues to process beyond human control.59 A photograph, that is, is never really
“still.” It is merely a moment in an ongoing and unending process. Hence, by
attending to the materiality of grain and bokeh and to the random marks and
stains of liquid intelligence––much of that which makes an image “photograph-
ic”––the photographic practices I am describing here can be seen as not detached
but emergent from or interacting with larger ecosystems composed of matter,
objects, bodies, spaces, surfaces, and markings, the atmosphere, liquids, and light.
This ecological understanding of photography may help us to understand
more clearly the turn of contemporary Chinese photographers such as Adou away
from the digital (which Wall sees as an expansion of photography’s dry part at the
expense of liquid, altering “the historical consciousness of the medium”), and
back to film as a mode of exploring and depicting the relations between nature
and culture and the ecosystems of the past and the present.60 But, as Wall’s essay
suggests, more is at stake here. The “ecological crisis” that Wall repeatedly invokes
stems from a notion of photography that is grounded in a relationship to nature:
The very concept of the liquid intelligence of photography, its self-organizing
processes, and their relationships to photography’s optical intelligence depend on
ecology.61 While a dualistic understanding of photography would separate the
modern vision of the camera “from the sense of the immersion in the incalcula-
ble” that Wall associates with the liquid intelligence of nature, the consequences
of this separation are manifest most clearly in the “form”––Wall’s term––of the
“ecological crisis.”62 Photography is emergent from natural processes and complic-
it in the domination of nature; it is complicit, as well, in the environmental degra-
dation of the very natural processes from which it emerged.
Adou stages this complex relationship in a loose grouping of photographs
that appear on a series of right-hand pages in the revised catalogue of Samalada
produced by the M97 Gallery in Shanghai when Adou’s work was exhibited there
in 2013. The domination of nature by a modern optical apparatus (among others)
appears most baldly in his photograph Electronics. Here the screen of a television
appears to look out over the landscape of Liangshan rather than appearing as a

59. Wall, “Photography and Liquid Intelligence,” p. 109.

60. Ibid., p. 110.

61. Ibid. As Wall opines, “the whole construct, the whole apparatus and institution of photogra-
phy is of course emblematic of the technological and ecological dilemma in relation to nature.” It is
striking how Wall’s repeated reference to the ecological in his essay seems to have gone unremarked by
commentators.

62. Ibid., p. 110.

64 OCTOBER

surface through which to look; indeed, its single opaque eye seems to survey its
surroundings with a commanding gaze that extends beyond the frame of the pho-
tograph, while the plastic layers of discarded CDs, videotapes, and electronic trash
conceal and defile the ground beneath it. And yet there is something anomalous
about this photograph: As the only image in Samalada depicting modern commu-
nications technologies, the photograph appears both striking and as strikingly out
of place in the book as those apparatuses appear in the landscape they domi-
nate—even as the entire image is, oddly, both sharply in focus and slightly dis-
solved by the textures of the expired film. Indeed, this relationship between opti-
cal apparatus and the natural world is, so to speak, turned inside out in
Photographer, the image that precedes Electronics in the M97 catalogue. Here, any
depiction of an optical apparatus has entirely disappeared. Instead, a representa-
tion of a landscape is both situated within and doubles the landscape of cloudy sky
and barren ground strewn with pebbles surrounding it in the form of a painted
backdrop a photographer is tying to two trees. On closer inspection, however, we
find that the backdrop is not only immersed within the wider landscape but
appears to replicate the surface of the expired film of which the entire image is
constituted, the stains and faded patches on the backdrop echoing the mottling of
the film visible across the sky, while the banded markings on the film at the upper
right seem to reappear as the folds slanting across the cloth of the backdrop.

Adou. Electronics. 2006.

Courtesy of M97 Gallery, Shanghai.
Photographic Ecologies 65

Adou. Photographer. 2006.

Courtesy of M97 Gallery, Shanghai.

Nature is screened by its own depiction within the photograph, even as that depic-
tion appears to be dissolving into the natural substances of which the photograph
is made. Indeed, the sky of the photograph appears to be even more mottled,
marked, and spotted than the surface of the backdrop, making, as is the case in
Electronics, the immaterial space of the sky into an opaque and material surface.
Both photographs are so visibly immersed in and constituted by the living matter
of the gelatin emulsion and cellulose film support that the film’s organic materials
seem to continue to breathe, both inspiring and expiring. It is when film expires
that its visible life begins, and it is this very expiration of film that inspires Adou to
treat it as living matter—a visible ecology of animal, vegetable, and mineral matter
that is Adou’s medium for exploring relationships of humans and nature.
What, then, does it mean at present to be part of an ecosystem, part of—and
not external to or dominating—the natural world? Or, more specifically, what can
66 OCTOBER

this rethinking of photography as primarily ecological, not representational, tell

us of what it means to be part of an ecosystem? How might a photograph
“embody,” to use Adou’s term, what Taki Kōji had called the transhuman struc-
ture out of which the world is woven? For Adou and his contemporaries, this is a
question open to ongoing exploration. And while it is posed throughout
Samalada, it appears most vividly in the sequence that begins with Photographer and
Electronics and leads to three of the strangest images in Samalada, and with which I
shall leave the reader. Man, Woman, Curtain, which follows Electronics, presents
another screen, albeit at first glance one void of any reference to landscape, or
indeed any apparent connection to the landscape in which it appears. The plane

Adou. Man, Woman, Curtain. 2006.

Courtesy of M97 Gallery, Shanghai.

on which the photograph is focused, which renders the figures identified in the
photograph’s title as sharply as possible while leaving the rocky ground an increas-
ing blur as it reaches forward to the camera and the picture plane, is a mark of the
precise calculation of photography’s optical intelligence—marks, that is, of
Adou’s choices in manipulating the lens and aperture. But what was utterly incal-
culable at the time of exposure was how the rounded, draping form of the curtain
would rhyme with a similarly shaped stain in the emulsion at the upper right, as
well as with another such patch on the ground at the center of the image that
appears to be light cast upon the earth––until one realizes the patch continues in
Photographic Ecologies 67

an oval shape up and across the curtain and into the sky, revealing it to be yet
another artifact of the expired film. These stains, with their unpredictable con-
tours, are quite literally the marks of where Adou’s agency as a photographer is
immersed in the agency of the liquid intelligence of the film.
As almost all of Adou’s photographs make visible, this “echo of water” seen so
clearly in Man, Woman, Curtain evokes not only the liquid chemicals used in process-
ing film but also the “mineral and vegetable”—and, indeed, animal—worlds from
which the photograph has emerged. In Person Under Curtain, which follows Man,
Woman, Curtain in the sequence, the screen, now moved closer to parallel the picture
plane, is removed from any apparent use or function in its environment even as its

Adou. Person Under Curtain. 2006.

Courtesy of M97 Gallery, Shanghai.

translucence both blocks and allows the viewer’s access to that environment while
dark marks drape across the upper edge of the photograph like bunting paralleling
the curtain. Most strikingly enigmatic, however, is the way one corner of the curtain
so precisely replaces the head and face of the standing figure, forming a transhuman
assemblage of body and screen. Indeed, the curtain, with dimly discernible landscape
and truck both screened out and screened through it, seems to emanate and flow
from the figure’s body as if what might have been thought to be a representation of
the world brought within the interior of the figure’s head were instead unfurled as a
surface of that world—a “threshold,” in Adou’s terms, on which the figure and its
environment and the viewer and the photograph “waver.” This transhuman structure
68 OCTOBER

of body, screen, and environment is restaged elsewhere in Samalada in the photo-

graph Horse and Chicken Tail as what might be called a trans-animal structure that,
because of the placement of the camera, combines a horse’s body with a boulder for
a head crowned by a chicken feather and a feathery white streak on the photograph’s
surface. Because of its composition, the photograph estranges the horse from its “nat-
ural” form even as it creates a combination of horse, stone, feather, and the grass
growing around the boulder on which the horse is presumably feeding, as unlikely as
the combination of plant cellulose, bones and tendons, and silver nitrate that com-
pose the matter of the photograph.63 If such photographs do not “naturalize” their
human or animal subjects and their relationships to their environment, they do trou-
ble one’s understanding of what constitutes an ecosystem. At this moment of environ-
mental degradation, Adou’s photographs define an ecological aesthetic not as har-
monious but as an aesthetic of connection and disjuncture and mingling of elements,
in which to inhabit an environment is shown to be an ongoing process of being
shaped by and emerging from that environment and struggling with it to take form.

63. On the “unlikely combination[s] of ingredients” from which “materials in common use are
derived,” see Ingold, “Materials Against Materiality,” in Being Alive, pp. 24–25.

Adou. Horse and Chicken Tail. 2006.

Courtesy of M97 Gallery, Shanghai.