Missionary Photography, Missionary Modernity: Transnational Imaging in Republican China

^{note: this talk is in conjunction with a Rubenstein Library event featuring the Gamble papers and materials: Reading the Image: A Workshop on Sidney Gamble’s China Photographs and Papers}

Cameras and visual devices accompanied American Protestant and Catholic missionaries as they undertook cultural, political, and religious projects in the Republic of China (1911–1949) through the first years of the People’s Republic of China. Evolving photography and filmmaking ultimately escaped missionary molds, coloring Chinese engagements with the world alongside US views of modern East Asia.

This talk uncovers images and photographic technologies that linked American missions and Chinese communities over the first half of the twentieth century, the milieu in which Sidney D. Gamble’s photographs of China, now preserved in the Duke University Libraries, took form. In tracing image-making, trans-Pacific imaginations, and historical afterlives of visual material, this talk explores the ways in which photographic cultures shaped Sino-US experiences on both sides of the lens.

About the speaker:

Dr. Joseph W. Ho is the academic program manager for the University of Michigan Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, center associate at the University of Michigan Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies, and associate in research at the Harvard University Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. He is a historian of modern China and Taiwan, Sino-US encounters, and transnational visual culture. He has held fellowships at Stanford University, the University of Michigan, and Boston College. 

Ho is the author of Developing Mission: Photography, Filmmaking, and American Missionaries in Modern China (Cornell University Press, 2022). He is also the co-editor of War and Occupation in China: The Letters of an American Missionary from Hangzhou, 1937–1938 (Lehigh University Press, 2017) and the co-author of Time Exposures: Catholic Photography and the Evolution of Modern China (Hong Kong University Press, 2026).