Photographical History,Everyday Life,and Memory: Wang Anyi as a Storyteller

Postmodernists view all reality as representation and visual spectacle. This essay challenges this claim through film analysis of third world cinema and by tracing the tension between photography and history to the earlier debate of modernity in Siegfried Kracauer's work. The essay goes on to show the possibility of historically grounded visual images. By looking at the Chinese novelist Wang Anyi's photo narratives, the essay argues for a photographical image capable of fostering a sense of history deeply rooted in everyday life, communal practice, and social reality. Instead of being the inauthentic mirror of consumer culture, the photographical image is integral to historical imagination, narratives of everyday practice, and cultural memory.