Inspired by Christian values, intellectual curiosity, and a desire to help in the process of modernization, Sidney D. Gamble went to China in 1917 to work on the staff of the Peking YMCA. He spent a total of nine years in China between 1917 and 1932. During that time, he traveled extensively and recorded daily life with his typewriter and Graflex movie camera. Gamble’s photographic archive, containing over four thousand negatives, six hundred hand-colored slides, and thirty reels of 16-mm film, may be the most important visual documentation of China’s social life for these turbulent, transformative years. This exhibition featured eighty-one black-and-white photographs taken by Gamble and offered a vibrant and compassionate view of the people and customs of China between the fall of the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) in 1912 and the beginning of the Communist Revolution.
China between Revolutions: Photography by Sidney D. Gamble, 1917-1927
革命之间：甘博摄影
June 29 – September 9, 1989
Exhibition organized by The Sidney D. Gamble Foundation for China Studies and China Institute in America, in collaboration with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service; catalogue published by The Sidney D. Gamble Foundation; copyright 1989 by The Sidney D. Gamble Foundation for China Studies
Presentation House Gallery, North Vancouver, Canada, October 14– November 26, 1989
Media Coverage
- Andrew L. Yarrow, “Weekender Guide: Pictures of China,” The New York Times, June 30, 1989.
- Andy Grundberg, “Review/Photography: Resonant Images From A Bygone China,” The New York Times, July 6, 1989.
“At a time when photographs customarily are displayed on the basis of their esthetic merits, the exhibition of Gamble’s work is something of an exception. It reminds us that part of what makes camera pictures so appealing is their power to render worlds far apart from our own – both geographically and chronologically – and to provide insights from the past that bear directly on the present.”
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