Liu Bannong 刘半农 (1891-1934) was a well-known scholar working in the Beijing University who studied literature and learnt photography abroad. In the 1930s Liu became member of the notorious Guangshe photographic society and was very active in the photographic scene by translating essays in Chinese and publishing his own writings on photography aesthetics. Liu championed artistic photography as a mean to express the author’s personality and to convey the viewer’s emotional response by notably referencing to Chinese pictorial principles: such as rules of composition, softness, the rejection of pure ‘realism’, specific subject matters like still life, landscape, animal, and so forth.
