Imperial Discomfort in Post-Habsburg Tianjin

This essay represents a visual archive of researcher discomfort at encountering the intimate legacies of globally-unequal colonial heritage. The essay explores how post-Habsburg subjectivities are incommensurate by assembling failed photographs taken by an inexperienced researcher of Serb/Yugoslav origin in Tianjin, northern China. Juxtaposed to the images is an autoethnographic textual component, which focuses on my recognition of the research space as “familiar,” mediated by historical and personal narratives of imperial and socialist cityscapes. The essay proceeds to explore how such familiarity is broken through the visual archive, stressing the phenomenology of photographic research practice in architectural history. The purpose of the textual and visual components of the essay is to interrogates the limits of visual research practices, as conducted by persons subjectivized by imperial legacies of hierarchized and territorialized difference.