On April 29 - May 8, “Elegant Decoration – Exhibition on the Decorative Art of Old Photos” was held in the Historical Documents Catalog Hall of the Shanghai Library.
After decades of accumulation, the Shanghai Library has collected a large quantity of original historical photos from the Republic Period. Over the past decade, the library also acquired and organized a number of treasured items from the late Qing Dynasty through various channels,   forming a collection system in rich varieties, organized in a chronological order, crossing a vast range of locations and not without rare and highly treasured items. Some early historical photos were produced in very early days and are in large sizes and with elegant decorations, which give them multiple values as antique items and useful documents. They have a benchmark role in the historical development of the Chinese photography. Since the early 1990s, the researchers of the Shanghai Library have been organizing and conducting studies of these historical photos and have held a number of large-scale photo exhibitions, including "Document and Photo Exhibition on the 700th Anniversary of the Shanghai City", "Anti-Japanese War Photo Collection Exhibition", "Tracking the History – Exhibition of Original Historical Photos of the Shanghai Library" and etc., and published such large-sized catalogs as Life in the Old Shanghai, Historical Photos in the Shanghai Library Collection and others. The Shanghai Library has launched the digital library project Shanghai Memory, conducting the digitization and online services of the historical photos and providing professional information services to many local and overseas organizations and individuals.

In recent years, the collection of old photos has become a new fashion and the beauty of black and white images has attracted the attention of the general public. This exhibition has selected more than 70 original historical photos, albums, related documents and real objects from the Shanghai Library collection with a time span from the 1850s to the 1940s. The exhibition seeks to show the beauty of the decorative art of old photos in different periods. The main exhibits include the three-dimensional protein images shot by the French photographer Louis Legrand in the late 1850s in Shanghai, colored pictures showing Chinese local customs taken by William Sanders in the 1870s, the panoramic view of the Bund taken by the "Gongtai" studio in 1881, "Collected Photos of the Jing Zhang Railway Workers" published in 1909, as well as the photos of Li Hongzhang, Kang Youwei, Sun Yat-sen, Hu Shi, Zhang Xueliang, Mei Lanfang and other celebrities with their signatures and inscriptions and the photographic works produced by various well-known studios in Shanghai in different periods. Among these photos, Louis Legrand’s photographic works produced in 1859 are the earliest extant items from the photo studio in Shanghai.