As an important medium of the 1930s Shanghai, the pictorial used photographic images and words to reconstruct the city of Shanghai. On the one hand, the pictorial takes high-rise buildings, streets, lights and other urban buildings as the display objects, and most of its photos adopt the perspective of looking up and the composition of vision and panorama. Through the“landscape”urban form, it shows the urban public’s vision and desire for modern material civilization; On the other hand, the pictorial takes the street as the“container”and shows the photos of the common people and their work and livelihood scenes in close range and peace view, which configures“non-modernity”colors such as tradition, backwardness and even crime, and expresses some criticism of modern urban civilization. In fact, in the urban image display of the 1930s Shanghai pictorial, editors often used the“juxtaposition”method to construct the“contradictory”urban form, and inadvertently implied their value orientation and emotional structure to the city in the contradictory crack of graphic meaning, reflecting the complex mentality of the middle class yearning for and alienating from the modern city.