.
News
of the field -----
参考消息与报道
|
Japanese Photobooks
of the 1960s and '70s
(aperture foundation, 2009)
|
New
(January 14, 2010): Over
the years, things tend to accumulate. There sometimes is of course a
strategy behind such accumulations, and we usually call such strategy
"collection development". In my case, I am collecting old photographs
from China, and photobooks. I
have a decent collection of the latter genre, around 200 volumes I
would think, not including journals, all having to do with historical
photography in China. However, progressively the term "historical" has
come to mean various things to me in the past 25 years of collecting
such materials, and my interests now extend far into the modern age in
fact, leading me to collect materials of more recent vintage,
including, again, photobooks from the 1950s to the present day. Well,
having just purchased the massive volume by Ryuchi Kaneko & Ivan
Vartanian entitled Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and '70s (aperture foundation, 2009),
I have to admit there is a bitter taste in my mouth.What Japanese
photographers and publishers produced in a time period that saw
China mired in ideological struggles which basically got nobody
anywhere is so much more alive, challenging and interesting, there is
just no comparison. Of course it makes me question when the first
"real" photobook was actually produced in post-revolutionary China
which did not target the socialist masses with any type of didactic
message. I'll have more notes on the subject within the next
weeks, so watch this space. In the meantime, I highly recommend (if
only for the sake of comparison) the Kaneko/Vartanian volume. |
Exhibition
|
New
(January 14, 2010): Recently
in Shanghai, I managed to take a look at an interesting exhibit
which just closed its doors in the venerable Shanghai meishuguan. A
collaboration of the Qin Feng lao zhaopian guan 秦凤老照片馆 and the
San Ren Xing lao zhaopian yishuguan 三人行老照片艺术馆 entitled Reflections of one hundred years of Shanghai 上海百年影像展
provided for a glimpse of Shanghai well into the 1950s; in fact, most
of the photographs on display were from the 1940s to the early 1960s, a
critical period in the city's history of course. The exhibit was on
display from December 11, 2009 until January 4, 2010. Here is a link to a news article on the exhibit (in Chinese), including 8 images. |
Conference
Announcement
|
New
(December 6, 2009): Facing Asia - Histories and Legacies of Asian Studio Photography is the title of a conference which will be held August 21-22, 2010, organized by and to be held at the Research School of Humanities, Australian National University and the National
Gallery of Australia. As the conference web site states, it is "an international two day conference on early photographers and
their studio practices in Asia, and cross-cultural exchanges in the Asia-Pacific
region." The
Call for Papers closes February 24, 2010. For those interested in
actively participating, the relevant document can be downloaded here (PDF file format). |
|
|
New
(December 6, 2009): My book review of Terry Bennett's volume History of Photography in China, 1842-1860 (Quaritch,
ISBN 978-0-9563012-0-8; £50) is now up. It turned out to be
a 16 page essay (PDF file formatted). In a strictly technical sense, it
is not even a review - it follows its own methodology and reasoning. My
conclusions on this volume are varied. Here is one conclusion I came to
draw after reading (and re-reading) the book: "The
level of archival research presented makes Bennett’s book without a doubt the
most comprehensive and thorough treatment of the earliest exponents of western photographers
of all stripes in China ever to be published." |
|
New
(September 24, 2009): In 1931, the National Board of Review passed a curious short documentary film of William M. Pizor's Port 'O Call
Series. The travelog, narrated rather vividly and with a measured sense
of drama by Deane H. Dickason (who, incidentally, died in Hong Kong in
1953), going by the name Ghosts of Empire - Peking, constitutes
a unique insight into the street life of a capital which goes about
business as usual. Except, of course, that it is out of the business of
governing the country; instead the US Marine Corps trains at the foot
of the Arrow Tower. The 9-minute clip,
photographed by A. Greenberger, has been posted on Youtube about a year
back, and should be made more widely known, if only for the fact that
it is the only one of its kind.
This film makes for a nice supplement to Hedda Morrison's photographs
of Peking, taken around the same time, although time flows so
thick and slow through the streets of the city that a decade or two
hardly seem to matter. |
|
The shopkeeper |
New
(September 24, 2009): Kodachrome
slide film, a medium unfortunately recently decommissioned, is famous
for its survival skills. Photographs taken, say, sixty years ago, have
an uncanny way of still being with us, troubled times and
great travails notwithstanding. Greg Millett, son of the late Dr. Clinton Millett,
has "repatriated" sixty year old color photographs taken by his father
in Kunming, Yunnan province, and restored them to their place of origin
(the original 35mm Kodachrome slides are now at the National Museum of
China in Beijing), to great acclaim and impact it would seem. The 2004
exhibition entitled 1944 Colorful Kunming Exhibition, expertly curated and prepared by Jin Feibao, drew the rather surprising number of 300.000 visitors. A video of the details regarding this particularly successful exhibit can be seen at blib.tv . As far as I have been informed, Greg
has now been involved in four similar exhibitions in China and will be
preparing a colored glass slide exhibition in 2010. |
Click on image
to go to Quaritch' web site
|
New
(August 28, 2009): The antiquarian publishing house Quaritch has just released the long-awaited study by Terry Bennett, on the subject of the very earliest instances of photography in China. History of Photography in China, 1842-1860 (ISBN 978-0-9563012-0-8; £50) no
doubt is a hallmark study in the field. I hope to have a review copy on
hand soon to peruse this important contribution. It will be
interesting to compare Bennett's analysis with for example
1. Zhongguo sheyingshi 中国摄影史 (published in 1981)
2. Zhongguo sheyingshi 中国摄影史, 1840-1937 (published in 1987; the continuation1937-1949 appeared in 1998)
3. Zhongguo sheyingshi lüe 中国摄影史略 (published in 2009)
From the publisher: "Terry Bennett describes the way in which the
discovery of photography in China was framed against the tumultuous
backdrop of the Opium Wars, the Taiping Rebellion and the opening of
numerous treaty ports to foreign trade. From 1842, when the use of a
camera was first recorded in China, foreign and Chinese photographers
captured the people, places and events of this unsettled period. They
were professional portraitists, soldiers and pioneering amateurs, among
them: Jules Itier; Pierre Rossier; Lo Yuanyou (the earliest-recorded
Chinese commercial photographer); Felix Beato; and Milton Miller. The
author, an acclaimed international authority on historical photographs
from China, Japan and Korea, sheds new light on the unique historical
value of these photographs." |
|
Mr. Ed Stokes
|
New
(July 16, 2009): The
FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club) is a venerable institution in Hong
Kong. The FCC board entertains applications and "upgrades" from members
of the Hong Kong Club, an association deemed to be of lower
entertainment value. On this particular occasion, I was graciously
invited to sit in on a talk by well-known photographer Ed Stokes entitled Asia's Historical Photographs: Publishing the Region's Hidden Gems (PDF-file). Ed Stokes, founder of the Photographic Heritage Foundation and author of numerous books (such as Hedda Morrison's Hong Kong,
2005), discussed how historical photographs can be used to re-build
bridges between the present and their places of origin. The talk was
very well attended (no seat was left empty), and it was very well
received indeed. |
|
Taiwan
in the 19th century
19 世纪末的台湾
|
New
(July 4, 2009): In 1896, Ogawa
Kazumasa published an outstanding
(and now very rare) album of views of late 19th century Taiwan,
entitled Souvenirs
de Formose et des Îles Pescadores. The
sites and scenes depicted in this album follow roughly the main western
transportation artery of Taiwan (Formosa) at the end of the 19th
century, i.e., from Taipei in the north towards Kaohsiung in the south
via Jiayi and Tainan. Of great interest (I think) are the images
related to the
Pescadore Islands (Penghu 澎湖), and those photographs documenting a
foreign (Spanish, British, French) presence on or historical
involvement with the island.
For the sake of convenience I have translated the original French
captions. Most place names are identified and transliterated into their
present-day common spelling (for example Takao --> Ta-kow
--> Kaohsiung --> Gaoxiong). |
|
--凝光擷影--
攝影術的發明暨
中國澳門老照片
|
New
(July 2, 2009): The Macao
Museum is hosting an exhibition at present, entitled A Journey through Light and Shadow - The
Invention of Photography and the earliest photographs of Macao, China.
Here is an introduction to the exhibit, taken
from the
preface on the exhibition website. "As is known to all, photography was
introduced to China from France via Macao. The earliest photos of China
presently found were taken in Macao in 1844 by Jules Itier from France.
Represented by “A-Ma Temple, Macao” and
“Praia
Grande”, these landscape shootings on daguerreotype will
evoke a
visual aesthetic resonance through their most genuine portraits of
life, and will serve as the first monument in the history of Chinese
photography that testifies the humanistic brilliance being added to
this little town of Macao through photography more than a century ago.
Since The Historic Centre of Macao was inscribed on the World Heritage
List in 2005, collecting, researching, publishing and exhibiting
historical photos of Macao have become a renowned school in both
photographic circle and academia. With superb techniques and exquisite
view-capture, photographic works of large quantity have manifested a
profound understanding towards the abundant details of
Macao’s
cultural heritage and preserved valuable moments in Macao’s
cultural history. 'A Journey through Light and Shadow – The
Invention of Photography and the Earliest Photographs of Macao, China'
will engage more concerns towards Macao’s culture and
history,
and will serve its turn in popularizing the art of photography."
Note that the web site
refered
to above and to the left should perhaps be called a "Journey
through Light and Shadow" itself - it is awkwardly coded,
very
small, and therefore rather unwieldy to maneuver. |
申
報
|
New
(June 20, 2009): The
intimate relationship between 19th century engravings and photography
has again been underscored in a recent
publication on old Beijing as depicted in historical western
copperplate engravings, produced by the Taiwanese collector
Qin Feng 秦风. The Shen
Bao 申报 in Shanghai, L'Univers
Illustré in Paris and the Illustrated London News
are just three representative examples of how the printed image made
its way successfully into a mass media market of global dimensions.
Among the plates reprinted in Qin Feng's publication mentioned above,
it is therefore not surprising to find explicit language linking a
photographer's work with an engraver's final product. Sifting through
all the plates reproduced in the second half of the book, I managed to
identify nine such references:
1. Abords de l'entrée du palais Impérial. -
Dessin de H.
Clerget, d'après une photographie du docteur Morache
2. La colline et le lac du Ouane-cheou-chane. - Dessin de H. Clerget,
d'après une photographie du docteur Morache
3. Chapelle du couvant dans le cimetière des
eunuques. -
Dessin de Taylor, d'après une photographie du docteur Morache
4. Chapelle épiscopale de Pékin.
- Dessin de
H. Catenacci, d'après une photographie de M. Thomson*
5. Sépultures des jésuites, a Pékin:
Tombes du P.
Ricci et du P. Schall. - Dessin de H. Catenacci, d'après une
photographie du docteur Morache
6. Lacs et jardins du palais Impérial. - Dessin de H.
Clerget, d'après une photographie du docteur Morache
7. Le pont des mendiants, dans la ville Chinoise. - Dessin de H.
Clerget, d'après une photographie du docteur Morache
8. Péking - La ville chinoise vue de la muraille. -
Photographies J. Blase
9. La porte entrée de la Legation de France, 15
âout [1900] - Photographies du médecin-major J.
Matignon
For the record, three rare names have emerged from this quick exercise:
the good doctor Georges-Auguste
Morache (1837-1906; see Régine Thiriez in her Barbarian Lens,
p.12-13); the medic-major J.
Matignon (author of the book Superstition, Crime et Misère en Chine),
and a certain J. Blase.
Morache's work dates to the 1870s, while Matignon and Blase date around
1900.
*The name M. Thomson (#4 above, dated to the 1880s) may be a
misspelling for John Thomson. |
|
|
New
(May 26, 2009): With
close to 40,000 contributing members, Picture China
(老照片爱好者的家园) is a community of people interested in the historical
image, whether that image depicts an old street view of
Beijing, the execution of a corrupt female official in the
1980s,
or the influenza epidemic which had much of western Europe in its grip
back in 1918. The variety of posts speaks to its diverse membership,
which at this point may or may not be all-Chinese (I have not yet
registered myself). Postings take place in a bulletin-board style
(BBS), with pictures being embedded in the original post, calling for a
debate, criticism or reflection of any kind. The time range appears to
be from the very earliest photographs up to the 1980s. There is a general archive of images; a corner for collectors;
a classification scheme for historic photographs by genre and location,
and so on. Contributors are encouraged to post and/or to respond, and
appear to be awarded points or "virtual money" (金钱） for being
actively engaged. Depending on your status in and
your contribution to the community, access may or may not be
granted to various parts of the site, which also includes on-line movie
streaming, a discussion board for old (revolutionary) movies and
an on-line archive of old songs
歌曲. Windows Media Player Extension is necessary to run certain parts of
the on-line media. Overall a site to watch and follow - there is much
to explore here. (Note that there is to date no English version of this
resource) |
Propaganda painting depicting
a Japanese soldier about
to stab a Chinese
farmers to death |
New
(April 29, 2009): A
new movie was just released to much acclaim in China, entitled
Nanjing!
Nanjing! 南京! 南京! (or "City of Life and Death" in English).
It is, obviously, about the so-called Rape of Nanjing,
the Japanese invasion of the city, atrocities committed there
specifically in December 1937, what choices (if any)
the occupying
Japanese forces provided for the civilian population of the city, and
so on. Another movie, entitled "John
Rabe"
after the German industrialist who aided Chinese to flee from
Japanese oppression in the same city (that film did win best
film
at the German Film Awards ceremony in Berlin earlier this week), is set
to be shown in China this coming weekend, too. I mention both films
because in both cases the subject touches upon the small matter of the
authenticity of the recorded image. This same subject matter was taken
up, if you will recall, by a Japanese research group which
examined historical photographs taken (perhaps, definitely, maybe) in
Nanjing during the occupation. The English
version of the group's report (PDF format, 236 pages) called Analyzing the
“Photographic Evidence” of the Nanking
Massacre has
now been released (the Japanese version was published in 2005).
Analyzing (oftentimes in highly speculative fashion) and
attempting to validate (in fact mostly in-validating!) hundreds of
published and unpublished photographs supposedly from Nanjing and
environs, the report closes with the unsurprising statement that
"most of the photographs that have been in use - such as those included
in numerous publications, those on display at the Memorial Hall in
Nanking or at media events in Japan - cannot constitute viable
evidence of the alleged atrocities in Nanking", and cautions against
the use of ongoing manipulative media practices (engaged in by both
Japan and China) as it "stand[s] in the way of fostering genuine
friendship between the two nations." |
Workshop:
The
Role of Photography in Shaping China's Image, 1860-1945
|
New
(April 20, 2009): Word
just reached me about an upcoming workshop entitled "The Role of Photography in
Shaping China's Image, 1860-1945" at Northwestern
University's Art History Department on April 24/24 (2009). The
workshop agenda is described as follows:
"This workshop explores photography's decisive role in shaping
China’s image for both internal and international audiences."
[...] "The central question is: Did China’s own early 20th
century mass media
internalize the negative, colonial view of its emerging urban culture?
Professional Chinese photography of peripheral nationals indicates the
impact was profound—a mimicry that is predicated on
Euramerican
anxiety
of China’s role in the modern world. This conference will
bring
together scholars who will address this question exploring the
relationship of coastal photography with China’s own
neo-colonial
photography of the ‘primitive’ interior. The
inquiry
extends to Greater
China and the impact of photographic practices in Japanese
colonization."
Abstracts of the workshop presentations can be found here. |
|
New
(April 12, 2009): The
old Scotsman John Thomson
continues to impress with his photographic oeuvre, almost 140 years
after it was created. The quaint World Art Museum in Beijing honors
the old master with a new
exhibit. Betty Yao, curator of said exhibit,
remarks that Thomson, who was active in China in the early 1870s,
constituted an early specimen of the "original
photojournalist",
a craftsman who lugged imposing and cumbersome equipment around and yet
managed to capture "intimate moments". It is fair to say that Thomson
had a huge influence on how the West viewed China in the late 19th
century and thereafter. How China views Westerners's interpretations
and annotations of such views is another story altogether. English captions for some photographs on
exhibit don't match the Chinese counterparts,
the latter appear to be sanitized as they are deemed sensitive or
perhaps even offensive for the Chinese public. The exhibit opens April
16, and will travel
after the closing on May 18 to other destinations in China, before
being put on display in Liverpool, England, some time in early 2010. |
Taoist monk at the
Wenchangge 文昌阁 |
New
(April 12, 2009): The
Northeast of China, photographically speaking, is a somewhat neglected
territory. Photographers active there before 1949 were mostly
of
Russian and Japanese origin, surveying the land with distinctive
purpose and driven by various (mostly political) agendas. The area
around Harbin specifically was Russia-dominated, and it therefore is no
surprise that once in a while we do encounter the work of a
Russian photographer who took it upon himself to document his
environment. I purchased such an album
of Russian provenance
a while back, and have finally been able to put it up in my Zenfolio
space. It is of no great import, but the work does cover a rare (and as
far as I was able to ascertain no longer existing) Taoist abode
by the -genereic - name of Wenchangge 文昌阁 in Ashihe 阿什河, some
short distance southeast of Harbin (now Acheng District of the same
city).
As historical photographic coverage of Chinese Taoist temples and
abodes goes, this album of original, pasted-in photographs must be
counted among the very few (perhaps a handful, not more) such records
ever published. |
Li Hongzhang
September 27, 1900 |
New
(April 5, 2009): The
Boxer Rebellion in 1900 had a profound impact on Chinese foreign
policy. Much has been written about the state of affairs in China at
the time, about the advances and adventures of the allied forces
marching into the Forbidden City, scaling Beijing's city walls, putting
up tent camps in the two adjacent southern Tan 坛 (Heaven and
Agriculture), and so on. Now it would appear as if the amount of visual
documentation of this critical event hitherto has been underestimated.
Chiefly named here should be the Killie Album; various select
illustrations (mostlty engravings) in Chinese, Japanese, European and
American newspapers; Ricalton's photographic record; the publication
from the Peking-Tientsin Publishing Co.; and
Meerscheidt-Hüllessem's extensive visual documentary. It turns
out
that this, however, is only half the story (if that!). Two private,
very specialized photo-albums, recently sold at auction on eBay (for
5-figure $ amounts; # 150329921135 & 270356418256), are clear
evidence that the photographic record created in 1900 was in fact much
more comprehensive than previously thought. It would be a worthwhile
undertaking to aggregate these data and compile a quick reference
listing of the variously held (if not readily acessible) visual sources
to the Boxer Rebellion. |
CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT
|
New
(February 16, 2009): This
year's Annual Meeting of the Association of Asian
Studies in Chicago (March 26-29, 2009) will feature a panel
entitled Photographic
Practices, Visual Transgression and National Identity in Meiji Japan
and Republican China (Session #219, Sunday morning 8:30 to
10:30). Besides (hopefully) elaborating on the notion of Visual Transgression,
the panel includes the two following talks which might be of
interest:
1. "National Identity and Photographic Reproductions of Art in Early
Twentieth-Century China"; by Yu-Jen Liu, University of Oxford; and
2. “Photographers’ Dream Comes True:”
Nationalism and
Photography of Mt. Huang"; by Yi Gu, Brown University. |
Liu Xucang's studio |
New
(February 12, 2009): While
traveling through the village of Nanxun
in Zhejiang province recently, I discovered an exhibition
hall dedicated to one of this old village's illustrious sons, namely,
the photographer
Liu Xucang 刘旭沧.
Photographer Liu, it turns out, was a student and contemporary of Lang
Jingshan, and in fact much of his oeuvre (going now for 10.000-30.000
RMB at auction for a single print) is inspired by Lang, if not directly
related in terms of composition, technique, and motif. Similarities are
so great (including nude models) that I actually thought at first that
this was a combined Liu-Lang exhibition. Liu Xucang needs to be
credited with a number of things. He very much inaugurated color
photography in China, at least he was an "early adopter". He also
successfully contributed to national and international saloons, and did
win many prizes with his work. Finally, he was the twice-elected
secretary of the Chinese National Society of Photographers. He died in
1966, a year many good people died, at age 53. |
|
New
(December 27, 2008): The Taft
Mission to Asia of 1905 took its 83 delegates to countries such as
Japan, China, Korea and the Philippines. One of the results of the
mission was the controversial Taft-Katsura Agreement, signed on July
29, 1905. The amateur photographer Harry
Fowler Woods accompanied Taft and his entourage,
documenting the mission's major sites and events. Long forgotten albums
of these images were discovered in 2004, serving as the foundation of
an exhibit entitled "Looking East: William Howard Taft and the
1905 Mission to Asia - The Photographs of Harry Fowler Woods",
on tour around the US and Asia. I managed to see the exhibit as it was
displayed in Hangzhou this October. The so-called Harry Fowler Woods 1905 Photography Project
is preserving the memory of the main actors of this particularly
interesting and important diplomatic mission. |
|
New
(November 12, 2008): For
those interested in how national monuments fare in China over the years
(in this case, hundreds of years), visiting the exhibit in Beijing's
Guozijian 国子监 on
the Great Wall of China
may be a rewarding experience. Most compelling is the contrast
between visual documentation from the early part
of the 20th century, namely by W. Edgar Geil and others), and
what William Lindesay and his colleague Piao Tiejun 朴铁军 saw and
captured when they revisited the same sites (mostly and methodically)
from the mid-1980s onward. The photographic exhibit is complemented by
many
other objects, including antiquarian books, antique maps (an original
map of the Octava Asie
Tabula variety for example!); W. Edgar Geil's
notes, diaries, and a
curious American flag. A very worthwhile publication entitled The
Great Wall Revisited - From the Jade Gate to Old Dragon's Head
was just released earlier in September. The exhibit is open to the
public until the middle of December 2008. |
DUKE UNIVERSITY
|
New
(September 7, 2008):
Duke University has put together
an extremely
valuable resource earlier this year, namely, the Collection of Sidney D. Gamble
Photographs. "From 1908 to
1932, Sidney Gamble (1890-1968) visited China four times, traveling
throughout the country to collect data for social-economic surveys and
to photograph urban and rural life, public events, architecture,
religious statuary, and the countryside. A sociologist, renowned China
scholar, and avid amateur photographer, Gamble used some of the
pictures to illustrate his monographs. The Sidney D. Gamble Photographs
digital collection marks the first comprehensive public presentation of
this large body of work that includes photographs of Korea, Japan,
Hawaii, San Francisco, and Russia. The site currently features
photographs dated between 1917 and 1932; the 1908 photographs will be
digitized and uploaded as part of future additions to the
site."
It
should be noted that this collection comprises almost 5000 images, for
the most part related to China. The images are described (and therefore
searchable) following the annotations given by Gamble himself. This
presents a bit of a problem in my view, as a search for the term
"Suzhou" (note the Pinyin romanization!) for example retrieves images
which, geographically speaking, have nothing to do with Suzhou the
town, nor with the environs of Suzhou, or perhaps even with Jiangsu
province at large. One has to tread with caution, but once thus
cautioned, truly pioneering work can be accomplished by using just this
particular and monumental archive. And did I mention that the image
files are downloadable as full resolution JPGs (aka ~4000 by 3000
pixels)? |
Archive
of
Asian-American
Photographs
made
available
at UC Berkeley
|
New
(September 6, 2008):
Under the headline UC Berkeley organizes Asian
American photo archive
an article by Kristin Bender was just published in the Oakland Triibune
on Sept. 6, stating in its two opening paragraphs that "The
Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley has recently completed organizing
and archiving what is thought to be one of the largest Asian American
photograph collections held in a public
institution worldwide, university officials said. With a
$180,000 grant from the National Historical Publications and Records
Commission, more than 200,000 photos taken by professional photographer
Kem Lee, documenting San Francisco's Chinatown from the 1940s to the
1980s, were sorted, labeled, cataloged and neatly placed in Manila
folders." Besides the Kem Lee collection, a
second major photo collection, namely by photographer Henry Woon,
awaits preservation treatment and cataloging. "The [Woon]
archive contains more than 240,000 images of Asian Americans in San
Francisco and the East Bay from the 1950s to about 2000." |
|
New
(July 28, 2008):
The National
Gallery of Australia recently opened an exhibit
on Asia-Pacific Photography 1840s - 1940s, entitled Picture Paradise.
From the exhibit web site:
"This is the first
exhibition to survey the history of photography of our region
– from India and Sri Lanka, Southeast and East Asia,
Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands to the west coast of
North America. It features pioneer local photographers as well as
Europeans working in the region. The exhibition reveals the rich
heritage and the many outstanding achievements of the first century of
photography in the Asia–Pacific
region.
This significant gathering of over four hundred
original photographs and albums includes gem-like daguerreotype
portraits, mass-produced views and portraits on paper made possible by
the revolutionary wet-plate and dry-plate glass negative-positive
process, and prints from the modern era of small format film cameras
and photojournalism."
Judging from the well-done and resourceful web site,
this exhibit is well worth a personal visit. It is open until November
9, 2008.
|
 |
New
(June 11, 2008):
On my Zenfolio site earlier this month I put up a number of
galleries with photographs of various aspects of the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution 文化大革命 in China
(generally dated 1966-1976). Much has been written about this traumatic
segment of China's recent past, but - with the exception of the
legacies of Li Zhensheng and Weng Naiqiang - the subject (for
very complex and difficult reasons) is not well covered visually. For
example, in An Anthology of Chinese Photography 1957-2000
(1957-2000 中国摄影作品精选), the ten years between 1964 and 1974 are not
represented at all, and the years 1974 to 1979 display mostly Mao and
Model Operas (yangbanxi 样板戏). It is evident that in many instances and
ways, the CR is still very much a taboo subject in China itself.
With
the exception of Chang Song's striking images, the galleries offered
here reflect parts of my own holdings on the subject. There are at present five
galleries (two more will follow soon), with the
following content:
1. The anti-Kong anti-Lin
campaign in Qufu 批孔批林运动 - 决不充许开历史倒车 (27 photographs,
April 1974)
2. Sports and physical education
发展体育运动 - 增强人民体质 (15 photographs, November 1971)
3. The nation-wide educational campaign in the
mechanical
and life sciences 教育战线生气勃勃 (21 photographs, April 1974)
4. China's navy and archaeology (sic!) on the
Xisha Islands
西沙群岛
(20 photographs, approx. early 1974)
5. China's heavy industry
in the early 1970s (coming soon)
6. Drills and practices of
the Peoples Liberation Army PLA in the early 1970s (14 photographs,
coming soon)
7. A small selection of Chang
Song's work covering the late 1960s as exhibited in the
Caochangdi Art District in Beijing in 2007
|
|
New
(June 11, 2008):
If anybody doubted it in recent years, eBay remains a
wonderful source of materials and insights. Historical photographs of
China, Japan, and, to a lesser degree, Korea, are listed with
great regularity. In many instances, complete albums of
sailors or soldiers serving in the Pacific theatre come up for
auction. Likewise, photographic collections of members of the Japanese
military serving in China/Manchuria, not to speak of the myriad
individual postcards and photographs of anonymous provenance. Recently
a unique batch of late
19th century albumen photographs of southwestern China was
sold for $3500 (item #180244923196). As far as I am aware, the
photographer is unknown, and the existence of said images had not
entered the public record. For those researchers interested in the
early stages of the medium in China, such a discovery is like striking
gold. One has exactly seven days to view and analyse the images before
they are being sold to the highest bidder, usually a private
party (as opposed to a public institution like a museum or a library).
Another item (#380013677422), still current in fact, is Dr. Rudolf Mell's personal oeuvre
of photographs from southern China, specifically, the area
around Guangzhou (Canton), where Dr.Mell resided and worked as
a botanist for over a decade. The seller is asking for $5500 for the
entire collection, but also entertains offers.
A
number of years ago I published an article on how a small collection of original
photographs of the 1868 Burlingame mission to the US
faired on eBay. For those interested, this
article can be found here (in PDF). |
Gallery
1 (German provenance)
Gallery
2 (Russian provenance)
|
New
(May 23, 2008):
It may be un-timely in the wake of the Wenchuan Earthquake disaster and
the EV71 outbreak, but here we go...The so-called Manchurian (Pneumonic) Plague of 1910-11, a
fiasco in the history of public health in China, came at a time when
the imperial court in Beijing was at its weakest and the Republican
Revolution led by Sun Yat-sen hadn't occurred yet. With a mortality
rate of almost 100%, it's outbreak would claim the life of ca. 45,000
to 60,000 residents of Harbin and environs. Not only did the outbreak
occur at a crucial moment in Chinese history, it took place in
a geopolitically highly contested area: Russia, Japan and China all
laid claim to controlling this particular region.
Photographic
documentation of the Manchurian Plague is almost
non-existant. Through good fortune (and guanxi),
I am able to offer two sets of images depicting the course of events.
Taken together, these two sets constitute the most comprehensive visual
account of the Manchurian Plague available anywhere.
The
first set
is of German provenance. I acquired these original photographs about a
year ago. They are captioned "Die Pest in China 1911" (which does not
require translation I believe). I assume they were taken some time
between January and March, 1911.
The
second installment of photographs depicting the very grim
realities of the Manchurian Plague is of Russian provenance. The files
were generously provided by Mr. Spike Cook in Florida, the owner of
this extremely rare album. The Russian captions still await
translation. Note:
Both galleries contain very
graphic images! |
Acrobat
performer |
New
(May 6, 2008): On-line resource: The Chinese-Australian Historical
Images in Australia (CHIA) database. This resource "is a
catalogue of historical images of Chinese, Chinese immigrants and their
descendants held in Australia. It primarily draws on the photographic
holdings of the Chinese Museum but also includes photographs from other
online archives, publications and private family collections." And
"CHIA also includes the beginnings of an encyclopaedia of
Chinese-Australian history, complete with bibliography, aimed at
providing contextual information for database images." The
image files are available on fair-use basis, i.e., "Images
in the database can be reproduced for research or study purposes,
school or university projects or in family histories." Strangely, some
photographs, while described and cataloged, are not available on-line
for viewing. In quite a number of cases, links to images are broken.
Regarding the themes of the images, there is "a strong focus
on photographs from the nineteenth and early twentieth century and also
particularly subject matter such as weddings, sports, archways and
processions, photographs of particular families."
Access to the CHIA. |
Huachen
Auctions
华辰拍卖
Beijing
April
29, 2008
|
New
(March 28, 2008):
This is the 2008 Spring
Auction of Huachen's
Photographic Division.
As with previous auctions, Huachen put out a very interesting and
well-produced auction catalog. The catalog contains hundreds of
well-researched and annotated photographs of such traditional masters
of the medium like Lang Jingshan, Ah Fong, Thomas Child, James
Ricalton, etc. Surprisingly, a small batch (22 prints) of architectural
photographs taken by Liang Sicheng 梁思成 and Liu Dunzhen 刘墩桢 are for sale
as well. The most interesting collections in my personal view are,
however, those from more recent years; the images by Yu Quanxing 于全兴 of
his Mothers-in-Poverty series
(Guizhou, Yunnan 2001-2006) for example are very striking; likewise,
the photographs of political rallies and campaigns from the 1960s and
70s are important visual documents reminding us of a level of
politization of the individual no longer replicable nor desirable. The
accompanying short essays by Li Mei 李媚 on the subject of the political
nature of photography in China are informative and detailed. Work by
Cui Haiming 崔海鸣 (2007), Lu Di 卢笛 (2007), Ma Liang 马良 (2006) etc. bring
the collector into close contact with contemporary themes. The catalog
is supplemented with a useful section of artists' and photographers'
short bios, in English language. The link to the auction house and the
items for sale can be found here. |
 |
New
(March 28, 2008): Chinese life in American cities
has been documented in a number of visual and textual studies over the
years; Arnold Genthe is perhaps the most prominent visual documenter of
San
Francisco's Chinatown,
covering the years shortly after his arrival in 1895; the selection of
photographs by an unknown photographer offered here
in my Zenfolio Gallery under the title Chinese Customs - Indelible
Photographs was assembled into a small booklet
by the (German?) publishers Hoffmann and Wittemann and published in 1892.
This small collection of views includes images of a Dragon "Procession"
(Dragon Dance it should be really), offerings to the dead at a
western-style cemetary; a girl with bound feet (see left), a funeral
train, a fortune teller, a joss house, etc. Many of these themes would
be covered by Genthe later on in the first decade of
the 1900s again. |
 |
New
(March 13, 2008): As a repeat of Vivienne Esders successful
auction
of historical
photographs of China and adjoining regions, another auction is planned
for March 19, 2008 (at Yann le Moeul, Salle 9, rue Drouot,
2pm). This auction includes "the
Collection of photographic Archives by the diplomat and explorer
AUGUSTE FRANCOIS, French consul in China from 1896 to 1904. [...] The
photographs, typescripts, glass plates and folioscopes proposed in this
sale have been kept by Auguste François' descendants until
today." Also listed is important, original work by John
Thomson, Milton
Miller, Saunders
and others. Types of materials on offer are stereoscopes, albumen
prints, aristotype prints, panoramas (of Yunnan-fu, i.e. Kunming),
tirages argentique (Silver halide prints), and a number of book
publications such as by Donald Mennie (his Grandeur of the Gorges),
Heinz von Perckhammer (the rare volume Edle
Nacktheit in China), etc. Click here to download the catalog of
items on offer (66 well-produced pages, in PDF format, ca.10MB) |
 |
New
(March 12, 2008):
In case this resource is unfamiliar, I need to point towards a Chinese
site
dedicated to discussions and on-line exhibitions of historical Chinese
photography. This is a rather comprehensive resource on all aspects of
the media's impact in China, from the late Qing period all the
way into the early 1980s, when the country as a whole finally
started to embark on the windy path of profound economic, social and
urban transformation. |
A
word or two on
Two
Exhibitions
of
Historical
Photographs
in Beijing |
New
(January 21, 2008):
The China Daily on January 18, 2008, under the heading Capturing a Frame of Mind, reports
on an exhibition of Chinese
historical family photographs and family-specific photo albums
which were curated for an exhibition at Peking University.
The oldest photograph dates from 1898. Depicted are not only the
entourage of famous political and cultural icons (Zhu De, Mao Zedong,
Ren Bishi, Li Xiaomin and others), but also "people of all sorts of
political, economic, social and ethnical backgrounds", a fact which -
according to Bi Chunping, one of the key exhibit organizers - allows
many intimate glimpses into the private lifes of ordinary
citizens.
Another
institution in Beijing, Beijing
Normal University, was recently celebrating its 90th
anniversary, also with an exhibition of historical photographs. This
particular exhibition, or, to be precise, one single picture, caused
quite a stir. It was taken on Tiananmen Square on August 18, 1966,
showing a student of said university by the name of Song
Binbin ceremoniously handing Chairman Mao a red badge, the signifier of
the Red Guards. According to the photographer capturing the
moment, the
Chairman is said to have asked for the student's name, and, deeming
Binbin too genteel for the times that would lie ahead, answered that
her name should be Song Yaowu 宋要武. The rest, as they say, is
history, as On Mao’s 114th Birthday, [the]
Past Catches Up to [a] Former Red Guard Leader. |
Paiwan |
New
(January 10, 2008): Here is a new,
very well-constructed resource
of pre-war
photographs of Taiwan. Called the Gerald
Warner Taiwan Image Collection,
after a US consul's photographic impressions of urban and
rural
life in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule, the collection in fact
culls images not only from the original Warner Collection, but also
from a great variety of mainly Japanese sources. The oldest of these
referenced sources (the Taiwan
banzoku zufu 臺灣蕃族圖譜) dates back to 1918; while the most
recent material used dates to 2007 (issue of the National Geographic).
From
the introduction: "The subjects represented are wide-ranging, including
clothing, arboriculture, urban structures, agriculture, religious
rituals, topography, highways, parks, and more. These digitized images
have been researched and annotated to serve as a web-based encyclopedia
of colonial Taiwan's material culture."
This
on-line resource
makes extensive and intelligent use of metadata; images can be either
browsed or searched by various attributes (location, title, etc.). A
zoom-in function provides high resolution image detail. Altogether a
very useful resource for those interested in Taiwan's rural
and
social conditions under Japanese colonial rule. |
 |
New
(December 9, 2007): After
much research and some deliberation I finally decided to put together a
gallery of early
artistic photography of Nudes in China.
As it happened, the story starts in the year 1915, when the
Shanghai Fine Arts Academy 上海美术专科学校 is advertising for young
women
to
model in a drawing class, the first of its kind applied to the human
figure in Republican China. The very first photographs of nudes,
then, were in fact taken within the setting of the classroom
and
the college, creating rather a stir when released (or leaked) to the
public. Classes resumed eventually, and the nude body continued to be
painted and drawn and, starting in the late 1920s, photographed
artfully by, for
example, Long Chin-san 郎静山 (Lang
Jingshan),
Heinz von Perckhammer and un-named others. Chinese print media
(including the advertisement industry) picked up on the theme
and
incorporated the Nude in their own fashion from the early 1930s onward.
The gallery can be found on my Zenfolio site here. |
|
Huachen Auctions
华辰拍卖
Beijing
December 3, 2007 |
New
(November 28, 2007): The
photography branch of Huachen
Auctions Co.
for this year's autumn auction has collected a large number of
interesting photographs which are being sold on December 3
in Beijing at the Jingguang Center 京广中心. Huacheng was so kind as to
furnish me with a catalog of the items for sale, and it is again a very
impressive panorama of various important stages in the history of
photography in China and abroad. I must praise Huachen for paying
special
attention to two aspects of photography, namely the coverage
of
everyday life in China in the 70s to the early 90s (there are some
iconic images
to be had here), and the inclusion (again) of contemporary, should I
say: avant-garde art photography, such as the intriguing work of Lu
Jun 陆军 and Yang Yongliang 杨泳梁. Highlights of the category of historical
photographs (besides a whole series of images by Lang Jingshan) include
a portrait by Saunders of Shen Baozhen 沈葆桢 (15.000-30.000RMB), and a
Yamamoto print of Puyi & his bride Wanrong, both in the company
of
Puyi's English tutor R.F. Johnston (180.000-200.000RMB). A (reprinted)
article discussing documentary photography in the cultural, political
and "ethical" (伦理) context of contemporary China by Bao Kun is well
worth the read. It places the start of the genre into the years
1985/86, which is a tad vexing when compared to the beginnings of the
same genre in the west. Recent American photography is represented by
Annie Leibovitz (her
famous John
Lennon/Yoko Ono photograph), Yousuf Karsh, Tom Kelly (Marylin Monroe
on Red Velvet) and others. Click
on the image to the left to go to Huachen's web site.
|
Maggs Publication |
New
(November 12, 2007): Titus
Boeder, the author of Japanese
Photography from the
pre-War Period: Photobooks & Prints (Maggs, London
2007, ISBN 978-0-901953-14-8, £35), is an old friend of mine.
Working for Maggs Bros., Ltd, Purveyors of Rare Books &
Manuscripts
by Appointment of her Majesty the Queen (of England), he is also
uniquely qualified to compile this annotated and illustrated
bibliography of "135 titles comprising over 1000 books and magazines
spanning the rich history of the most challenging period of Japanese
artistic history." As some of the challenges Japan was facing in this
period had to do with China (military challenges, no less), there is
much in here which is of relevance to the collector or researcher of
things Chinese. In fact a rather sizeable amount of the titles Titus so
competently describes deal with Manchuria (Manchukuo) and
other
parts of China. I would recommend this bibliography to anyone working
in the area of visual arts in East Asia. Note that the items listed are
all for sale, as a batch, for, well, an undisclosed amount. |
CONFERENCE ANNOUNCEMENT |
New
(October 29, 2007): At
the upcoming conference on 'China'
on Display: Past and
Present Practices of Selecting, Exhibiting and Viewing Chinese Visual
and Material Culture (Leiden University School of
Management, Holland, Dec. 6-8, 2007), Oliver Moore will give a talk on Art staged for the Camera in
Qing and Republican China. The
symposium, focusing "on China as a case study to examine how the visual
production of non-European cultures has been represented in exhibitions
and museum displays", is open to the public. |
Daoist
priest (ca. 1930) |
New
(September 28, 2007): As
is quite well known I believe, one of my oldest interests in China
relates to Daoism (or Taoism, as it is still used in much of today's
literature on the subject). I recently went on an explorative mission
to locate and identify historical photographs having to do with Daoist
practice, sites and rites. Elusive as the Dao is in general, this
proved to be the expectedly tricky journey. While the journey is far
from over, in the meantime I would like to present some preliminary
findings, culled from a variety of sources, such as original
photographs found in China, western literature (travelogues mostly),
and photographic albums in my possession (Perckhammer, Siren, etc.). I
will add more materials over time - not all images I see in sources
like the newspaper Beiyang
huabao 北洋画报 for
example are of the quality I'd like. See my Zenfolio gallery on Early
Photographs of Daoist Sites and Practice. |
|
Exhibiton announcement
|
New
(September 14, 2007):
Please be aware of the upcoming exhibtion entitled Picturing China,
1870-1950: Photographs from British collections, held at the Brunei Gallery,
School
of
Oriental
and African
Studies, London.
The
exhibit
opens October 16 and closes Dec. 15, 2007. It is part of an ongoing
digital archives project edited by Prof. Robert Bickers with
the project title Historical
Photographs of China. As the project web site
states, the "photographs archived [here]
come from the collections of a Chinese diplomat, foreign businessmen,
staff of the administrations in the Chinese treaty ports, missionaries,
and officials of the Chinese Maritime Customs Service." |
|
Huachen Auctions
华辰拍卖
Beijing
June
25, 2007
|
New
(September 14, 2007): It is quite
amazing what one can learn from an
auction
catalog. I have in front of me the Huachen
Auctions catalog referring to the Spring 2007 Auction, and
it is an editorial masterpiece, featuring almost 750 annotated,
well-presented items for sale, a number of appendices, and introductory
articles on a variety of subjects. For example, my good friend Tong
Bingxue compiled a very useful article on
collecting photographs, discussing
the value increase of historical photographs over
the past years.
The catalog, besides featuring work
of western photographers (which is now also collected in China), is
otherwise a very useful tour through various stages of the photographic
profession in China's history, all the way up to the present in fact,
with modern work by Xu Yong 徐勇, Daniel
Lee 李小镜, Shu Yang 舒阳 et al. Of great interest, however, are
the hitherto much neglected und unresearched decades of the 50s to the
70s, with Hou Bo 侯波, Mao's official (female) "court photographer"
occupying a prime position. |
 |
New
(September 14, 2007): The Dutch International
Institute for Asian Studies, in its latest Newsletter
(#44, Summer 2007) addresses Asia's
Colonial Photographies. Oliver Moore is the author of the
article on "Photography in China: a global medium locally
appropriated".
The online version of the newsletter can be found mounted on the IIAS
web site. |
|
Pulling
the curtain aside: The visual documentation of Japan's war
crimes in China and the continued battle over who owns what
piece of history
|
New
(July 20, 2007): China.org.cn has
reported the discovery of a photo album of Japanese war criminals.
From the web site: "The album contains well-preserved photographs of
150 high-ranking war criminals, including Takebe Robuzo, who served in
the general affairs department of the state council of the puppet
Manchuria government in northeast China between 1940 and 1945."
This announcement ties in with a little-known discussion (in fact, a
confrontation) between Chinese and Japanese authorities over the
display of historical photographs documenting Japanese war crimes in
many of China's museums. The Chinese position was expressed by Foreign
Ministry spokesperson Qin Gang in the following statement: "The
photographs record the horrors of the period to remember history. They
are there not to continue hatred, but to prevent tragedies from
recurring." For more on this discussion, see here. |
 |
New
(July 13, 2007): The name Joseph
Skarbek may not be familiar to many, but the Centre Culturel
Francais in Beijing recently mounted an exhibit of photographs taken by
this French railroad engineer in Henan province between
1906 and 1909. I visited this exhibition and was very much
intrigued by the quality of the photographs and by the scope of themes
on display: a) Customs and daily life; b) Chinese historical
architecture; c) The Bian - Luo railway line under construction.
Pictures of this exhibition can be viewed on my Zenfolio
Joseph Skarbek gallery site. |
Hong
Lei 1997 |
New
(May 13, 2007): Would
you pay over 20.000 USD for a single photograph by Lang Jingshan (Long
Ching-shan)? Some collectors do, as can be seen here at this Chinese auction site, (Note: loads a bit slow, in
Chinese language only) where historical and new photographs were sold
very recently. Incidentally, the two most expensive photographs were
contemporary, limited edition prints by Hong Lei 洪磊, such as
his splendidly morbid, symbolically charged Autumn in the Forbidden City -
East Veranda 紫禁城的秋天 - 太和殿东回廊 of 1997 (click on image to the left),
fetching well over 65.000 USD each.
|
A Yamamoto Postcard |
New
(May 12, 2007): I
wanted to direct the reader's attention to the Historical
Chinese Postcard Project: 1896 - 1920. The project has been
dormant for over three years, but before it becomes what information
scientists call a solitary "information island", I think it very much
deserves to be on record here. It is one of Regine Thiriez's projects,
and while the reproduced images of the photographic postcards are not
as crisp or engaging as one would like (due to their smallish size
mainly), the introductory texts written by Thiriez on the subject and
the included supplementary research data are extremely helpful. |
|
CONFERENCE
ANNOUNCEMENT
|
At
the annual meeting of the Association for
Asian Studies, held this year in Boston on March 22-25, panel 107 is
dedicated to Photography in Qing China and Meiji Japan.
Chaired by Oliver Moore (Leiden University), presentations related to
China include
- The Formative Years of Shanghai
Photography, 1842-1875 (Regine Thiriez)
- Drumming up
Business in early Shanghai Photographic Studios (Oliver Moore) |
|
|
New
(March 1, 2007): I
now have had the chance to review Terry Bennett's book Old Japanese Photographs:
Collector's Data Guide (Quaritch, London
2006, new 13-digit ISBN 978-0-9550852-4-6, 65 Pounds Sterling).
With nine pages the review became a bit longer than I had originally
anticipated. The disparate nature of its individual parts
notwithstanding, this volume is indeed a resource and tool of the
greatest value to collectors, researchers, archivists and historians.
Read my review here
(PDF format, 150kb). |
Friedrich Behme in the
Botanical Garden of
Singapore, 1903 |
New
(February 6, 2007):
One of the more fascinating aspects of photography as a medium lies in
its versatility.One can make a perfect living by just shooting weddings
these days. Or portraits. Or events, such as a rock concert. A more
fundamental use of photography, and one indeed intricately tied to its
legitimacy of existence in the first place, lies in its ability to
record and to capture, to quantify and to measure. Fractions of time,
the flow of movement, the features of plants, the surfaces of the
earth, the structure of buildings, the docking of molecules. In short:
it is not far-fetched to say that photography was destined, if not
invented, to aid and accelerate the sciences (although it soon became
its own art form). In a presentation given at a conference in November
2006 I address the question
of early scientific photography in China and how this newly acquired
font of visual evidence was incorporated into the scientific discourse
in Europe. (PowerPoint converted to PDF, 7.5MB). It is a big
subject, and this is a first attempt to formulate some general ideas.
Comments and suggestions are welcome. |
|
|
New
(January 13, 2007):
I recently rediscovered among my possessions a set of fifty
lantern slides from ca. 1920. They were published by the
Seemann Lichtbildanstalt in Leipzig, as series # CLVIII of their
lantern slide series on comprehensive "country studies" (the Latin
sub-title of the complete series is bibliotheca cosmographica),
to be used throughout the advanced educational system in Germany and
Austria in the 1920s and 30s. Lantern slides were once a very popular
didactic teaching tool, but most of these collections are of course no
longer in use and have either been discarded, or have been lost in
other ways. The East Asia set of slides discussed here includes very
interesting scenes of China, Manchuria and
Korea. Using a Canon 8600F scanner I processed all slides and
put them up on my Zenfolio site. The Canon scanner,
btw, proved to be up to the task, but nevertheless will be replaced
with a more versatile Epson 4990 scanner soon. |
|
|
New
(January 1, 2007):
The London antiquarian bookdealer Quaritch
contacted me and sent along their latest catalog
and newsletter (PDF file) of old photographs for sale. While
most of the items are of Japanese provenance (and much of it attributed
to Felice Beato), there are a couple of items related to (early) things
Chinese, such as a 1873 volume of The
Far East with five original pasted-in
photographs. What is of much broader interest, however, is the
advertised, new publication by Terry
Bennett, called Old Japanese Photographs: [A]
Collector's Data Guide (Quaritch, London
2006, new 13-digit ISBN 978-0-9550852-4-6, 65 Pounds Sterling). Without
having had a chance to see or review this book, it is probably fair to
say that it would be highly desirable to have something similar on hand
for old Chinese photographs, especially with the market for historical
visual documentation being what it is right now in China. |
|
|
New
(November 22, 2006):
Back again in Beijing, I visited the Gongwang fu, which features an
interesting exhibition of old
photographs. I was allowed to take some random pictures of
this exhibition, and am posting a selection here. For visual
documentation on how the actual, present-day Gongwang fu looks like,
please check out my Zenfolio gallery,
which includes images of the parts currently under restoration (and not
open to the public). While on the
subject of the Gongwang fu: A wonderful and very important compilation
of historical photographs has just been published on the princely
palaces of Qing-dynasty Beijing. Full information on this publication
can be found in the bibliography. |
|
|
New
(September 24, 2006):
A small photo-diary of Mrs. Nora Dillenbeck, dated 1916, is now fully
scanned and on-line as a slide-show at this URL. Dillenbeck was a
missionary stationed in Shandong (Tai'an fu). The album chronicles her
"tour of duty", starting out on a steamer in San Francisco. Some of the
original photographs show some fading, but most of them are still
bright and clear.
I picked up this annotated,
well-preserved album from a dealer friend in New York a while back,
and only noticed the Ithaca-connection when I
picked it up
again for processing. |
|
|
New
(September 11, 2006):
Harvard announced recently that The Rev. Claude L. Pickens, Jr. Collection
on Muslims in China would become available on-line
through their visual imaging system. The following details may be of
interest about this collection:
"Over 1000 photos of Muslims
and Christian missionaries working among
them in Western China in the 1920s and 1930s form the core of this
collection, which is supplemented by several hundred books, pamphlets,
broadsides, etc., in several languages. Gift of Rev. Claude L. Pickens,
Jr. in memory of Joseph Fletcher, Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian
History at Harvard University. The albums and photographs can be viewed
in the VIA online catalog. A finding aid to the printed materials can
be viewed in the OASIS online catalog." These
visual resources are accompanied by Islam in China: A
Selected Bibliography of English-Language Publications and
various other, supplementary tools. |
Fujian
exhibit - detail
 |
New
(August 1, 2006):
During a recent, month-long trip to China, I came across a couple of
very interesting items and events, which I am happy to share on this
site:
1) A photo-exhibit
featuring the History
of Fujian Normal University in the city of Fuzhou, from
the beginnings up to the 1950s.
2) A private
photograph album of Huang Jiliang, a
young Chinese sent abroad to America for studies in the late 1870s or
early 1880s. This item is kept behind glass in the Memorial Hall
dedicated to the French-Chinese naval battle of 1884, also in the city
of Fuzhou. Huang in fact died in this battle, aged only 24. For more on
this particular album and its background story see here
(PDF-file).
3) The
photographic legacy of the renowned architect Liang Sicheng,
who documented many archaeological sites and historic buildings
throughout central and northern China between 1936 and 1938. As far as
I was told, three sets of his images exist: two are in private hands,
and one is at Beijing's Tsinghua University Library, where a digital image archive has been
created of many of these very interesting images (which number between
1600 and 2000). Note that the Tsinghua University Library link -
although pointing in the right direction - does not always work. I was
shown the complete Liang-collection at a scholar's private home in late
June, and was allowed to take some pictures of parts of the collection.
These I put up in a gallery on my new zenfolio.com
site, as images 39 - 45. |
|
|
New
(July 26, 2006):
I thought I'd mention my new site on China's urban
transformation and other subjects. Since this site here is
all about the history of photography in China, I thought it prudent to
construct a site which features my own (recent) photographs of things
Chinese, especially visual documentation on
-
Urban planning;
- Modern Chinese art;
- The cities
of Beijing, Tianjin and Fuzhou and their surroundings.
- Impressions of Tibet and its borderlands from the mid-80s.
If any of this is of interest please take a look at my zenfolio.com
site, which now features over 2000 images. |
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New
(June 14, 2006):
Leaving the position of curator of the Wason Collection at Cornell
University (after more than 5 years on the job) required moving
this web site to the newly founded gatheringmountains.net
domain. I hope this will not inconvenience visitors too much, as I have
left a referral site up on the Cornell server. |
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New
(May 4, 2006): A
new, long anticipated Chinese-language web site has
ben put up by its owner, Mr. Tong Bingxue. The (privately managed)
on-line Museum of Chinese Photography and Old
Photographs Network (中国摄影博物馆暨老照片网) includes exhibits,
articles, channels for material exchange, and a letterbox to leave
notes and messages. In the "about us" section the author state that
this site is devoted to Chinese photography of the late Qing and early
Republican era (until ca. 1920). I myself have seen the "off-line",
physical collection in Beijing not too long ago and can attest to its
authenticity and value. As more images come online, accompanied by
proper annotations and the corresponding research, this site will make
an important contribution to our understanding of the development of
the medium of photography and the modernization of visual arts in China
during this critical time period. |
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New
(April 2, 2006):
An upcoming auction of historical
photographs of China may be of interest. Put together by Viviane Esders
in Paris, the auction will take place April 12, 2006 (Yann le Moeul,
Salle 69, rue Drouot, 14:30). Click here to download the catalog of
items (82 pages, in PDF format). This auction includes very prized and
unique items, such as photographs by Jules Itier, John Thomson, Milton
Miller, Saunders, Thomas
Child, Auguste Francois (his personal photo-album!), Perckhammer,
Chin-San Long 郎静山, Cartier-Bresson and others. The results and proceeds
of this auction can be seen here (PDF file; all prices in US
dollar). |
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New
(Jan.23,
2005):
A small archive of images from Beijing,
mainly consisting of images from the Thorbecke/Schiff cooperation (here
pointing to the marvelous book Peking Studies, published
by Kelly & Walsh, Shanghai 1934), and the well-known
Perckhammer volume on Peking (Albertus Verl., Berlin 1928), has been
made accessible by a group under the direction of Christian Henriot
(CNRS). The - searchable - archive contains 215 well annotated images. |
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New (Nov. 2, 2004):
I recently had opportunity to do research on a topic entitled Images
of Daoism in Early Photographic Sources. The results of this
research were presented at the Boston Conference on Daoism in June
2003. The photographs assembled and discussed in this presentation were
taken from a great variety of sources, including Chinese illustrated
newspapers like the Liangyou huabao, photographic albums (published and
unpublished ones), early international exhibitions, etc.
See here
for the
PowerPoint presentation of this talk (converted to PDF,
opens in separate window). |
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Also
(relatively) new:
A dissertation (hitherto still unpublished) by Kerstin Gesell
may be of interest:
Title:
Imaginary China in Western Representations of the Orient,
Institution:
Surrey Institute of Art & Design, 2003 (Note: the institution's new
name is now University College for the Creative Arts).
Abstract: This dissertation examines
aspects of
nineteenth century Chinese photography in the light of recent critical
writing around 'Orientalism'. My introduction introduces 'Orientalism'
. Three dimensions of 'Orientalism', 'Scenes and Types', 'Violence' and
the 'Erotic' are subsequently discussed with reference to Chinese
photography. My conclusion assesses the ways in which Chinese
photography did, and did not, correspond to prevailing nineteenth
century notions of the 'East'. |
Notes and Explanations:
This list of titles was started in 1988, when I
first became interested in the history of China via the modern visual
media of photography. Considering the highly specialized topic, this
bibliography nevertheless does contain quite a number of works and
collections (368 entries at present), which can be
attributed to the fact that recently publishers have become rather
interested in reprinting photographic albums on China of the Republican
Period or the late Qing period. Besides, Chinese archives have opened
up, resulting in the availability of hitherto rather hidden treasures.
Note that some of these items listed below are unique,
which basically means you will only be able to find one single copy or
album, such as is the case for example with Burger's photographic
album, an item which was specifically made for and presented to the
emperor of Austria, and which is held at the National Library of
Austria in Vienna.
My bibliography supplies
rather exhaustive data on a variety of issues concerning these albums
(which may in fact be reprints or modern publications of, say,
postcards printed in Hong Hong in the early thirties). Besides the
usual bibliographical description such as Author or editor, date and
place of printing etc. I try to trace the fotographers themselves under
a biographical heading. The precise number of images is given, their
actual (or average) size, whether they are b/w or colour, with which
camera(s) they were taken, which film was used, and, above all, what
the photographs themselves show. Whereas not every single item
(reproduced or original) is described, I still try to give an overall
impression of what the fotographer did actually intend to "shoot". So
look out for keywords, whether they be of a geographical nature (like
"Hong Kong" for example), of a mere topographical nature (like
"Baiyunguan 白云观"), or personal names ("Lin Biao 林彪" - the entry will,
for example, guide you to the only two published images I know of Lin
Biao after his plane crashed so mysteriously on its way to
Moscow). Many highly interesting Chinese and some Japanese publications
are included here (with Chinese/Japanese characters). Many of them are
of a more recent date, but do reflect photographs that were taken well
before 1949. A few items (with titles like "100 Years of Photography in
Shanghai" or the like), however, also do contain some material of a
later date. Overall, the deadline to qualify for the bibliography is
still around 1949.
(Note: this "deadline" is under review
at present. A few items of great value have been published recently on
the Great Leap Forward 大跃进 and the Cultural
Revolution 文化大革命 (which I have treated in its own right in my
Zenfolio collection); in addition, extremely
interesting "new" or "avant-garde" photography is practiced in China,
Taiwan and Hong Kong these days, and it would be of geat value to give
an introduction and an overview of at least the most important works of
this genre).
For comments or suggestions (or
contributions!) please do not hesitate to get in touch with me by electronic mail.
On early photography in China see Regine Thiriez'
very informative book "Barbarian Lens - Western Photographers
of the Qianlong Emperor's European Palaces", published in
1998 by Gordon & Breach in Amsterdam. For more of Thiriez'
writing published on the Internet see Creating
a User's Guide on Early Photography in China (1999)
(PDF-format) or Library
Collections and Early Photography in China (Bulletin of the
International Association of Orientalist Librarians vol. 44, 2000).
Also, see Thiriez' article on Photography and Portraiture in
Nineteenth-Century China, in the journal East
Asian History 17/18 (1999), pages 77-102.
Worth noting is the Giles Pickford Collection at
the Australian National Library (a collection associated with Herbert
Giles, no less).
Here is an example of how early
advertisement for photographic equipment in a Shanghai based
magazine looked like. Note that these items were sold in a "pharmacy"
(yaofang) in those days. The scan is taken from The Chinese
Scientific and Industrial Magazine - (Gezhi huibian) vol.2,
no.3, Shanghai 1892. (file size: 292 kb).
The bibliography is
arranged in alphabetical order of the names of authors, editors or
corporate bodies. Anonymous works are listed first and are arranged
according to title. Just click on any character in the upper frame and
you will be taken to the first corresponding item.
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