Chapter 2. Photographing Chinese childhood

Abstract

Photography was brought to China from Europe in the 1840s, whereby the narratives these pictures told about the country were largely framed in pseudo-colonial terms. Although Western photographers – including Isabella Bird, Jules Itier, James Ricalton and John Thomson – consistently characterized the camera as showing China in the most faithful way possible, these apparently authentic representations were steeped in established Western tropes of what China was already assumed to look like. This chapter uses this backdrop to interrogate what these photographs say about Chinese childhood, which, in the literature of the period, is characterized as both a natural and universal condition, and as something that is incompatible with being Chinese. The chapter discusses the switching between what the photographs’ commentaries claim the children are like and what they should be like, as well as offering alternative readings of childhood in the pictures, focusing on ideas of innocence, formality, and playfulness. It concludes by demonstrating the ways in which these narratives still continue in Anglophone texts today through publication, exhibition, and academic discourse.