Western Photographers Research Articles

Photography in the Late Qing Dynasty: A Comparative Study

Photography was introduced to China in the early 1840s. The early Western photographers in China were mainly driven by artistic pursuit or curiosity of the Orient. This paper argues that the artistic value of photography was higher and the purpose of photography was simpler during the first years of its introduction to China than the late nineteenth century when photography was increasingly associated with colonialism. The situation of Western photography in China changed profoundly in the latter decades of the nineteenth century: photography began to serve colonialism, and photographers became accomplices of the colonizers. In addition, this paper also addresses the experience of Zou Boqi, the first Chinese photographer, who combined traditional Chinese knowledge with Western science and produced the first Chinese camera in 1844. Both Chinese and Western photography have evolved as the technology advanced over time. However, Chinese and Western photographers differed greatly in their techniques, motivations, and choices of subject.

Picturing Urban China in Ruin: “Ghost City” Photography and Speculative Urbanization

In recent years, the world has been captivated by the construction of so-called “ghost cities” across China. Reporters and scholars have delved into this topic at length. This article is concerned specifically with the photographic imagery that has been central to the ghost city phenomenon. It provides a close read of photographic work on ghost cities by three Western photographers: Michael Christopher Brown, Kai Caemmerer, and Tong Lam. This article situates these photographers’ images within the globally popular genre of ruin photography, and assesses their significance in terms of representing ghost cities as “hyperobjects,” fragments that refer to much larger, world-shaping forces. Figured as hyperobjects, ghost cities relate visually to urban transformations at local and supra-local scales, providing a critical window upon planetary urbanization and its varied regional and local manifestations.

Photography magazines and cross-cultural encounters in postwar Japan, 1945-1955

This article examines cross-cultural encounters between Japanese and western (European and American) photographers in the immediate postwar period (1945-1955), asking how these encounters influenced Japanese photographic trends. In addition, this article considers what photographic representations of western cultures reveal about postwar constructions of Japanese cultural identity. Building upon recent research framed by conceptions of photography as sites of cross-cultural encounter (see Melissa Miles & Kate Warren), this article argues that photography magazines provided space for consistent exchange between western and Japanese photographers through multiple platforms: interviews and round table discussions of photographic trends; articles on and photo series by western photographers; and images by both western and Japanese photographers depicting western cultural material and landscapes, such as photographs of western-style fashions, domestic space, and daily life in European and American cities. Such encounters directly influenced photographic trends in Japan. Features on European nude photographers popularised nude photography as an art form among Japanese photographers, and works contributed by the likes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and Robert Doisneau contributed to a rising interest in photographic humanism. Further, these encounters provided a conduit through which photographers and readers encountered western cultural material at a time when Japan underwent a cultural identity crisis brought on by the devastation of defeat and foreign Occupation. In this way, photography magazines simultaneously functioned as spaces that negotiated what exactly “Japanese culture” meant in Japan’s new postwar world.

Photography As A Bridge To Intercultural Interaction In Bali During The Netherland Indies Colonial Period Of The 1920-1930S

This article presents the process of commencing inter-cultural interactions and artistic collaboration between Balinese and western photographers through photography. In the beginning, the photography project only showed visual record of the Kings, the royal family along with the royal government apparatus in Bali. Beginning with Gregor Krause, a colonial doctor who practiced photography, the others photographers then began exploring nature, culture, art and Balinese society into recording their photographic works. The activity then continued to be an artistic collaboration between westerners as photographers and Balinese as photo models. Not only that, the collaboration also extends to the incorporation of many western cultural elements into photography properties. In addition, the models that appear in photographic works are not only from the royal community, but begin to spread to ordinary residents, artists and their environment. Through the bridge of photography, many western artists combine their ideas with Balinese artists to design and create works of art in the needs of photographic documentation. The collaborative work then attracted tourists to Bali to enjoy the exotica of Bali which was first collaborated by western photographers and writers.

변화된 ‘皇都’에서 서양과 조선의 접촉 - 1860∼70년대 조선 赴京使臣團의 사진을 중심으로 -

Chosŏn’s first photograph was taken in Beijing, in the year 1863. It was not a photo that was taken passively without awareness of the situation, but rather one that was taken purposely in a principal capacity. Prior to Chosŏn-Japan Treaty in 1876, all photos which principally depicted Koreans had been taken by westerners in Beijing. That photography of Koreans was possible in Beijing owed to the fact that it was virtually the only space where Koreans could come into contact with western civilization and material culture at the time. Furthermore, following the Second Opium War and the complete opening of Beijing to westerners, westerns were free to visit or reside in Beijing, thus creating more opportunities for contact between Koreans and westerners.<BR> After the Second Opium War, increased contact between Chosŏn and the West led to the deepening of mutual interest in each other. However, the directionality of such interest was not the same. Having opened up the ‘Imperial City (皇都)’ wherein the previous Qing-centric order was still firmly in place, westerners not only took a growing personal interest in Chosŏn, the ‘Hermit Kingdom’, but western powers also sought to open up Chosŏn, which still remained within the Qing-centric order. Beijing became a space wherein such tentative contemplations took place. On the other hand, Koreans took an interest in western civilization and material culture, and would recruit western photographers to have their pictures taken. Some Koreans contacted westerners and expressed keen interest in the West. However, due to Chosŏn’s policy of isolation, the experiences in Beijing were not conveyed to Chosŏn itself.<BR> Beijing represented a space where the inquisitiveness of Chosŏn and the West intersected, and was also a place where the West - which sought to expand its sphere of political influence beyond the ‘Imperial City’ - came into contact with Chosŏn, which was opposed to such machinations. As such, the positions of both parties lay behind the photos of Koreans taken in Beijing. Following the photos of Koreans taken in Beijing during the 1860s-1870s, this study traces the background and processes by which the photos were taken to explore the nature of Chosŏn’s contact with the West, in addition to considering the significance of the ‘Imperial City’ - which had undergone changes since the ‘Convention of Beijing’ of 1860 - as a ‘contact zone’ between Chosŏn and the West.

Иностранные фотографы в Сибири: фотография как средство дегуманизации

This cultural research is the analysis of the foreign photographers’ activities in Siberia from the second half of the 19th century to the present time. We consider the issue of dehumanization of Russian society and culture by means of foreign photography. On the basis of real photographs published on the Internet, the author compiled a list of all Western photographers who visited Siberia and proved their destructive and countercultural, political, and non-artistic goals aimed at weakening the Russian state and Russian people dehumanization; we confirmed it by the final relevant foreign publications. Some research materials are documents of the State Archive of the Republic of Buryatia and are the first time in scientific discourse. Until now, researchers consid-ered the activities of foreign photographers in Eastern Siberia mainly in the specialty of history, exclusively as a source base positively. The novelty of this cultural research lies in the fact that foreign photography of Eastern Siberia is considered from the perspective of the tasks set for for-eign photographers by their foreign customers, as well as from aesthetic and artistic positions. Thus, we prove the negative nature of the foreign photographers’ activities in Eastern Siberia.

Chinese Folk Photographic Creations of Western Photographers

Folk cultures contribute to the important composition of the traditional culture in China, a multiracial ancient civilization enjoying a profound history. Folk photography opens a window for the world to enable people in other countries to understand China as well as its traditional culture. Western photographers have created a large amount of folk photographs during over a century of corresponding development. These works mean not only great significances to the documentation and heritage of Chinese folk cultures but also enormous contributions to the communication of Chinese folk cultures towards the global community. The paper reviewed the Chinese folk photographic creations of western photographers from mid-19th century to early 21st century, and discussed the connotations and meanings of these works.

The City as Contact Zone

This paper introduces the research-based photographic project Contact Zone that is conceived through the study of the Japanese period of self-inflicted Westernization beginning shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century. Considering especially the emergence of Western style architecture in the new capital of Tokyo, the paper presents working methods of German architects, who were invited to Japan to build new governmental buildings in the 1880s. The description of the historical situation serves as a basis for the presentation of Contact Zone photographed by the author in 2006.Contact Zone is a documentary art project dealing with the appearance of Japanese cityscapes in the beginning twenty-first century. It focuses on the integration of Western style architecture from the nineteenth century and different architectural styles and periods in Japanese cities. The work shows that Japanese contemporary urbanity is not completely contrasting the appearance of European cities today, but that it has absorbed Western influences into its own fabric. The idea is to show an image of the global Japanese city today that features historical and cultural influences from the West. Whereas many photographic works by Western photographers usually present Japan and Japanese cities as completely deviant from Western cities, thus concentrating on Japanese Otherness, the photographic project Contact Zone focuses instead on similarities in the visual fabric of contemporary Japanese cities.

The Refracted Moment: Photographing Chinese History in the Making

Abstract This article examines the way in which both Western and Chinese photographers have documented Chinese history in the making by focusing on the photographic documentation of two key events in the formation of Chinese society: the 1911 Revolution that laid the foundation for the birth of the republic and the “energy revolution” that was the Three Gorges Dam project (1994-2012). The major difference between the two revolutions is that the latter was documented by the Chinese themselves. No longer relying upon images made by Westerners exclusively, as was the case in 1911, the Chinese appropriated this monumental event in their history to archive it photographically. The article offers a conceptual framework for understanding revolutionary events in the context of historiography and photography history. The analysis of various photographs of the 1911 Revolution by Francis Stafford and of the Three Gorges Dam project and area by Edward Burtynsky, Bill Zorn, Zeng Nian, and Yan Changjiang shows that the event remains an evanescent and quasi-impossible entity to capture photographically, and that photographers can only archive its refracted presence in the faces, landscapes, and objects in front of the lens. What the pictures unveil is that the refracted moments of these two events are far more significant than the actual events themselves for the photographers under study.

Sites of "Disconnectedness": The Port City of Yokohama, Souvenir Photography, and its Audience

Photography and East Asian ports formed an inextricably tight relationship during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Initially launched by Western photographers, photography in East Asian treaty ports captured exotic customs and landscapes of East Asia and was an indispensable part of the newly emerging culture of port cities. In Japan, the tourist photography industry was established in the mid-nineteenth century at treaty ports and flourished as an ever growing industry until the beginning of the twentieth century. Catering exclusively to the non-Japanese audience in the West, this photographic industry cultivated a parallel image culture to the indigenous photography scene with its distinctive iconographic repertoire and its particular visual aesthetics. Conditioned by transport technologies, the profile of the foreign clientele of this image industry was never monolithic, and experienced a radical shift in the course of its history, especially since the rise of the globetrotter tourism in the early 1870s. This very fact invites us to question how tourist photography as a commercial commodity responded to its changing circumstances and how the industry’s reaction was reflected in its visual imagination. My analysis focuses on clarifying the complex web of movements of people (photographers, customers of photographic images) in port cities and visual products (photography) within the context of the port city tourist industry, showing how this dynamic was embodied in the intricate strategy of its photographic imaginations. By taking the tourist photography industry in Yokohama as an example, this paper illustrates how it was launched as a business emblematic of nineteenth-century European and American entrepreneurship in East Asia, and how it developed a unique image culture that spread from the port city of Yokohama to Europe, the US, and Australia. It also looks into its visual language and illuminate how this commercial image industry consciously related its geographical, historical, economic, and cultural specificity to its visual products. By doing so, I aim to demonstrate that photography, in this regard, proves to be a cultural artifact mirroring complex interconnections taking place in the nineteenth-century port city of Yokohama.

Yi Gu. Review of "Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China" by Jeffrey W. Cody and Frances Terpak, "History of Photography in China 1842–1860" by Terry Bennett, and "History of Photography in China: Western Photographers 1861–1879" by Terry Bennett.

Yi Gu. Review of "Brush and Shutter: Early Photography in China" by Jeffrey W. Cody and Frances Terpak, "History of Photography in China 1842–1860" by Terry Bennett, and "History of Photography in China: Western Photographers 1861–1879" by Terry Bennett.

Felice Beato: a photographer on the Eastern road

This is a survey of one of the major but least recognised photographers of the 19thC. In recent years Felice Beato (1832-1909) has come to be recognised as one of the major photographers of the 19thC, yet there has been no general survey of his singular life and work. Born in Venice, Beato came of age in the Ottoman capital of Constantinople. As an apprentice in 1856, he photographed the sites of the Crimean War, thereby launching a long, remarkably adventurous career. Over the next half century he would follow in the wake of the British Empire: Egypt, Palestine, and Syria; India, where he photographed the aftermath of the Indian Mutiny; and China, where he chronicled the Second Opium War. He spent 30 years in Japan and Burma, where he was in the vanguard of Western photographers as they opened their borders to the West. This abundantly illustrated book captures Beato's entire oeuvre in both images and narrative and serves as a tribute to his extraordinary life.

History of Photography in China, Western Photographers 1861-1879

History of Photography in China, Western Photographers 1861-1879

Barbarian Lens: Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor's European Palaces (review)

Reviewed by: Barbarian Lens: Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor's European Palaces Joanne Y. Yamada (bio) Regine Thiriez . Barbarian Lens: Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor's European Palaces. Amsterdam: The Netherlands: Gordon and Breach Publishers, 1998. 191 pp. Hardcover $68.00, ISBN 90-5700-519-0. Regine Thiriez' Barbarian Lens: Western Photographers of the Qianlong Emperor's European Palaces exemplifies the highest level of scholarly curiosity. Her research, conducted from 1987 to 1994, focused on the photographic record of the European Palaces of the Yuanmingyuan, designed in a European style of architecture during the mid-eighteenth century by Jesuit missionaries who were employed by the emperor of China. During the seven years of her research, Thiriez' pursuit of images of the European Palaces took her to libraries and archives in London, Edinburgh, and Belfast in the United Kingdom, and to the German cities of Hildesheim, Uslar, and Hamburg. She also hunted through basements and forgotten shelves in Toronto, Boston, Washington, DC, and Rochester, New York. The result of this effort is more than a retelling of the story of the Summer Palace. Thiriez includes a historical background, including the circumstances that [End Page 551] brought the Western photographers to China, and her detailed account includes descriptions of the walled city of Beijing and the Forbidden City within it and the city of Shanghai, the latter having become an international center by the 1870s. By 1874, Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, and the United States were represented in Beijing. The author comments on the differences in lifestyle between Beijing and Shanghai, at one point using the membership of the Asiatic Society to illustrate, parenthetically, that the atmosphere in Shanghai may have been one of internationalism "but not of universalism since, of course, no Chinese was invited to join" (p. 20). Facts of this kind, of course, are well known to all sinophiles, but Thiriez' primary objective was to search for photographs of the European Palaces and not to rewrite the history of the Western entry into China. The only Westerners who saw the Yuanmingyuan in its original grandeur were the Jesuit priests in China during the eighteenth century who served as astronomers, mathematicians, geographers, painters, or clockmakers. Thiriez' thoroughness in her research is displayed in the way she picks up even the smallest details, such as the "minor incident"—a reference to when the Qianlong emperor noticed a fountain in a European picture in 1747. It was this that inspired the construction of the European Palaces. Thiriez speculates on what one of these palaces may have looked like: One could not miss its grandeur, its feeling of otherworldliness. Under the Beijing sun, the palace came alive. White marble glittered, glazed tiles sparkled, gray stone and brick in relief against the blue sky. Evergreens completed the frame. (p. 38) The retelling of the destruction of the legendary Summer Palace by British and French troops in the dawn of October 6, 1860, is also detailed and supported by footnote references. However, the historical accounts and Thiriez' reconstruction of events, based on her research, are not the featured subject of her book. Rather, they serve to frame the quiet drama of the aftermath of the looting and torching of this legendary Summer Palace during the last of the opium wars. The mute witnesses to this aftermath are the extant photographs taken by nine Western men from seven countries who had entered China for a variety of reasons and whose collective stay spanned some sixty-five years. Thiriez begins with a general review of the research on early photography in China. At the start of her own project, only five studies had been published on this subject, and only two nineteenth-century photographers had been studied extensively. These were Felice (Felix) Beato and John Thompson, on whom Thiriez provides background information. It is known that Beato was the semiofficial photographer of the British army during the China Campaign, and Thiriez gives an in-depth description of his portfolio. Her analysis of Beato's body of work exemplifies her ability to critique his photographs in the context of their [End Page 552] reproduction and distribution. There are 102...

East Asia - Régine Thiriez: Barbarian lens: Western photographers of the Qianlong emperor's European palaces. (Documenting the Image, 6.) xxiii, 191 pp. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association (with Gordon and Breach Publishers), 1998. $68.

East Asia - Régine Thiriez: Barbarian lens: Western photographers of the Qianlong emperor's European palaces. (Documenting the Image, 6.) xxiii, 191 pp. Amsterdam: Overseas Publishers Association (with Gordon and Breach Publishers), 1998. $68.

Biographies of Western photographers: a reference guide to photographers working in the 19th century American West

Biographies of Western photographers: a reference guide to photographers working in the 19th century American West

The Twentieth-Century West: Historical Interpretations ed. by Gerald D. Nash, Richard W. Etulain

170 Western American Literature The Twentieth-Century West: Historical Interpretations. Edited by Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989. 454 pages, $40.00/$17.50.) No scholar of western American studies can cover very much ground with­ out encountering Turner’s frontier thesis of 1893. For one hundred years it has been the touchstone for our understanding of and investigation into the western American experience. However, the time has come, not to dispense with Turner’s thesis, but to augment it and move beyond its nineteenth-century premises into the twentieth century. And the timely and admirable collection of essays edited by Gerald D. Nash and Richard W. Etulain, The TwentiethCentury West: Historical Interpretations, has done just that. The essays com­ piled by professors Nash and Etulain display indisputably that the West of today is a far more diverse and complex entity than that which confronted Turner and that his thesis isno longer an adequate framework for understand­ ing western experience. As Professor Etulain points out in his prologue to the volume, Turner’s thesis is based on a “to-the-West historiography,” but what the study of the twentieth-century West requires is an “in-the-West historiog­ raphy” that focuses on “social institutions and the West as section.” Following Professor Etulain’s prologue, which offers an overview of his­ toriographical scholarship on the West since Turner, the book is comprised of thirteen essays divided into five sections. The first section discusses the popula­ tion of the West since 1890. Walter Nugent’s essay presents a comprehensive demographic study of the entire Western region, while Carl Abbott concen­ trates specifically on metropolitan development. Karen Anderson discusses the role of women in the West, and her essay is followed by Ricardo Romo’s examination of Mexican Americans and Donald L. Parman’s treatment of Native Americans. Although not completely ignored throughout the entire volume, this collection would have profited from separate essays on both African-Americans and Asian-Americans in the American West. The second section is comprised solely of Howard R. Lamar’s discussion of the ramifications of the Great Depression of the western economy. The next section covers the environment of the West in the twentieth century, through John Opie’s essayon environmental history, William G. Robbins’sexamination of the lumber industry, and Donald J. Pisani’s evaluation of the role of irriga­ tion districts, water rights and their relation to the federal government. The fourth section deals with the always volatile politics of the western region. Paul Kleppner examines western party loyalties and voting patterns since 1900, while William D. Rowley discusses the history of radicalism and reform movements. The two essays that make up the final section of the book cover the West’s cultural and artistic heritage. Fred Erisman offers an excellent overview of western literary regionalism and H. Wayne Morgan discusses the role of the visual arts in shaping the image of the West in the American imagination. The essaysin The Twentieth-Century West, according to Gerald D. Nash, serve to “suggest the outlines of an emerging image of the West during the last Reviews 171 one hundred years.” Nevertheless, much remains to be done. As much as this work is a comprehensive examination of significant issues and scholarship in the historiography of the West in this century, it is also a call for and a guide to the scholarship that is still needed. Accordingly, Nash notes that “the essays in this volume are designed to be suggestive, not exhaustive, illustrative rather than definitive.” Gerald Nash and Richard Etulain have produced a com­ mendable and invaluable contribution to western American studies that, although it may not cover all the ground that needs to be covered, charts that ground and shows us how to cover it. TIM POLAND Radford University Beyond the Mythic West. By Stewart Udall, Pat Limerick, Charles Wilkinson, John Volkman, and William Kittredge. (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1991. 162 pages, $29.95.) Beyond the Mythic West combines the essays of five prominent western writers with the color photographs of thirteen western photographers to form a tribute to the American West. Each of the...