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| John Thomson. Plate in Illustrations of China and its people: a series of two hundred photographs with letterpress descriptive of places and people represented, London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low & Searle, 1873–74, volume 1, collotype, 30.3 x 25.4 cm, Royal Geographical Society of South Australia, Adelaide |
Gael Newton AM
The concept for an exhibition surveying the history of photography in the Asia- Pacific region was developed late in 2005, in part as the National Gallery of Australia's contribution to the National Photography Festival in Canberra in 2008. The associated research and collection development are ongoing, and align with Director, Ron Radford's objective that the acquisitions and exhibition program of the National Gallery should clearly reflect Australia's position in its own region. (Ron Radford was NGA Director from 2004–2014).
This publication, produced in association with the exhibition, Picture paradise: Asia-Pacific photography 1840s-1940s, offers an introduction to the emergence and adoption of photographic technologies across the diverse geographic region of the Asia-Pacific. The decision was made to limit the project to the first century of photography's development, up to the early years of the Second World War - a period characterised by European and American colonial or economic domination of much of the region. The end point of the 1940s recognises that the postwar era marked the beginning of the end of colonial control and the onset of fundamental changes in relations between nations.
While the geographic scope of the survey sweeps from the Indian subcontinent, through Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands, to the west coast of North America and Canada, and from China and Japan to Australia and New Zealand, the approach has not been encyclopedic. Rather, the intention has been to highlight some of the most significant achievements in the region through a succession of photographic processes and practices - from the daguerreotype era of the 1840-60s, through to the early decades of the twentieth century and the impact of art photography and modernism.
The unique daguerreotype on a metal plate, which made its debut in Europe in 1839, not only popularised portraiture, it also provided a new way to make a true record of peoples and places. This facility was enhanced with the introduction in the 1840s of the first negative-positive photographic process, the calotype, by which many positive paper prints could be made from a master paper negative.
From the 1850s the calotype process, using improved waxed paper negatives, was spectacularly employed to record architectural antiquities in India. The further reach of expedition photography and the mass production of views on paper were made possible from the 1860s onwards by the wet-plate and then dry-plate glass negative process; and a generation of outstanding practitioners appeared from India to California who might best be described as 'photographic illustrators'.
The temporal span of the survey continues from the turn of the century into the 1920s and 1930s as the international art photography movement and modernism attracted adherents across the Asia-Pacific region, and concludes with the introduction of the small format 35mm still and movie cameras.
What is demonstrated is not only the global reach and standardisation of different processes imported from Europe and America, but also their local reception and adaptation. One of the earliest responses is from the mid 1840s when a daguerreotype camera was introduced to the royal court in Siam (Thailand) and subsequently employed by the progressive King Mongkut, who constructed his official portraits to match European styles and to serve his diplomacy as gifts to foreigners.
Across the Pacific in California, the gold rush gave rise to '49er' portraits, a genre formulated by the miners who posed in jaunty fashion, fully kitted out for the diggings. The carte-de-visite portrait, patented in Paris in 1854, appeared across the Asia-Pacific region just as fast as its popularity spread in Europe and America; and while the European fashion for collecting these miniature portraits of royalty and celebrated performers was enthusiastically followed, by the mid 1860s photographers in the region had successfully established an export trade in cartes de visite of 'native types'.
The Picture Paradise exhibition showcases renowned pioneer travel photographers whose decades of work in the second half of the nineteenth century collectively helped to shape the European visualisation of the Far East. Felice Beato, who photographed British military campaigns in India and China, left a valuable archive of images of architectural monuments - as well as a record of atrocities. As a contrast, Beato's exquisitely hand-coloured images of Japanese subjects introduced a Japanese aesthetic to photography.
Samuel Bourne undertook three hazardous expeditions into the Himalayan region to photograph its 'picturesque' wilderness; while John Thomson reached a worldwide audience through his adoption of photomechanical means to publish the first travel photography books on Asia - particularly his four-volume Illustrations of China and its people, published in London in 1873-74 and reprinted in 1900.
A photographic genre that celebrated California's sublime wilderness was fostered and developed in the 1860s-80s by the American Carleton Watkins and the English immigrant Eadweard Muybridge. Their photographs of the Yosemite Valley and the Calaveras giant tree grove in particular - often produced in the most technically impressive, but demanding 'mammoth' plate format - placed the scenic wonders of that region firmly on the world's tourist itinerary and defined an image of the American West to rival the renowned topography of Europe.
In Australia in the mid 1870s, pride in the urban progress and future prospects of his adopted home led German born Bernard O Holtermann to fund the creation of the largest wet-plate photographs and panoramas ever made. Holtermann's
panoramic view of Sydney Harbour and surrounding suburbs, nearly ten metres in length, was taken from the tower of his mansion on Sydney's North Shore by his commissioned photographer Charles Bayliss, and first shown in 1876 at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.
The first generation of indigenous photographers in the Asia-Pacific region emerged in the late nineteenth century - Lai Afong in Hong Kong; Francis Chit in Siam; Kimbei Kusakabe in Japan; Alfred Bock in Australia; Carleton Watkins in California; Kassian Cephas in the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia); and Lala Deen Dayal in India. Their works in the exhibition are complemented by the views and images of ethnographic subjects produced by immigrant photographers who operated long-running studios in the region - the Armenian, Onnes Kurkdjian on Java; J W Lindt, who migrated from Germany to work in Australia; Californian Henry Chase, who ran a successful studio in Hawaii; Alfred Burton, an Englishman who worked in New Zealand; and his countryman, Captain Allan Hughan, who set up as a photographer in New Caledonia after being shipwrecked there in 1870.
The 1880s and 1890s saw the rise of amateur photographers, whose participation was facilitated by the new Kodak box cameras as well as their membership of the many camera clubs that emerged in those years. Examples of their photographs in the exhibition show a typical humour; while the insertion of the photographer's own image is characteristic of the genre worldwide.
The phenomenal popularity of the international art photography movement known as Pictorialism is featured - with early pictorialists from the 1890s such as Shapoor N Bhedwar in India, Adam Clark Vroman and Anne Brigman in California, and John Kauffmann in Australia, through to the highly active and influential photographers of the 1920s-40s led by Shinzo Fukuhara in Japan and the circle of progressive photographic artists around Edward Weston in California, which included members of the camera club of Japanese-American pictorialists such as F Y Sato. A wave of romantic ethnographic portraitists appeared in the early decades of the twentieth century, influenced by the styles of art photography - prominent among them were Edward S. Curtis in Seattle, and Caroline Haskins Gurrey in Hawaii.
A small group of images in the exhibition by women photographers includes work by Julia Margaret Cameron in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the 1870s; and, in the twentieth century, pioneer figures in pictorialist, modernist and documentary photography- Hedda Morrison in China, Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange in California, and Olive Cotton in Australia.
Pictorialism in the Asia-Pacific region not only had a longer life than in Europe or Atlantic North America, it merged with, and facilitated the development of modernist aesthetics, particularly in landscape photography. In California a powerful group of modern photographers, male and female, formed in 1932. Edward Weston was a founding member; his work melded the luminous quality and spirit of Pictorialism with the hard edge geometry and realism of the New Photography coming out of Europe in the 1930s. Another member of the group, Ansel Adams brought a reverence for wilderness into a new, highly individual
pictorial art that would make him, and California's wilderness photography movement, famous in the postwar era.
The comparative nature of this survey has provided the opportunity to place side by side the works of contemporaries across the Asia-Pacific region who, for the most part, were unaware of one another's existence - such as Lionel Wendt in Ceylon, Max Dupain in Australia, and Shiihara Osamu in Japan, whose works in the late 1930s explore similar Surrealist themes and approaches.
Some local facets or 'regional accents' in the practice of photography across the Asia-Pacific region also had international impact as exports - from ethnographic cartes de visite, decorative lacquer albums that fostered the fashion for Japanese art in the West, exotic costume types and risque native belles, to distinctive Hollywood glamour portraits of celebrities and lifestyle images produced in California for the American movie industry. The movies created styles of lighting, dramatisation, pathos and fantasy that became an indelible part of the modern media world.
Picture Paradise: Asia-Pacific photography 1840s-1940s treats the region as a single entity, in much the same way as existing 'world histories' encompass an axis between Europe and North America - the geographic, political and cultural space often referred to as Euro-America. This methodology does not imply that the photographic achievements of parts of the region are unknown - much great scholarship exists on aspects of the history of photography in the Asia-Pacific, especially of the formative decades of the nineteenth century, although none of these histories is broadly comparative. In recent years there has been a marked increase in the publication of scholarly works on photography within the region, indicating a new level of interest in the Asia-Pacific.
In support of the Picture Paradise project, the curator and a dedicated librarian from the National Gallery of Australia Research Library were engaged in the acquisition by the Research Library of some 200 titles, including many not previously held in any Australian library - such as two volumes of John Reddie Black's The Far East, a rare photographically illustrated journal from the 1870s, published in Yokohama, Japan and Shanghai, China.
It was a delight to find desirable titles already held in Australian libraries and collections. The absence of other items was instructive in that it revealed ways in which Asia-Pacific history had not been a priority in Australia. (The Australian Association for the Advancement of Pacific Studies and like bodies have long campaigned that the absence of Asia-Pacific topics from educational curricula should be addressed.)
A special pleasure was viewing an album of the first photographs of Upper Burma taken in 1855 by Captain Linnaeus Tripe, an official photographer for the British colonial government in India. The album, which was published in London in 1858, is held in the Picture Collection at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne - it was bought in 1863 on the order of Redmond Barry, a founder of that Library. The Picture Paradise exhibition is the Melbourne album's first public showing.
The bibliographic searches, which were also aimed at securing rare books, magazines and portfolios for display in the exhibition, have realised one of the aims identified in planning this project - to emphasise the role played in the reception and consumption of photography in the public domain by all forms of illustrated publications.
It is hoped that the rich Asia-Pacific holdings in the National Gallery's Research library will be a resource and stimulus for future researchers both within Australia and from the region.
Thousands of original prints and online images were viewed in the course of preparing the exhibition. Organising raw data into historical sequences within one country is never easy, but trying to align such data from across a vast region of racial, cultural and linguistic diversity presented additional layers of complexity.
Uppermost was the need to understand the nature of the arrival, and reception of photography in the Asia-Pacific. The goal was not only to introduce audiences to the outstanding photographic achievements of the first century of photography in the region, but also to investigate innovations and responses specific to a particular place and time. These might be called the 'regional accents' in the dialogue between the region and imported photographic processes, styles and ideas.
The countries under review were distinguished by varying levels of economic development over the period from the 1840s to the 1940s. Many were subject to foreign direct or economic imperialism, creating for the colonial subjects very different encounters with the first century of photography than were the experiences of their overlords.
Much of the output in that first century was produced by visiting or immigrant European or American born photographers and directed at markets in their home countries, or at the waves of tourists in the region in the latter part of the nineteenth century - facilitated by the opening of the Suez Canal and the American transcontinental railway service. The impression gained from the material viewed, however, was that even if the products were made for export the relationship between sitters and photographers, makers and their markets was never simply passive. The photographers' perceptions and their images were shaped by the demands of climate and economics, cultural and political factors.
To photographers foreign to the region, the light, sights and peoples of the Asia- Pacific represented the other half of the world to Europe and America with its cold, grey seasons. It was a realm of extraordinary diversity of terrain, climate, race and language, and amazing monumental antiquities. Some places were conventional paradises of beautiful landscapes and easy, cheap living for foreigners; the entire region was a paradise of photographic opportunities, enlivened each time a new process or development arrived.
While the imagery pouring into Europe and America from the Asia-Pacific region shaped, or stereotyped how one half of the world was seen from afar, it also changed how each side of the exchange saw the other. And perceptions are still being shaped by the archive of photographs from the region.
more on Picture Paradise
intro page | main essay | photo processes | the plates | background | bibliography
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