Oscar Holland: Rare 19th-century images show China at the dawn of photography
Before the arrival of
photography, the Western imagination of China was based on paintings, written
travelogues and dispatches from a seemingly far-off land. From the 1850s,
however, a band of pioneering Western photographers sought to capture the
country's landscapes, cities and people, captivating audiences back home and
sparking a homegrown photography movement in the process.
Among them were the
Italian Felice Beato, who arrived in China in the 1850s to document
Anglo-French exploits in the Second Opium War, and Scottish photographer John
Thompson, whose journey up the Min River offered people in the West a rare look
into the country's remote interior.
These are just some of
the figures whose work features in a 15,000-strong photo collection amassed by
New York antiquarian and collector Stephan Loewentheil. His 19th-century images
span street scenes, tradespeople, rural life and architecture, showing -- in
unprecedented detail -- everything from blind beggars to camel caravans on
the Silk Road.
A rare book dealer by
trade, Loewentheil has spent the last three decades acquiring the pictures from
auctions and collectors, both in and outside China. They form what he claims to
be the world's largest private collection of early Chinese photography. (And
given the number of artworks and artifacts lost in the country's turbulent 20th
century -- during Mao's Cultural Revolution, in particular -- the claim is
entirely reasonable.) Now, he has put 120 of
the prints on display in Beijing for the first time.
The exhibition's scope
runs from the 1850s, the very genesis of paper photographs in China, until the
1880s. It features examples of the earliest forms of photography, such as
albumen print, which uses egg whites to bind chemicals to paper, and the
"wet plate" process, in which negatives were processed on glass
plates in a portable dark room... read more:
