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Photography in Qing China and Meiji Japan
Organizer and Chair: Oliver Moore, Leiden University
Discussant: Julia K. Murray, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This session assembles four panelists engaged in the early history of photography in respectively China and Japan. All four use broad categories of content, form and medium, to explore photography’s introduction (in the early 1840s), its early functions, and its distribution in two different yet contemporaneous early modern cultures of East Asia. In considering photography as one of the major new technologies of vision in the 19th century, operated both by foreign and indigenous practitioners, the panelists will address the central question of how an increasingly democratized production/reception of the visual image in China and Japan (and overseas) engendered both common and separate visual practices. Adopting a synchronic approach to the history of vision in two places, the panelists will demonstrate how a prime expression of 19th-century visual culture may be usefully employed as a rich category of analysis in diverse historical situations. And, historicizing the conditions of photographic visions/images first isolated in their Chinese and Japanese settings can show that even the apparently universal technical medium of photography cannot be subject to a single narrative of its development in different places. Even if China and Japan early on shared some epistemological determinants of what the photographic image was, huge dissimilarities characterized the social constituencies of photography’s usage. Finally, as an intentionally diverse regional emphasis will illustrate, the two societies—despite how much they shared—harbored diverging visual expectations of photography’s veracity as well as differing aesthetic justifications related to the other pictorial kinds within their respective visual cultures.
Japanese Photography and the Legacy of “Dutch Learning”
Doris Croissant, Heidelberg University
Following long experiments, the earliest extant Japanese photograph was produced in 1857. It portrays Daimyo Shimazu Narikira (d. 1858), passionate supporter of imperial restoration and its ideology: “expel the barbarians, respect the emperor.” Since efforts to master photography were isolated from Western photographers’ activities in Nagasaki and Yokohama during the early 1860s, it is unsurprising that the content of the new medium differed considerably from Western infatuations for “things Japanese”, such as geisha, samurai and famous spots. Early Japanese photography, thus, presents an ambition to appropriate Western optical science for nationalistic ends, as well as a response to Western predilections for Japaneseness, which eventually rendered Japanese tourist photography profitably exportable. This paper focuses on the first issue, exploring the impact of photography on Meiji cultural policy. I argue that, from the late 1700s, Dutch Learning (Rangaku) advocates rooted vision as mechanically reproducible in their conception of Western painting realism. These theorists aimed to revitalize painting with a power of mimetic persuasiveness believed to have made Western art a tool of visual communication beyond script and language. Assuming Western painting exploited a universally valid mechanism of vision, they argued that photography enabled the highest degree of veracity by providing the ‘authentic copy’ (shashin) of reality. I will show how, at the core of Meiji reforms, this Ranga program promoted the union of painter and photographer. Panel discussion may also clarify how sharply Meiji reform and Ranga engagement differentiated the reception of photography in Japan from its history in China.
Colonizing the Ogasawara Islands: National Boundaries and Photographic Frontiers
David Odo, Smithsonian Institution
This paper examines the role of photography in the Meiji government's colonial project in the Ogasawara Islands within the wider context of early Japanese photographic practice. Located approximately 650 miles south of Tokyo in the north pacific, Ogasawara was first known as the Bonin Islands and was originally inhabited by a cosmopolitan group of settlers from the USA, Hawaii and Europe, who established a resupplying station for whalers there in 1830. The Islands were colonized by Japan in 1875, shaped by the government's trepidations about events in colonial Asia and by its own experiences consolidating control over Ezo (Hokkaido) in 1869 and the Ryukyu Kingdom (Okinawa) in 1872. Colonial images of Ogasawara differ from the better-known, contemporaneous tourist images of nineteenth-century Japan, both in content and—more importantly—in their paths of circulation and consumption, even while linked to global photographic practice. With these differing consumption routes came differing meanings attached to the evolving place the Islands occupied within the modern Japanese nation. Photography was used to expand the perception of Japan’s national boundaries among the citizenry to include the formerly foreign islands, even as the physical boundaries were expanded through colonial acquisition. The Islands and the Islanders of the colonial images were remote and exotic yet simultaneously a part of the nation, in a jumbled mix of a place that could ostensibly be shown to have historical roots in the Japanese past, even with a resident people who were undeniably “foreign”.
The Formative Years of Shanghai Photography, 1842-1875
Regine Thiriez, Institut d'Asie orientale, France
In its first decades, China photography generally focused on the “Treaty Ports”—the handful of coastal and river cities opened to international trade by the Opium Wars. Shanghai, opened to Western settlement in 1843, rapidly gained the international economic prominence it still enjoys. The busy city and its mixed population, both Chinese and foreign, provided an ideal breeding ground for photography. Whether from portraits, topographical images, or scenes of daily life either elaborately staged or taken from real life, every type of photography was practiced in Shanghai, in styles soon copied elsewhere. While the history of early Chinese photography is still in its infancy, it is certain that by the mid-1870s Shanghai photography was leading over the two other major regional centers of Hong Kong and Yokohama; however what exactly was recorded, how, and by whom, and how all this evolved over time, strongly needs to be clarified. This paper will study the development of early photography in Shanghai as a model for broader, more thematic research in the field. After briefly surveying the starting years of photographic activities, it purposes to show how recognizable patterns started taking shape in the late 1850s, before reaching their maturity and specific identity by the mid-1870s as the unique Shanghai and, by extension, China-coast way of doing photography. Topics to be considered include: what type of images were produced and for which market; who were the participants (local and foreign); and how the emerging local culture was an essential factor in all this.
Drumming up Business in Early Shanghai Photographic Studios
Oliver Moore, Leiden University
This paper looks at the social history of photography in Shanghai by reference primarily to early written Chinese sources, especially newspaper advertisements. Not surprisingly, the early success of Shanghai’s commercial photographic studios, including the trade in photographic images, equipment and technical knowledge, was partly fuelled by advertising in the daily Chinese press. Advertisements are sources of the highest interest, since they plot trajectories of technological, social and aesthetic change in the commercialized visual culture of an expanding Chinese treaty port. Considerable too is their reliability, especially considering that the advertisers paid publication fees in the hope of increasing custom by repeatedly staking claims—e.g. of their studios’ technological superiority and conformity with visual taste and social acceptance—via the pages of a daily newspaper on behalf of a large literate/semi-literate audience. Because the target readership was Chinese, advertisements’ unambiguous—if not consistently true—claims help to establish crucial particularities for a Chinese reserve within the larger international visual economy of Shanghai (and other locations of 19th-century China). Variously on behalf of human portraits, city- and landscapes, and newsworthy events, advertising reveals visual priorities, evolutions of taste, ploys in image-marketing and the existence of social strictures—e.g. advertisements seeking women to be portrayed solely by women. Such insights can serve a major role beside other forms of documentary evidence and visual material in order to re-imagine historically the situations where early photographs in China framed and isolated human bodies and sites within their surrounding environment.