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4 Mirror Images: John Thomson’s Photographs of East Asia Thomas Prasch Introduction Arevealing verbal slip occurs in the preface to John Thomson’s Straits of Malacca, IndoChina , and China (1875), his summary of ten years’ travel with camera in East Asia. “It has been my care,” Thomson writes, “so to hold the mirror up to his [the reader’s] gaze, that it may present to him, if not always an agreeable, yet at least a faithful, impression of China and its inhabitants.”1 If what Thomson held up is a mirror, however, the reader would see himself, not the Chinese. Thomson spoke more accurately than he intended. He shared with most of his contemporaries a firm belief in the straightforward realism of the photographic image. “The faithfulness of such pictures,” he claimed, “affords the nearest approach that can be made towards placing the reader actually before the scene which is represented.”2 Thomson’s photographic practice, however, was far from neutral, encoding Western assumptions about hierarchies of race and civilization. His central project was to capture “characteristic scenes and types.”3 This concern with “types” is reflected in the photographs themselves — in Thomson’s selection of images and in his compositional techniques. The supporting texts reinforce the message by underlining Thomson’s very Victorian English beliefs about race and race mixture, class, progress, and civilization. The mirroring of England in the East is further underscored by both overt and indirect comparisons between China and England, and especially between the lower classes of both nations. Thomson’s project reveals the ways in which Victorian photography was employed to define, delimit, and categorize groups at the margins of nineteenth-century culture. Victorian photographers imposed their own categories and hierarchies on marginal groups (whether imperial subjects or the domestic poor), using photography to present 54 Thomas Prasch these classifications to Victorian readers as “natural.” The messages about social and racial hierarchies were reinforced within the photographs themselves by rules of composition borrowed from more traditional arts (especially painting), and further underlined by supporting texts. The “natural” status of these typologies further depended on widely accepted premises about the objective, merely transcriptive character of the photographic image — what led Henry Fox Talbot to call photography “the pencil of nature” — that obscured the mediating role of the photographer in selecting, posing, and composing his subjects. The Image of Empire Born and bred in Edinburgh (where he completed his education at the University of Edinburgh), Thomson traveled to Asia briefly in 1861, but set out for a more sustained period of travel and residence there in 1862, at the age of 25. Stephen White has usefully traced the course of Thomson’s travels. Setting up a studio first in Penang, where he remained for ten months, he then moved to Singapore, where his brother already worked as a ship chandler; the two briefly established a photographic business together there. Thomson journeyed to Ceylon and India in 1864, to Siam in 1865–66, and to Cambodia in 1866.After a short return to Britain, where he shared his photographs and observations of Cambodia and Siam, he returned to the East, settling in Hong Kong in 1868 after visits to Singapore and Vietnam. Aside from studio photographic work, Thomson began to find other outlets for his photography, including appearances in China Magazine in 1868, and published albums of the Taiping Rebellion (during which he was embedded with Lieutenant-Colonel C. G. Gordon’s troops) in 1868 and of the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh to Hong Kong in 1869. In the following years, he traveled extensively through China, assembling the photographic images that would provide the material for his Illustrations of China and Its People (1873–74).4 In the introduction to those volumes, Thomson wrote of his Chinese travels that “my journeys . . . extended over a distance, estimated roughly, of between 4,000 and 5,000 miles,”5 including not only major northern cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, but also trips up the rivers like the Yangtze, Pearl, and Min. Returning to Britain in 1872, Thomson continued to publish photographs and travel writing about his decade in East Asia through 1876. In the course of that decade’s travel, Thomson’s distinctive photographic techniques were honed. The implications of Thomson’s practices are particularly evident in his East Asian work, where he explicitly links his quest for a comprehensive photographic portfolio to the extension of scientific knowledge and of...

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