THE NATIONAL GALLERY of Australia (NGA) in Canberra has been poised to play an active role in the appreciation of the art of the Asia-Pacific region. In 2006, a commitment was made to build the first national collection devoted exclusively to the history of photography across the Asia-Pacific. The acquisition of colonial era works of South and Southeast Asia substantially expanded the NGA’s existing photographic holding to some 14,000 works. It became the most balanced historical collection of Asia-Pacific photography in the world, ranging from rare 19th-century daguerreotypes to documentary works and 20th-century prints and works by Pictorialist and Modernist photographers. The NGA’s enlarged collection forms the basis of the exhibition, Picture Paradise: The First Century of Asia-Pacific Photography 1840s-1940s, an unprecedented comparative survey of the subject. Over 400 original photographs and albums trace early photography from India and Sri Lanka, through Southeast and East Asia to Australia, and across the Pacific to North America. They record both the revolution in new photographic technologies, and their singular achievements in the Asia of that time.
Picture Paradise opens with the first western encounters of 19th-century Asia. They brought with them a new curiosity about Asian societies and cultures. Until the daguerreotype was invented in 1839, images of Asia were largely depicted by drawings, aquatints, lithographs and prints. It is no accident that the daguerreotype was invented by an artist, Louis-Jacques Mande Daguerre (1787-1851). An objective record of reality on small polished copper plates, its technical accuracy far surpassed anything that had been made before. It became an unprecedented window into a new world, capturing the ‘exotica’ of the region in infinite detail. When first introduced, the daguerreotype image required an exposure time of up to 20 minutes. Each plate was unique and was protected by being mounted under glass. An early quarter plate daguerreotype on display is A Man from Central Borneo (1844), by Jules Itier (1802-1877) of France.
Other photographic processes were subsequently developed. In 1841, the calotype, a salted paper print allowed contact prints to be produced from a master paper negative. For the first time, photographs could be published in large editions. In India, John Murray (1809-1898) produced an early calotype of Agra, the Taj from the East (circa 1858). Official photographers such as Linnaeus Tripe, were employed by the colonial authorities of the Raj to document the first images of its far-flung empire, including upper Burma, in 1855. However the wet-plate glass negative process – invented in the 1850s – required plates to be exposed while moist and developed in situ, testing the skills of outdoor studio photographers. The dry-plate process opened the way for amateur photographers as it eliminated the need for cumbersome equipment. The possibilities of the photographic medium were increased by the advent of the albumen print. A thin sheet of paper coated with an albumen solution was printed from a glass plate, and was able to give high definition. European pioneers such as the Scot, John Thomson (1837-1921) used it to produce the first major illustrated books of Asian photography focused on travel. His Antiquities of Cambodia (1867) was unprecedented, followed by the four-volume Illustrations of China and Its People (1873-74), one of the earliest photographic essays of late Manchu China. Other Britons such as Charles Moravia (1811-1859) working in India, and Walter Woodbury (1834-1885) in the Dutch East Indies, also used the albumen silver print to produce images of the natives, the landscape and architecture.
The Maltese-born, British photographer, Felice Beato (1834-1907) took 19th-century photography further. His important technical improvement to the albumen process reduced its exposure time, and enlarged its scope. It enabled subject matter to develop from travel for instance, to conflict. It is possible to say Beato opened the doors to what was 19th-century photojournalism in Asia. After working in the Levant, he documented the Siege of Lucknow in 1857 India. He then accompanied an Anglo-French military expedition to China, becoming the first known European photographer to capture its images. The Tartar city of Pekin appeared in his album, China 1860, a record also of the earliest narrative sequences of the Second Opium War, including the destruction of the Old Summer Palace of Beijing and the capture of Tianjin.
Beato then turned his attention to Japan. His Photographic Views of Japan (1868) might be credited with the subsequent fascination in the West for things Japanese, known as Japonisme. It surfaced as a phenomenon before the end of the 1800s and amongst its attractions, were the first hand-coloured samples of Japanese albumen prints. The Czech-born Baron Raimund von Stillfried-Ratenicz (1839-1911) took to it, evident in his Three Women in Kimono (1876). Native Japanese photographers soon followed suit. In Yokohama, Kimbei Kusakabe’s (1841-1934) Portrait of Young Japanese Couple in Western Clothes (circa 1890) was part of a genre that later spread from Japan to the Chinese seaboard. In time it became a Japanese ‘export’ filtering into southeast Asia to influence the direction of Asian photography well into the 20th century.
One of the findings of the exhibition is that indigenous 19th-century, Asian portraiture originated in the royal courts. The first generation of native Asian photographers were court appointees, commissioned to capture the formal likenesses of royal subjects. In India, Lala Deen Dayal (1844-1910) first worked for Indian and British patrons including the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Lord Curzon, before opening his Bombay studio in 1896. Bedecked in jewellery and finery are young royals sitting for the Surajmal Studio’s Portrait of Rajasthani Boy and Little Girl (circa 1885) in Bikaner. It was the French Catholic bishop of Bangkok who introduced the kingdom of Siam to the daguerreotype in 1845, and trained court members in its finer points. Francis Chit (1830-1891) was one such court photographer who documented the royal family, beginning with King Mongkut, Rama IV. Chit also captured his son, His Majesty King Chulalongkorn, Rama V on his Second Coronation (October 1973), in traditional Thai costume and in European formal dress. Prince Vajirunhis escorted to the Grand Palace for his Investiture as Crown Prince (14 January 1886) was another work. Eager to catch up with the west, the daimyo of Satsuma imported one of the first daguerreotypes to Japan in 1848, and had portraits taken by court photographer Shiro Ichiki (1828-1903). The Japanese imperial family however were averse to having their formal likenesses immortalised and did not succumb to the camera until the 1870s. In the Dutch East Indies, the Javanese Kassian Cephas (1844-1912) was a pioneer, appointed official court photographer to the Sultans of Jogjakarta after he was taught to use the daguerreotype by a Dutchman. He went on to document the historical monuments of Java. Many Asians started off as studio photographers in port cities with large expatriate populations. Lai Afong’s (c.1839-1890) Afong Studio of Hong Kong, captured Western Man in Chinese Costume (c.1885), holding an opium pipe and also covered Chinese cities in albums such as Views of Pekin, Foochow, Canton and Hong Kong (1870).
The gelatin silver print, which appeared in the west in the 1880s, reached Asia a generation later. It was the first product that could be exposed by artificial light, and gave way to contact prints and enlargements. In Java, Kassian Cephas’son, Sem Cephas (1870-1918), who followed in his footsteps, produced Portrait of a Javanese Woman (circa 1900), in the traditional sarong, a gelatin silver photograph with colour pigments. Still, European-owned studios dominated the field of professional Asian photography in the early 1900s. In the then Ceylon, A.W.A. Plate & Co. produced the portrait, Sinhalese Man (circa 1920) of great detail. Legong Dancer, Bali (1928) by the Frenchman, Andre Roosevelt (1879-1962), is a portrait of the child, Ni Pollok, aged eleven, later the model and wife of the Belgian painter, A.J.Le Mayeur who lived and worked in Bali. The Armenian, Onnes Kurkdjian (1890-1935) owned the Atelier Kurkdjian operating in the Dutch East Indies and employed the British photographer, George P. Lewis (d.1926). French Indochina in all its variety was captured by the Frenchmen, Charles-Edouard Hocquard (1853-1911) and Pierre Dieulefils (1862-1937), among others.
Until the 1870s, the photograph was considered a work of mirror-sharp accuracy, and the product of a strictly technical process. The Calcutta-born, British photographer Julia Margaret Cameron (1815-1879) did not see the world in that way. Having lived much of her life in India, Cameron took up photography in 1863 on her return home. She approached portraiture as an art, borrowing the element of allegory from painting. Her last years were spent in Ceylon, where she was one of the earliest European pioneers to work on 19th-century Asian portraiture. Portrait of Two Tamil Girls, Kalutara (circa 1876) has a distinctive style that was hers alone. Cameron was ahead of her time. Her albumen prints preceded the platinum process, which made its debut in the 1880s. It subsequently stretched the boundaries of photography, enabling the image to achieve a soft tonal effect, and a quality akin to painting. The platinum print inspired a movement evolved from principles of European painting called Pictorialism, in the closing years of the 19th century. ‘Pictorialist art photography’ came into vogue and was transplanted to Asia only in the next century. Among its first protagonists was the Indian, Shapoor Bhedwar (active 1890s-1900s), whose work, heavily influenced by European academic conventions, emphasised the photographer as artist. In 1930s Japan, Shinzo Fukuhara (1883-1948) favoured the technique for the images of Hangzhou in his Chinese album, Beautiful West Lake: The Light with its Harmony (1931) published in Tokyo.
Early 20th-century Asia witnessed the modern era of amateur photography. The 35 mm camera marketed by Leica in 1925, and the Rolleiflex introduced in 1928, were hand-held and allowed greater latitude. The nature of the genre was simultaneously influenced by modern European art movements such as Modernism and Surrealism which made a break with the art of the past. A key figure identified with Asian Modernism is Lionel Wendt (1900-1944) of Ceylon. He took indigenous photography out of its 19th-century mode by using the Rolleiflex in 1932 to document local landscape and architecture. His studies of the nude, both male and female, may have been shocking for his time, but Buddha Head among Branches (1939) reveals that his métier was his revolutionary Surrealist style. The Surrealist photographers of 1930s Asia worked in relative isolation, and were unaware of one other’s existence. In Japan, Osamu Shiihara (1904-1974) of Osaka employed the solarisation techniques favoured by Man Ray and fused painting and photography in his work.
One of the most distinctive photographic trends from the 1930s onwards was the need to communicate. In Asia, the impulse to document made the image a new form of communication. The Dutch East Indies continued to attract a number of Japanese photographers working in the style known as photojournalism. K.T. Satake captured local colour in Sumatra, Java, Bali, an album published in Surabaya in 1935. In China, German-born Hedda Morrison (1908-1991) documented both its landscapes as well as its social deprivation in the critical years between 1933 and 1944, before going on to do the same in postwar Hongkong and British Malaya. By the 1940s, new attitudes towards photography suggested it was already a rare and valuable historical resource. It was recognised as powerful form of expression, able during the first century of its birth, to construct and document a vision of changing Asia, like no other.
Picture Paradise: The First Century of Asia-Pacific Photography 1840s -1940s is at the National Gallery of Australia, Parkes Place, Parkes, Canberra ACT 2600, until 9 November. www.nga.gov.au
