Through the Looking Glass: Photography, Science and Imperial Motivations in John Thomson's Photographic Expeditions

Abstract

My design in the accompanying work is to present a series of pictures of China and its people, such as shall convey an accurate impression of the country I traversed as well as of the arts, usages, and manners which prevail in different provinces of the Empire. With this intention I made the camera the constant companion of my wanderings, and to it I am for the faithful reproduction of the scenes I visited, and of the types of race with which I came into contact. [Emphasis added]1These are the introductory remarks that the Victorian photographer John Thomson (1837-1921) presented to his readers before they delved into his first of four volumes of tipped-in photographs displaying Illustrations of China and its people. Through this preamble, Thomson highlights central issues - for both contemporary and modern readers - in reading photographs of the Far East: are these accurate representations, and, if so, how does this align with the desire for racial classification through visual codification? These are issues that have been read and reread in the analysis of these images by historians of art and anthropology.2 Yet the processes of reproduction through which these images came to be read by Victorian audiences, whether as scientific objects or otherwise, have largely been ignored. This paper deconstructs what it meant for Thomson to be indebted for the faithful reproduction of the scenes I visited in the construction of a colonial gaze. Considering that these images were invested with their own claims to accuracy and classificatory veracity, what epistemological shifts did they undergo when they were reproduced? And how does the context of their reproduction in British books and periodicals affect their claims to accurately represent racial and topographical types?For Thomson, these photographs were scientific pursuits. To take a photograph in the late nineteenth century was a technical, mechanical and chemical endeavour, and the images that resulted from Thomson's lens were embedded in practices of taxonomical colonial encounter.3 Borrowing from the language used by Wilder in her work on the relationship between science and photography, Thomson's images are both photographs of science and photographic science.4 The images in Illustrations of China and its people - as well as his later photographic books The Straits of Malacca, through Cyprus with a camera and street life in London - were intended to offer representational proof of racial classification. At the same time, the chemical and technological aspect of the images' production and reproduction were essential to Thomson's claim to accuracy. Yet Tucker has cautioned us that, for nineteenthcentury audiences, photographs - whether or not they were intended to be scientific objects - were rarely viewed with unconditional trust.5 Thus when reading Thomson's photographs, they become conditional scientific objects, positioned between the intention of the author and the evaluation of the reader. Moreover, this conditionality of the photographic image was not only situated in the reading of the image itself, but in the context of its print reproduction.Edwards, in her work on photography and anthropology, has reminded us that a photograph has a social biography, and that the reading of photographic images is tied to both the places in which they were made and those in which they were displayed.6 Pinney has further emphasised the importance of local photographers and vendors to the adoption of photography in the Indian context, and has demonstrated how various technologies of communication, such as the telegraph, comingled when images of India moved outside of the national boundaries.7 Thus when reading Thomson's photographs, there is a clear representational conception of racial and geographical difference, yet the reading of these visual tropes was constructed through more than just the photographs themselves; it was also mediated by the textual spaces and print technologies that he used to reproduce them. …

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