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“We are now making history, and the sun picture supplies the means of passing down a record of what we are, and what we have achieved in this 19th century …” John Thomson, 1891.
Such a statement could only have been made during the Victorian era, and its author, the photographer John Thomson was undoubtedly a product of it. He was also a man who suffered from that most modern of diseases, Wanderlust, a condition that led him halfway round the world and produced some of the most beautiful photographs of the late nineteenth century.
By the end of his career Thomson had captured royalty and labourers, exotic landscapes of the Far East and the poverty of east London on glass. In 1881 he was appointed as one of the official photographers to the British Royal Family by Queen Victoria and was recognised by his peers as one of the most experienced professional photographers of his generation.
How was it, then, that hundreds of Thomson’s negatives of an unexhibited series came nearly to be thrown away in a box labelled “broken glass” a century later? Fearing that the delicate glass negatives would be lost after his death, Thomson offered 650 of them to the collector Henry Wellcome in 1920, and when Wellcome accepted they were stored but not displayed for almost a century. Were it not for the Wellcome Library’s William Schupbach, who fortunately ignored the label on the crate through curiosity, and the curator Betty Lao, Thomson’s decision to sell his works might have guaranteed their destruction and his own obscurity forever. What survives is an unexpected and extraordinary record of the Chinese way of life at the end of the 19th century and a feeling that although times change, people, with our sensibilities and cares, do not.
The story of the negatives after Thomson’s death, however, is nothing compared to the incredible difficulties faced by the photographer himself. Born in 1837 shortly before the invention of the photograph, little is known about Thomson’s early life or education prior to his first visit to Asia in 1862. He arrived in the aftermath of the second Opium War of 1860 when the defeated Qing government was forced to open up its borders to the British. This allowed the East India Company to expand and gave civil servants, explorers and artists (including Thomson) the ability to move around the country with relative freedom for the first time.
Apart from a brief return to the UK in the mid 1860s, he spent a decade travelling and photographing China and its neighbouring countries. Such a journey was not undertaken lightly; with almost no knowledge of the Chinese language and at constant risk of malaria, Thomson also faced great suspicion, both of his person and of his camera, but luck and a great amount of personal charm allowed him to travel from Beijing to Fujian and Guangzhou unscathed.
Thomson stood by his belief in the importance of the camera as an educational tool; after settling in London in 1872 he never returned to Asia but continued to give lectures and write books about his experiences for the rest of his life. Almost in spite of himself and his Victorian attitudes to the British colonisation of Asia (he described Hong Kong as a “political beacon… casting the light of a higher civilisation over some dark corners of the Flowery Land”), Thomson was also a humanist. Some of his most affecting portraits are neither of the English aristocracy nor of Manchu officials, but of the poorest of citizens of the countries he visited.
He marvelled at the social mobility afforded to educated Chinese, and noted with amusement the “good-natured employer, who seems to grow fatter and wealthier on the smiles and happy temperament of his workmen.” He also took some compelling portraits of Chinese women, apparently fascinated by their dress and complicated hairstyles. ‘A native woman’ (1871) displays the distinct coiffure and decorations of the Fujian region, while Thomson’s accompanying notes describe her skin as “olive in colour with a warm glow.”
Perhaps the best testament to Thomson’s sympathy for his subjects can be found in an article he wrote in 1866: “Every portrait, so far as the work of the photographer is concerned, should be a work of art. No matter how rough or uninteresting the face he has to deal with, he ought to start with the conviction that there is something good in it, some redeeming characteristic which may be brought out by his manner towards, and treatment of, the sitter.” We do not have to look far to find these convictions in his work; in Beijing Thomson dedicated an entire series of photographs to the street traders he came across. A beautifully composed scene entitled ‘The Travelling Chiropodist’ (1871–2) depicts the Chiropodist and his patient seated on the street, with a third man watching intently from a doorway immediately behind them.
In actual fact these photographs could hardly be further from the “point-and-click” experience of photography most of us enjoy today. Well before the invention of the contemporary camera, even before negatives could be stored within the body of the camera, Thomson used the wet collodion process where glass plates were treated with a chemical mixture that would make them sensitive to light. They then had to be exposed and developed immediately to make them stable, which meant that Thomson was forced to carry dangerous chemicals and a portable darkroom across practically inaccessible tracts of inland China.
Each shot had to be carefully planned and could only be taken on days when the sunlight was strong enough and access to clean water was imperative to the development process; ten porters were required to carry Thomson’s equipment, and it took four people to lift just one of the three cases of glass negatives that Thomson returned to England with.
Our sudden recognition of Thomson’s subjects not as 140-year-old historical figures but as people who are, in the moment of our looking at them, both real and alive, is surely an affirmation of Thomson’s reputation as the father of photojournalism. The clarity and quality of his compositions assert Thomson’s skill as a photographer and his ability to draw out a moment of apparent immediacy during the tricky and time-consuming wet collodion process. Images such as these remind us of the potential of the photograph; much more than a dry document attesting to the existence of a person or place surviving longer than human memory, it can take us on a journey through time and across continents.
by Rebecca Lewin
All images courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London