Exhibition Info
A Window to the Orient: The Victorian Photographs of John Thomson
When John Thomson (1837–1921) settled in the Far East in 1862, he was a young and energetic photographer of twenty-five. Like many of his Victorian countrymen, his interests included art, botany, ethnography, geography, and sociology; in addition he was an able linguist, fluent to varying degrees in French, Malay, and certain dialects of Chinese all of which served him well in the exotic lands of Southeast Asia. From what we can glean from his published writings and his letters, his disposition was one of general affability and open fascination with new cultures and social structures. Unlike other Victorian travelers in this region, however, Thomson was also a photographer--an exceptional photographer through whose vision a number of Asian societies and peoples were brilliantly documented in a large body of photography that is at once informative and eloquently picturesque. Thomson spent ten years exploring the major cities, the principal archaeological sites, and the little-traveled by-ways of the Malay Peninsula, Penang Island, Siam, Cambodia, Vietnam, Formosa, and a wide-ranging area of China. These lands, many of which are now familiar to us because of recent history, had never been photographed before Thomson to such a degree nor with such artistry. For the Victorian viewer of these images, Thomson provided a window to a world known only through non-visual, written accounts. These were the scenes and sites named in the reports of exploration' trading companies, and accounts of the various Opium Wars a few years earlier. Here, moreover, is what they looked like to the Victorian era. As Thomson once stated, "The faithfulness of such pictures affords the nearest approach that can be made towards placing the reader actually before the scene which .is represented." Yet for all their exoticism and historical freshness, there is a chord of familiarity to these pictures—a familiarity engendered not so much by our present interest in these lands but by the fact that Thomson's photographs bear that striking resonance of all great photography: the essential beauty of a world well seen.
Stephen White and Robert Sobieszek
Introductory text, A Window to the Orient: The Victorian Photographs of John Thomson
1985
