From opium wars to life after Mao

By Julia Lovell

The invention of photography coincided with the mortification of modern China. In 1839, the year Henry Fox Talbot presented his early photographic experiments to the Royal Society, China’s “Century of Humiliation” at the hands of imperialist powers began with the first opium war. Through the second half of the 19th century, foreign photographers joined the armies of soldiers, diplomats, traders and missionaries swarming over China. In the late summer of 1860, the Italian photographer Felix Beato captured the carnage of the second opium war, and four decades later the “punitive picnic” of the Boxer war was photographed on new Kodak Reloadables. Compositions designed to shame a defeated China were staged and sent around the world in newspapers, periodicals, photobooks and picture postcards: images of privates playing hockey around sacred temples; officers lolling on imperial thrones and picking over the emperor’s apartments; grisly public executions of suspected Chinese Boxer rebels.

“The Chinese Photobook”, an exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in London, starts with this agonising “opening” of China by imperialism. The first photobook on display, “China: From Earth and Balloon”, is a collection of images taken by the French army during the Boxer war, and is predictably rich in European military swagger. Across its pages, hot-air balloons—used by the French army to take some of the first aerial photographs of a previously sequestered Beijing—loom over a low-rise capital city now powerless to resist the all-powerful foreign gaze.