Modern orientalism : the image of China through John Thomson's photography

Abstract

Considering visual experience as the representation of the overwhelming social conditions and the lived experiences of a particular period of history, this thesis argues that the image of China through John Thomson’s photography is not the historical evidence/documentation of social reality of Late Qing China; instead, it stands as a crucial visual representation of the Occidental/Western ideology of modern Orientalism during the 19th-century. In the field of photography art and history, John Thomson has been highly appreciated as a pioneering photographer for his sympathetic documentation of the Orient. With the extensive historical research, another post-colonialist perspective debates that Thomson’s image of China essentially serves for the 19th-century British colonial project and targets to record the racial “types” and geographic knowledge of China. In response to these seemingly antithetical viewpoints, this thesis rephrased the question as how and in which extent John Thomson’s photography of China relates to the 19th-century imperialism, colonialism and modernity.

Modern Orientalism, as a key concept originated from Edward Said, is adopted throughout this thesis to characterize Orientalism in a modern form and in the modern age which sheds light on the interpretation of Thomson’s image of China. Focusing on two subjects of sympathy and landscape, Thomson’s portrait and landscape photography of China were examined respectively in this thesis. The images ranging from small foot, Manchu bride, Chinese labors to the London poor were selected to argue that “sympathy” representing as a humanitarian emotion was eventually the Western will for the knowledge of China and latently legitimize the colonialist and modernist discourse. Viewing from geographical knowledge of China, the melancholy atmosphere and the problem of hygiene, Thomson’s landscape photography was illustrated as the modern/linear conception of history veiled in the Western geographical imagination of China.

This thesis underlines both the visible and the invisible, historical and geographical representations of China and interprets such representation as the reverse of the power relation between the West and China in the 19th-century. Presenting a post-colonialist and modernist analysis of John Thomson’s photography of China, this thesis would flesh out our understanding of the visual representation and its association with colonialism. Also, it develops a new perspective to figure out the Western modern orientalist discourse of China and the West-China relationship in the 19th-century.