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Facing Asia: a Report

Geoffrey Batchen

Facing Asia: Histories and Legacies of Asian Studio Photography An International Conference. Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University, Canberra

August 21-22, 2010

Graciously organized by Luke Gartlan and Gael Newton (the first an expert on Japanese Meiji photography who teaches at the University of St Andrews in Edinburgh, and the second the Senior Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra), this conference brought together scholars from Australia, the USA, Canada, India, Japan and Europe to present papers on various aspects of Asian photography. It was immediately striking that “Asian Photography” is a very broad category, apparently encompassing photographers in Australia and the United States as well as practitioners working in India, China, Japan, Indonesia and Thailand. Every talk focused on vernacular photography. Even a presentation on her own work by Bangalore artist Pushpamala N. could be described in these terms, given the degree to which that work draws on already popular Indian conventions and codes. The conference therefore made a statement from the outset, presuming that the most distinctly Asian elements of the photography produced in that region of the world are to be found in commercial and ordinary practices, rather than in fine art.

The papers varied widely in topic, although almost all of them were based on new research, such is the nascent state of the field. Sebastian Dobson, for example, tried to displace the usual emphasis in Western histories of Japanese photography on the treaty port of Yokohama by looking instead at the career of a Tokyo-based photographer named Matsuzaki Shinji. Matsuzuki was particularly notable for publishing a pamphlet in 1886 titled Shashin Hitsuyo: shakyaku no kokoroe [The Essentials of Photography: Dos and Don’ts for the Photographic Customer]. This text, Dobson argued, “is particularly useful in analyzing the extent to which a distinctively ‘Japanese’ approach to studio photography developed.” Susie Protschky, in contrast, looked at photographs of Theeuurtje or “tea time” taken as family portraits by Asians and Indo-Europeans in colonial Indonesia, images that frequently appear in albums from that period. Protshcky presented these family snapshots as “ego documents” or self-representations in which a European status was insistently reiterated and performed for the camera. Richard Kent examined a number of portrait photographs made in China in the early twentieth century that include a colophon and inscription with the image, as if to extend a more familiar painting tradition in which text and image often interact. Such inscriptions, one of which listed every thing the subject wore, and even the color of those things, forestall any erasure of identity through the reduction of this subject to a type, turning these photographs into family mementos with both personality and emotional resonance.

Suryanandini Narain presented a genre of portrait photograph commissioned in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by women seeking a suitor in Delhi, Bombay and Calcutta. These portraits, many made both for and by women, were carefully designed to enhance beauty and hide any flaws. Their study, Narain suggested, helps give visual form to “the dynamics of gender in a period of historic transformation in the subcontinent.” Lady Erb Bunnag, a favored concubine of King Chulalongkorn in Siam, also practiced photography, documenting domestic life within the royal palace. As Leslie Ann Woodhouse explained, one series of eight photographs documented the ethnic differences exhibited by another concubine, Dara Rasami. These photographs represent, therefore, a local cataloguing of difference, even within this intimate setting. Difference was also central to Gartlan’s presentation, focused as it was on the sometimes tense relations of Japanese and Western photographers in the Meiji era. He contrasted Baron Raimund von Stillfried, who at one point ensured that each of his 38 Japanese studio assistants was assigned a specialist task so that none could leave and set up in competition, with Usui Shusaburo, who ended up employing a foreigner, David Welsh, to work for him in 1879 (to sell Usui’s prints in hotels catering for Westerners). According to Gartlan, Usui’s work imitated that of von Stillfried at first, but then sought to challenge this received aesthetic by establishing his own.

Wendy Garden’s paper again addressed itself to tensions between the West and indigenous culture, in her case concentrating on photographic portraits of two Indian princes, Sir Mahtub Ali Kahn, Nizam of Hyderabad, and Maharaja Ram Singh II of Jaipur. These portraits were made after 1857, in response to British anxieties about the loyalty of the indigenous ruling class, and often featured the wearing of British medals. Some, however, stressed a local dress and pose and were taken by Indian-born photographers, as if to insist on their difference. This talk was nicely complemented by a display by Newton of recently acquired Indian portraits at the National Gallery of Australia. Other papers looked in detail at particular studios. Yi Gu, for example, analysed the Baoji Studio in Shanghai, established in 1888, and in particular discussed its attempt to establish “aesthetic standards of photography that were unmistakeably Chinese.” Roberta Wue focused on the portrait work of Milton M. Miller, an American photographer active in Hong Kong, Canton and Japan in the early 1860s, work, she said, that presents “an intriguing and unique investigation into issues of group identity.” Maki Fukuoka looked more broadly at the area known as Asakusa in Tokyo, a suburb occupied by as many as 40 studios in the 1880s, businesses that, she argued, were “themselves spaces of performance.” H. Tiffany Lee drew attention to a peculiar photographic genre mentioned in a 1925 essay by the Chinese scholar Lu Xun, involving the making of portraits of “twos.” Lee argued, among other things, that “the figure of the double functioned as a cipher for the technology of photography and its properties for mechanical reproduction.”

As this very partial selection suggests, the photographic practices highlighted by this conference were diverse and thought provoking. A concluding roundtable of participants agreed that there was a surprising amount of overlap between presentations from otherwise different parts of the world. The focus on the studio as a site of commercial practice gave speakers some common ground, as well as some temporal boundaries, with most papers looking at work from the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. The studio was found to be a space that was simultaneously personal, theatrical, political and economic, often demonstrating fraught relations between each of these possibilities. Another frequent emphasis was on the photograph’s symbiotic relationship to texts, whether these be manuals, signatures, captions, advertisements, inscriptions or titles. Although speakers were excited by the richness of the field sketched by the conference, many also conceded that a huge amount of research remained to be undertaken, especially on the technical development of photography in particular parts of Asia.

John Clark, a specialist in modern Asian art, raised a troubling but crucial question during his otherwise idiosyncratic summation. Does the introduction of photography indeed mark a turning point of some kind in modern Asian cultural life? Or is photography’s significance—the very significance assumed and reiterated by this conference, and indeed by this journal—an invention of Asian photo-history itself, insisted on by a field of academic inquiry still insecurely seeking to establish a distinctive identity and reason for being? Clark argued that the most important dates for the development of Asian culture in the nineteenth century were 1857, the Indian Uprising, and 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal, with the advent of photography having little discernable effect. Indeed, he suggested that a focus on a single medium is to misunderstand the multi-media nature of Asian cultures, and especially the way that images are disseminated within them. The conference finished, therefore, by posing a question about it own most basic premise, asking whether “Asian photography” is even a category that can or should be distinguished from the broader field of visual culture in that region. Is there anything unique about photographs, such that they deserve to be studied in a ghetto? It is surely a question worthy of further debate, perhaps at some future conference or within these pages.

Geoffrey Batchen

Geoffrey Batchen teaches the history of photography as Professor of Art History at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand.

Note: The abstracts of papers presented at the Facing Asia conference can be downloaded at http://hrc.anu.edu.au/events/facing-asia>.

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