This volume is Terry Bennett’s latest contribution to photography’s history in China, after History of Photography in China 1842–1860 (2009) and History of Photography in China: Western Photographers 1861–1879 (2010). The newest in this series is likewise devoted to photographs made in China, but, as its title tells us, the principle for any object’s inclusion is authorship by a Chinese photographer or a Chinese studio. The result is an impressive gathering of Chinese photographers. Some are famous names, such as Huafang (Afong), who centered his operations in Hong Kong; among less familiar names are the studios of Yazhen (A Chan) in Guangzhou, Tongxing (Tung Hing) in Fuzhou, and Ruisheng and Yifang (Jiu-San and E-Fong) in Xiamen.

Bennett combines a longstanding passion for collecting original photographs with his research interest directed mainly at photographers’ careers. Aside from surviving images—most of which are his own acquisitions—his primary interpretative resources are press reports and advertisements, which without doubt contain crucial data for revealing the various spans of photographic operations in China. He has successfully exploited the same methods to describe photography in Japan. Inevitably, the results of all his work on photography in East Asia tend toward an empirical drive at the expense of discursive reach, but nothing should gainsay the tremendous amount of information that any collecting/publishing enterprise by Bennett puts at the disposal of his readers. Users of Chinese Photographers 1844–1879 will also enjoy the high standard of visual reproduction and the fitting design format ensured by Bernard Quaritch.

Somewhat less accessible are the principles of the volume’s internal arrangement as well as the editorial divisions between the content of this and earlier China volumes. Bennett allows a good deal of overlap with his earlier work, and the considerable amount of space occupied by Western visitors in Chinese Photographers is awkward. I also question an eccentric approach to China’s geography, a possible misrepresentation of the limitations inherent in the work of that country’s photographers, and an overdependence on Western sources.

Bennett presents the material in chapter-by-chapter subdivisions: namely, Beijing, Hong Kong, Guangzhou (Canton), Shanghai, Fuzhou, Xiamen (Amoy), Hankou, Tianjin, Yantai (Chefoo), Ningbo, Shantou (Swatow), Jiujiang, Nanjing, Aomen (Macao), and Taiwan (Formosa). Guidance from one of these places to the next is minimal, so whatever reason justifies the sequence is not clear. Beijing is an obvious starting point in political geography, but historically it is not the first major station in photography’s cultural, social, and economic expansion in China. That was probably Macao, or just as probably Guangzhou, or perhaps Hong Kong. Or, instead, all these possibilities form a set of multiple contacts around Guangdong province’s primary estuary and maritime inlet. A grouping in this way and an alternative beginning would at least avoid breaking off Macao, for example, and locating it far from its neighboring settlements.

Beginning in the south would also match the weight of evidence for photography’s transmission northward along the seaboard and into the mainland. This is, as Bennett correctly describes it, the same general direction of military, commercial, and missionary penetration by Western imperial powers into Chinese territory. (Japanese movement into China is another history in another geography.) What in 1872 the British photographer David Griffith aptly called a “photographic raid” (22) is not very useful to the thrust of Chinese Photographers, but it captures superbly how Western visitors often imagined their relationship to a new visual technology, and especially their progressive transport of its use into China’s interior.

But in a volume devoted to the Chinese agents of production, a northward traffic is also crucial to understanding a Chinese acculturation of photography determined by several generations of effort and genius emanating from Guangdong. The cumulative effect of the present list of disconnected places is a history deracinated from its physical coordinates. And as so many of the Chinese photographers to whom Bennett refers were Guangdong residents or sojourners, a more forceful argument could direct attention to the role their province assumed in the global history of communications and media transfer. It might also recall how the dimensions of globality in particular changed during the period under discussion. After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, Guangzhou and several other deep-water ports in China were suddenly closer to the familiar “ocean nations” whose ships berthed along their waterfronts. Whether local populations accommodated or resisted Western incursions, early photography around the globe was an exercise that followed shipping routes, just as surely as telegraph cables followed railways.

Various groups in Guangdong were among the first to grasp the flows of a changing economic order, and their awareness was by no means isolated from a rich culture of classical learning and epistemological renewal (and revolution). I can gesture only briefly to recent studies, but notable contributions are Michael Tsin, Nation, Governance, and Modernity in China: Canton 1900–1927 (1999); Steven Miles, The Sea of Learning (2006); and a highly professional Chinese study organized by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences: Song Zuanyou’s The Cantonese in Shanghai/Guangdongren zai Shanghai 1843–1949 (2007). Rudolf Wagner’s edited volume Joining the Global Public (2007), a set of essays on the early Shanghai press, which Bennett does cite, also contains material relevant to Guangdong’s role in Shanghai’s modernization.

Of course, the metropolitan and urban environments that Bennett describes were the primary sites of the most traceable history of early photography in China. Most traceable. We still know too little concerning the beginnings of studio businesses outside towns, and virtually nothing concerning itinerant photographers whose capital outlay might have run to a mule and cart. (Fugitives beyond the retrieval of every other category of historical record, they exist in one or two rare and unpublished photographs indicating their bygone success.) But even though it is difficult to avoid, an urban emphasis may be one factor that creates a false expectation of what comprised the content of Chinese photographers’ images. In chapter 4, “Chinese Photography Considered,” Bennett differentiates the genres of portrait and landscape. His lengthy citations of nineteenth-century sources display the predictably essentialist and derogatory biases that tainted Western opinions. The sum of these is that Chinese studios (in the cities) competed strongly in the economy and aesthetics of portraiture, albeit an economy and aesthetics that differed from those of, say, Paris or Lima. By contrast, the subject of landscape in China during the same period, if left in the hands of its native owners, inspired only poor efforts lacking, in the words of Isaac Taylor Headland, any “delicacy of touch” (46).

A much larger output of China’s landscape photographs was made by Chinese photographers and publishers in the period after this volume’s span (1844–79), a point that Bennett that does not make. Crucially too, the later output of China’s various landscapes and regional cultures would be circulated in the newly modernized publishing enterprises of Shanghai, and that eventually national scale of publishing would embed most publicly its audience’s rising expectations concerning Chinese photographs of China’s landscapes. Nevertheless, Chinese Photographers shows views of the 1870s, which prove that Chinese camera operators were already capable of recording local mountainous landscapes—even those devoid of the extra cultural layers that mountains in China often thickly acquire—and turning them into visual ecstasies of stillness. Such images are immune to the denigrations of contemporary Western commentators, and even Bennett’s citation of Wu Hung’s sympathetic identification with Chinese landscape photographs seems beside the point, as the subject of Wu’s remarks are images made by the British photographer John Thomson (46).

An early indifference by Chinese producers and consumers toward photographing landscapes is not to be translated into either insensitivity to landscape or technical incompetence. Entirely to his credit, Bennett does not say this. His conclusion in defense of precocious Chinese efforts to photograph landscapes, however, is still off target. Following suggestions in the catalogue of a recent Getty exhibition of photography in China (Cody and Terpak, eds., Brush & Shutter, 2011), he proposes that the appreciation of Chinese photographers’ landscape productions must be understood in reference to traditional Chinese aesthetics located in the realm of Chinese landscape painting. The equivalence of photography with the representational system of painting does not really work. Any foray into paintings created in the 1870s would soon prove this. Or, simply looking back, surely the sublimities of nineteenth-century landscape photographs are not conditioned by the achievements of Song dynasty landscape painters, are they?

Since the West forms such an insistent object of comparison, it is worth recalling how Western receptions of photographed landscape differed entirely from Chinese. The fact that Western photographers travelled to China—and often combined travel and photography with the literary exercise of writing about these activities—bespeaks political and economic imbalances that require no further comment. In another frame of comparison, however, that of landscape photography practiced by photographers in the United States, the topic is defined by trajectories of exploration and expansion. Earlier and contemporaneous photographs by Eadweard Muybridge, Timothy O’Sullivan, and Carleton Watkins minted the currency of a nation’s new representational economy. These images form one of landscape photography’s most well-known functional narratives. But, it is not a Chinese narrative, and it is irrelevant to any explanation of how Chinese photographers somehow failed to start on their obligations to visualize China earlier than they did.

The chapter containing these remarks on landscape reproduces equally pernicious nineteenth-century characterizations of portrait work. This parade of denunciations is interesting to read, but again, it reveals almost nothing of Chinese pictorial expectations. Also, it is not entirely true that no Chinese rhetoric is available for the modern critic to use and hit back, as it were. Bennett cites Roberta Wue’s remark that we have no comparable commentaries by Chinese photographers on the work of their Western colleagues. No, we don’t, but Wue wrote that in 2005, and since then the state of the field has changed a lot. Recent work on photography in settings as diverse as countries in Africa and in South America and in India, Indonesia, and Thailand has challenged the reign of textual comment as the paradigmatic means to historical retrieval. Although historians have delayed making better use of images, these now emerge as alternative forms of document whose visual codes are susceptible to reliable and informative readings.

Besides this methodological shift, why would we expect Chinese photographers to deliver the huge amount of comment that they obdurately did not? I have already mentioned the different professional drive of China-bound Western photographers, whose mission was as much tied to literary report as to the visual seizure of objects. Supposing even that they had been more forthcoming, why ask only Chinese photographers for their comments? Loud and garrulous members of other constituencies said a lot about Western images, their contents, forms, and functions. A new generation of Chinese diplomats, educators, and other privileged travelers form an obvious group who voyaged abroad and diarized their adventures in the studios of Paris, London, Boston, and Cairo (in the case of hajjis bound for Mecca). Another rich source of both Chinese and Western photographs’ ekphrastic retrieval comprises novels and stories written around the turn of the century. Created by writers whose interests succumbed increasingly to new vernacular pastimes, these dramatic documents contain fantasies of their heroes and heroines’ envisioned bodies, which careful reading could reconstitute as the prevalent norms of fashion and taste.

The sources used in Chinese Photographers are mostly from the English-language newspaper press published in China. However, with the assistance of translators and a growing body of Western writing on photography in China, Bennett introduces a few documents from early Chinese newspapers and journals. Invariably, the selection is ruled by his interest in a particular photographer, in turn determined by his acquisition of the same photographer’s work. Otherwise, readers will wonder why a volume dealing with Chinese photographers and illustrated by such beautiful examples of their work accommodates quite so many Western testimonies to Western practice. The early chapters cite comments by most of the early photographers who visited or lived in China: Jules Itier, Claude Gotteland, Felice Beato, Paul Champion, John Thomson John Dudgeon, David Griffith. The list seems indecorously long. Some of the names occur in a long discussion in “Chinese Reaction to Photography” (chapter 2), beginning with the catoptophobic suspicions that early photographers had to remove before their subjects would dare to be photographed—Balzac photographed by Nadar is everyone’s favorite example, which surely enough Bennett cites.

Once again, however, the location of this and so many other discussions in photography’s Western centers of development forecloses the possibility of switching the emphasis toward Eastern historical locations. Later, in the same discussion, when Bennett does bring events in China into view, he admits that many of his Western informants had much at stake in exaggerating the fears that Chinese subjects felt in front of the camera. Chinese sources show some quite different reactions. For example, Bennett’s claim that “there seems to have been no resistance to photography on formal religious grounds as opposed to superstitious fears” (14) is traduced by a famous story in the Chinese illustrated press: At Guangzhou’s Confucian Temple, in 1906, a foreign photographer was utterly frustrated in his attempts to record a day’s rehearsal of the elaborate autumn sacrifices that was scheduled to be performed the next day. With the obvious connivance of Guangzhou’s senior clerisy, a group of male youths danced and cavorted with aggressive persistence in front of his camera, and this cunning act of resistance was gleefully reported with a drawing of the scene in the Shishi huabao/Pictorial News (issue no. 26), one of Guangzhou’s more celebrated but short-lived illustrated newspapers.

Because the citation of so many English and other Western sources far exceeds any comment on them, the reader will also ask what Bennett thinks of these voices that speak over the Chinese multitude. Many of them deserve a more nuanced hearing, especially as this might steer the course of Bennett’s investigations even closer to Chinese engagements with photography. Western spectators and practitioners in China may have intended to say nothing concerning photography’s indigenous processes of education and knowledge creation, but the historian’s job is to detect the accompanying noise that does.

So, in 1842, during the closing weeks of the first Opium War, a young Harry Parkes (1828–1895), training to be a Chinese interpreter, watches Major Malcolm and Dr. Woosnam make a daguerreotype photograph of the Yangzi scenery downstream from Zhenjiang, marveling that they “took a sketch of the place on their daguerreotype” (2). The notion that someone “took” an image—a view, portrait, and so on—was typical in this period, and the expressive turn itself is important, if we agree that photography has a history even at the level of language. That two British operators “took a sketch” followed the technical descriptions established by painting and drawing, and shows no advance from conventional expressions in the previous century. When Jane Austen’s characters flirt with each other, their talk turns to how to “take” pictures and likenesses (Pride and Prejudice, chapters 10 and 18). The point could be, then, that Parkes, for want of better terms, could describe a new process only in the vocabulary of an old one. Pointedly, too, his failure to describe science in language that still eluded him was no different from his Chinese contemporaries’ struggle to describe photography in any terms other than those used for established graphic traditions. More sensitivity to these hindrances—in many discussions besides Bennett’s—would confirm that initial incoherence in the face of a new medium was not a particularly Chinese failure to create a modern discourse.

No less egregious, Bennett writes that Parkes “witnessed” a photographic operation. But in the same chapter, one of the first Chinese witnesses, Zhou Shouchang, who published what he saw in 1846, was “evidently unfamiliar with photography” (7). Even if it is only via a statement of omission, why is Parkes not recollected as being as unfamiliar with photography as is Zhou? In fact, why not more? After all, Parkes admits in his journal with the youthful naivety of the trainee (in interpreting, no less): “I cannot understand it at all: but on exposing a polished steel plate to the sun by the aid of some glass or other it takes the scene before you [. . .] It is no use me trying to describe it, for to me it is quite a mystery.” Steel? Some glass or other? We can probably assume that Parkes, who attended Birmingham’s famous King Edward’s Grammar School when its syllabus was still largely classical, had not read much by Newton. Nor could he have yet read anything by one of Britain’s great science lecturers, John Tyndall (1820–1893), whose lengthy work on optics would be translated into Chinese in 1876 and then widely read. (Better-connected Chinese visitors to London soon fixed on Tyndall as a must-see during their tour.)

To expect Parkes to pronounce more eloquently on photography in 1842 is unfair, but if the larger aim of Bennett’s discussion is to retrieve something since incorporated as “Chinese photography,” then the task must surely strive beyond Euro-American standards and find new levels of representation in Chinese arguments. To that end, Zhou Shouchang again deserves recognition as the only voice among several (mostly Western) who seized on photography’s “perfect likeness” in a new rhetoric equivalent to the medium’s new terms of unforgiving mimesis. Transcending what Zhou said “an expert painter could not have done,” photography was to this Chinese onlooker the medium that no other could exceed in what Liliane Louvel memorably characterizes as its peerless “précision stupide.”

Chinese Photographers 1844–1879, then, is a superb display of photographers’ work accompanied by a narrative that controls less evenly the task of telling a Chinese history. Pouncing on this shortcoming should not be at the cost of much that is highly commendable. Bennett’s careful research includes a thorough examination of Western newspapers and journals to elicit new facts of chronology and commercial history. His whole project stands also for a meticulous engagement with visual images produced by local societies and commerce that barely feature in the still uneven state of research on indigenous photographic practices in China.

On this last point, Bennett’s great contribution is a solid augmentation to the visual repertoire of the historical fabric, lieux de mémoire and autotochthonous encodings of visual sensitivity. Outstanding in this achievement are the chapters devoted to Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Xiamen, and Hankou, not least because they add views and information that his previous volumes had not included. But the present volume encompasses many more places, objects, and bodies, which glow not merely as valuable historical finds but as technologies of vision and, above all, as new appeals to seeing.

Oliver Moore is Lecturer in Art and Material Culture of China at the University of Leiden. The history of photography in China is one of his interests.