Darwent Revisited: Shanghai now and then

Posted on November 12, 2013 by Jamie Carstairs

Photography is the context, subtext and pretext for an exhibition that opens today.  The exhibition includes new photographs by Jamie Carstairs inspired by the text of Shanghai: A Handbook for Travellers and Residents, a guidebook to the city by Revd. Charles Darwent, first published in 1904.

Darwent was a Minister at the Union Church in Shanghai, and a founder member and first chairman of the Shanghai Amateur Photographic Society (S.A.P.S.).  His guidebook includes useful phrases in ‘Pidgin English’, including some for use ‘At a Photographer’s’ which hint at the guide book’s particular flavour, for this book was very much a photographer’s companion. ‘Twelve pieces wanchee wallop’, it begins: ‘I want these twelve plates developing’.

Serendipity brought a carefully annotated album of Darwent’s original photographs to the ‘Historical Photographs of China’ team in 2009, and many of the prints were originals of those reproduced in his guide. In 2011, inspired by the album, photographer Jamie Carstairs set off to revisit Darwent’s Shanghai, following Darwent’s guidebook instructions, and seeking to recapture the spirit of the book.

Like the Brazilian photographer Sebastiao Salgado, the words of the Bible must have been the ‘soundtrack of Darwent’s life’ – it is marvellous that some of his original photographs have survived, for time is not kind to pieces of photographic paper “As the chaff which the wind driveth away” (Psalms 1:4, King James Bible ‘Authorised version’. In his album, Darwent captioned his photograph of a woman winnowing wheat with this biblical quotation – see below).

Darwent Revisited: Shanghai now and then is part of the University of Bristol’s InsideArts festival and was funded by the AHRC and the British Academy.  The exhibition features photographs by Jamie Carstairs, Charles Darwent and other images from the Historical Photographs of China collections.  It is on at The Island, Bridewell Street, Bristol BS1 2LE, until Friday 22nd November, 10am to 6pm.

A visitor at Darwent Revisited: Shanghai now and then. Photograph by Jamie Carstairs.

A visitor at Darwent Revisited: Shanghai now and then. Photograph by Jamie Carstairs.

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A page from an album of photographs given by Revd. Charles Darwent to H. Wilcockson.
‘Where did you get that hat?’ Photographs by Charles Darwent. © 2009 Jane Hayward.

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Art imitates art

Posted on November 5, 2013 by Jamie Carstairs
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Programme for a Customs musical evening, Nanking, 1902, Hedgeland collection, He01-077, © SOAS

One of the images (on the right) in Historical Photographs of China, features the same compositional idea as Angus McBean’s photograph (below) of the theatre designer and producer William Chappell (1907-1994) – juggling heads.  This brought to mind Geoff Dyer’s The Ongoing Moment in which Dyer ducks and dives, dodges and burns, through the history of photography: the book is structured around the observation that the great (mostly American) photographers that he discusses, often photographed the same things (Barber shops, benches, hands, roads and signs, for example).   It is an entertaining conceit, but flawed of course in that he selects the few images that fit this thematic approach – images that are of the same things – and ignores the hundreds and thousands that are not.

The Angus McBean photograph is held in the Theatre Collection, University of Bristol, and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University.  Other fine McBean (and John Vickers) portraits from the John Vickers Collection are due to be exhibited in Faces of Theatre, as part of University of Bristol’s InsideArts festival.

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William Chappell juggling actors. Publicity photograph for ‘The Globe Review’, Lyric Hammersmith, London, 1952. Photograph by Angus McBean. Theatre Collection, University of Bristol. © Harvard Theatre Collection, Harvard University.

 

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Peking Picnics

Posted on October 11, 2013 by Robert Bickers

Feo, Stancioff and Sir Miles Lampson, Ann Phipps Collection, © 2008 Charlotte Thomas

A figure who looms large in Sino-British diplomatic relations in the late 1920s — literally because he was well over six foot tall, and hefty with it — was Sir Miles Wedderburn Lampson, later 1st Baron Killearn. Uncle Miles is how we know him in the office, though, for we have now digitised several albums of photographs taken or owned by his niece, Ann Phipps. Phipps twice visited the Peking Legation for extended periods between 1926-33 when Lampson was British Minister to China (the position was not upgraded to Ambassador until the 1930s).

Some 230 of these photographs have now gone live on the site. This is real Peking Picnic territory, the world sketched quite wonderfully in Ann Bridge’s novel of that name, first published in 1932. Bridge knew her territory, for she was married to Sir Owen O’Malley, who was Acting Counsellor of the British Legation from December 1925 until, embroiled in an insider trading scandal in 1927, he was ‘Permitted to Resign’ from the diplomatic service. (He was subsequently exonerated, and resumed his diplomatic career). There are picnics galore in Ann Phipps’s albums, and days at the Peking races, and holidays in the Western hills. We only lack some of Bridge’s bandits.

Lampson is generally most closely associated with Egypt, where he served as High Commissioner from 1933-46, but his contribution to the improvement in British relations with the Guomindang, and its National Government of China after 1927 was substantial. So, what do our photographs tell us about Sir Miles that has previously been little noted? Well, one thing to us is quite obvious: he liked his hats.

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Who took the photograph, reprised?

Posted on September 11, 2013 by Jamie Carstairs
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Photographing in military earthworks, after fighting, Love collection, BL-n087.

BL-n087 is a photograph of a photographer taking a photograph.  You may be able to identify the photographer at work, if you recognise the photograph he probably took here: a scene including a human corpse and battle debris – the aftermath of an engagement, at a makeshift earthworks fort, taken during or just after the Boxer Uprising.  One can imagine the hot pungent working conditions of this unidentified proto-photojournalist.

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A photographer taking a photograph in military earthworks, Love collection, BL-n088.

It is possible that the photographer operating the large view camera on a tripod (see BL-n088, a detail of BL-n087) is the American James Ricalton, who “was widely acclaimed as one of the most important (certainly most popular) photographers of his time.” (Source: ‘James Ricalton’s Photographs of China during the Boxer Rebellion’ by Christopher J. Lucas)?  Ricalton took many stereoscope photographs in China in 1900, published by Underwood and Underwood.

BL-n087 is a copy of a photograph, made on a glass plate negative – and is one of a set of 59 negatives, being photographs of various items assembled and then copied on a copy stand with a dry plate camera, possibly in about 1902-15, that together illustrate the story of the siege of the Legations in Peking (June-August 1900).  The items copied include photographs from at least two different albums, also unmounted photographs (including some by Reverend Charles Killie), notes and letters sent during the siege by Claude Macdonald, Colonel Shiba, Herbert Squires, Admiral Sir Edward A. Seymour and General Alfred Gaseley,  and a plan of Peking and other printed magazine illustrations (from the Royal Engineers Journal and the Illustrated London News), and also the diners signatures on back of a menu for a ‘Lest We Forget’ dinner.  It can be surmised that this narrative set was created to make prints for exhibition, or to illustrate a publication.  The glass negatives are in a wooden box at the Billie Love Historical Collection picture library.

For a lighter set of pictures of photographers at work, see http://www.flickr.com/photos/20939975@N04/3135648340/in/set-72157603425770983/

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Who took the photographs?

Posted on August 19, 2013 by Robert Bickers

Our collections are generally identified with a single individual, in most cases the woman or man who lived and worked in China, and who provides the current owner’s family link to China. In some cases we can certainly state with great confidence that the images in, for example, the G. Warren Swire or Fu Bingchang collections, were taken by Swire or by Fu. We know that they were adept amateur photographers, and we have often been working with their negatives, rather than prints. But the collections of photographs brought to us are often in fact amalgamated from a great variety of different sources. We are now so used to thinking of our family or personal collections of photographs as being taken by us, that we forget that for most of the history of photography so far this has not been the case.

The albums we receive and copy are often collections of photographs that have been purchased from photography shops and studios (as postcards would now be bought), commissioned from photographers, or otherwise acquired from work, or from friends. In many cases we might find that only a minority of images, if that, have actually been taken by the man or woman whose name we have assigned to the collection. (They might well have been taken by other members of the family). Shop-bought images would be cheaper: no need to purchase a camera, and film, and to pay for processing costs. Photographs bought from a shop are also likely to be technically better, and could show sights and scenes to better effect than might otherwise be caught. We might now assume that a photograph we took ourselves would be a more authentic record of our experience, but this was not necessarily a view held by visitors or residents in the past.

We see this most obviously in one sub-category of photographs that are quite pervasive: images of executions, including the 1904 and 1905 executions by slow-slicing (lingchi) of  Wang Weiqin and Fu Zhuli in Beijing, the execution of the pirates of the ship the Namoa in 1891, and executions carried out in the 1920s and 1930s in Shanghai. These turn up across different collections, and sometimes lead some current owners to believe that their ancestor witnessed the events. This is usually not the case: the photographs have been bought. While this is the most dramatic example of the practice, many other images in people’s collections were also purchased from shops, and advertisements in newspapers and guidebooks highlight the fact that shops and studios had images to sell. We do have less unpalatable examples across our collections, such as these below, of a man posed eating rice from a bowl, and of a pagoda near Fuzhou. This does not detract at all from the quality and unique interest of the collections that we have seen — or that you might have. It is instead a complication that makes them all the more interesting, and which sheds light on the social history of the photograph, and the history of these documents as objects.

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Smiling man with a bowl of rice, Chatterton collection, Ch-s17.

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Smiling man with a bowl of rice , from the book ‘Shanghai’ (published by Max Nössler, c.1907).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Zhe Pagoda, Guangji Monastery (廣濟寺), Wuhu, Banister collection, ba04-82

Zhe Pagoda, Guangji Monastery (廣濟寺), Wuhu, Wilkinson Collection, Wi01-03

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Magical pagodas

Posted on August 5, 2013 by Robert Bickers
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Cracked pagoda: Oliver Hulme collection, OH02-27, © 2012 Charles Poolton.

A guest blog from Dr Tehyun Ma: This rather magical photo, taken by postal official Oliver Hulme around the turn of the century, is one of my favourites.

Looking at the structure, which was probably in the vicinity of Hebei, you can’t help but be struck by a sense of the supernatural: that perhaps it was the presence of these peasants, lined up in an almost ritualistic fashion, that’s holding up this holy and ancient edifice, after it had been mortally wounded by an earthquake. And maybe – just maybe – their devotion could also make it heal … just like Xian’s Little Wild Goose.

The Little Wild Goose Pagoda, built in the eighth century, suffered a similar calamity at some point in its long lifetime: a long crack down its spine which went unattended until the 1960s. Since its completion, Little Wild Goose has not only withstood more than 70 earthquakes over 4.0 magitude, but has also healed itself time and time again. The crack, legends have it, becomes smaller to the point of disappearing until the next big quake, when the cycle restarts. Healing lore of this kind also surround Dali’s Three Pagodas and others pagoda of this style in the region.

Though the veracity of the pagoda’s self-healing powers remains unconfirmed, the ability of some split pagodas to withstand collapse has intrigued scientists. The long-standing theory of a wok-base foundation, which some suggest gave the structure a ‘Budaowen’ (or roly-poly) quality, has recently given way to a new hypothesis about the ‘stepped’ or stair-like foundation. This building technique, drawn from old Chinese tomb construction, lessens the impact of the quakes and may allow the two halves of the structure to collapse gently back onto each other.

This particular pagoda was not so fortunate. Attempts to track down its precise location have thus far drawn a blank, and at some point, it seems likely that it collapsed without being rebuilt. We’d be keen to hear from anyone who might be able to help identify it.

UPDATE November 2013, Mystery solved: In Spring 1913 American Luther Knight (1879-1913) took at least two photographs of the pagoda, which are reproduced (without the mesmerising audience) in Looking back at Chengdu: Through the Lens of an American Photographer in the early Twentieth Century (回眸历史：20世纪初一个美国人镜头中的成都), just published by China Travel and Tourism Press. The site was the Longxing Temple, in Pengxian county (now Pengzhou city, north of Chengdu), Sichuan province (四川省彭县城龙兴寺) and –magically the pagoda, much altered, still stands.

 

 

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On display in Chongqing

Posted on June 25, 2013 by Robert Bickers
Deputy British Consul General Benedict Mann opens the exhibition

Deputy British Consul General Benedict Mann opens the exhibition.

The project sometimes takes legs, and on 14 June at Chongqing Tiandi, British Deputy Consul-General Benedict Mann opened a new exhibition of project photographs, ‘Picturing China 1870-1950: Photographs from British Collections’, “1870—1950：英国收藏的中国影像”.

This collaboration with the communications team in Chongqing, and with the RCUK China team, has been a wonderful opportunity for us to root around and locate more of the photographs we have from the city. (And just days before it opened we were brought a suitcase full of albums and films from the 1920s, half of them relating to this Yangzi river city in Sichuan province).

Project researcher Dr Tehyun Ma was able to take part in the opening events and talk to the local press, who were keen to know more about the collections and the project. The exhibition runs until 30 June, and has been generously supported by RCUK China, the AHRC, and the British Academy.

116155108_91nOur photographs show the fascination of many of the city’s past visitors with the city’s interface with the Yangzi, the steep stone steps up from the water’s edge, and the  buildings, some of them on stilts, that once abutted the river banks. They also show Chongqing from a different perspective during its wartime years as the temporary capital city of the republic, when the National Government took refuge there from the Japanese invasion — a period explored in Rana Mitter’s superb new book, China’s War With Japan, 1937-45: The Struggle for Survival (Allen Lane).

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The Song of the River

Posted on June 12, 2013 by Jamie Carstairs
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Steps in Taiping Men, Chungking, 1920, Swire collection, Sw19-066

Porters would carry heavy loads and full pails up from the river into the city of Chungking, scaling long flights of steps, as in this photograph taken by Warren Swire: Steps in Taiping Men, Chungking, 1920.  See also Sw19-067, below.  One can perceive from these images that this was a grindingly hard way to earn a living – but other witness, in the form of words, can add further empathetic understanding.

Hear, for example, The Song of the River, a short story by Somerset Maugham (1922): “You hear it all along the river … the rowers … the trackers … But the most agonising song is the song of the coolies who bring the great bales from the junk up the steep steps to the town wall.  Up and down they go, endlessly, and endless as their toil rises their rhythmic cry. ‘He, aw – ah, oh’ … The sweat pours down their faces and their song is a groan of pain.  It is a sigh of despair.  It is heart-rending … It is the cry of souls in infinite distress, only just musical, and that last note is the ultimate sob of humanity.  Life is too hard, too cruel … That is the song of the river.”

Chungking images from HPC collections are being exhibited at Chongqing Tiandi, from 14th to 30th June.  The exhibition ‘Picturing China 1870-1950: Photographs from British Collections’ is organised by the  Research Councils UK (RCUK), Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the British Consulate-General in Chongqing, and the University of Bristol.

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Bang bang men at Taiping Men, Chungking, 1920, Swire collection, Sw19-067

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Graduation!

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Robert Bickers

The University of Bristol this week held its first graduation cemeremony in China. Two hundred students attended the ceremony in Beijing, and it is planned that this event will be held every two years. To mark the occasion here is one from the archive, captioned as ‘The Faculty and first graduating class of the ‘Tienstin University of New Learning’, the 天津新学大书院, on 7 June 1918.

Faculty and first graduating class of Tienstin University of New Learning, 1918

Faculty and first graduating class, Tientsin University of New Learning, 7 June 1918. Copyright Bovell collection, sb-s01.

It was not a university, and is better and properly known in English as the Tientsin Anglo-Chinese College, but its buildings were certainly inspired by the Cambridge University background of its principal and founder, seated here centre, Dr Samuel Lavington Hart (赫立德).

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Volunteers

Posted on April 19, 2013 by Robert Bickers

It is 170 years ago this week that the Shanghai Volunteer Corps was first established. The SVC, as it was known, became a fixture of life in the International Settlement in the city from 1870-1942, and I have blogged a little about this on my own site. We have just received some albums with a wealth of SVC photographs, and will get them online in due course. In the meantime I thought it might be worthwhile to draw attention to the lesser-known, but nicely-uniformed, Tientsin British Volunteers. They can be seen drilling below, possibly in the winter of 1900.

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Tientsin Volunteers (British) on parade, Tientsin. From an album in The National Archives. Crown copyright image reproduced by permission of The National Archives, London, England

Such volunteer militia were an important component in the defence schemes guarding foreign concessions in times of war or civil conflict, or anti-imperialist mobilisation. While they were a source of good outdoor exercise for young men, and represent also the wider (in particular) British enthusiasm for volunteering, they were not simply toy soliders. Those guns were real, and they were sometimes used to devasting and bloody effect.

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