Research on Asian and other non-European and North American photographies – informed by anthropology, art history, post-colonial studies, and other critical theory – has been gradually increasing since the 1990s, when pioneering works such as Christopher Pinney's Camera Indica (1997) and Deborah Poole's Vision, Race, and Modernity: A Visual Economy of the Andean Image World (1997) were published. Photographies East: the Camera and Its Histories in East and Southeast Asia, edited by anthropologist Rosalind Morris, is a welcome addition to this growing literature on the critical history of photography in Asia. The volume focuses particularly on East and Southeast Asian photographies, as the title indicates, and does much to expand our knowledge of non-Western photographic practice. There are three essays that examine photographs from (what is now) Indonesia, one on material from Thailand, two on Japanese images, and three on photographs from China and Taiwan.
Morris chose not to organize the book's chapters by these regions or even chronologically, instead allowing each of the nine essays to introduce particular questions and analytical perspectives, which can be seen to link one chapter to the next. This is a fine approach, which offers the potential for broad comparisons to be made. However, the reader, who, despite the editor's suggestion, is unlikely to read the essays in the published order, might benefit from an explicit organizing of chapters into thematic sections in order to more fully grasp editorial intention. Nevertheless, a careful reading does indeed bring to light extremely interesting and provocative ideas from individual essays that, for the most part, work very well together in this highly useful volume.
Morris states in her illuminating introductory essay that the authors in the volume aim not to provide case studies as illustrations of photography as a universal phenomenon, or posit Asian photographies as “absolutely particular” and therefore “untranslatable experience.” Rather, the essays seek in part to offer new analyses of photography “by extending the analysis of photography's ambivalent temporality – its haunting and haunted status, its split and receding horizon – to the question of foreignness” (Morris, p. 13). To the extent the book has a unifying theme, it is perhaps this intriguing issue of photography and foreignness, although there are many other rich threads running through its chapters.
This relationship between foreignness and photography offers a tantalizing possibility for reading the volume, because it was this very foreignness, Morris suggests, that structured the relationships between Europe and Asia during the decades when photography was introduced, and “one that marks and figures the experience of a new, technologically mediated historical consciousness and a new experience of history as the name of a mutually othering relation between the bearers of technology and their others” (Morris, p. 8). Although as Morris acknowledges, the essays in the volume develop this theme only implicitly, perhaps the essays collectively can bring us to a place where such ideas can be more fully developed.
Morris's suggestion offers an exciting and potentially highly productive way to think about Asia's photographically-mediated history with Western foreigners. For example, if one considers the camera itself as an origin of fissure between Asian and Westerner, as Morris recounts of pioneering nineteenth-century Scottish photographer John Thompson's writing, photography is a break in different orientations of time (Morris, p. 9). This “history” can also be subverted, as James Hevia writes about in his chapter, “The Photography Complex: Exposing Boxer-Era China (1900–1901), Making Civilization.” He demonstrates that colonial photographs have the potential to contain within them aspects of resistance – often missed – as in the case of an image of Qing policemen, who, although posed somewhat as if anthropological specimens, simultaneously manage to mock the European photographer and soldiers with their smirks and stances, using the very bodies that Europeans sought to control as instruments of resistance (Hevia, p. 114).
The editor emphasizes what she calls the “empiricism” of the contributors, who “attend to photographs” (Morris, p. 14). By this Morris does not mean scientism or positivism, but rather a careful observation of the photographs in question, without “delving in to the fantasy of universalism”. Indeed, one very much appreciates the authors' careful observation of their material, as evidenced for example in Marilyn Ivy's “Dark Enlightenment: Naito Masatoshi's Flash.” Ivy not only works with the wider historical and political issues surrounding the photographs she examines, but understands how to link technique to these same issues, pointing out that in one particular Naito image, for example, “We know we are seeing the blanched aftereffects of flash, a flash that has been trained to efface what it would normally seek to illuminate” (Ivy, p. 229). This flash serves, Ivy writes, as an allegory for modernity's aporia.
Anthropologists – or perhaps more precisely, ethnographers – would seem ideally suited to this task of close observation, since their work depends so acutely on careful observation of human behavior. Most of the book's contributors are, in fact, anthropologists, but since the volume is somewhat interdisciplinary, including scholars from several disciplines, it seems particularly odd that there are no essays by art historians. Art historians, after all, rely on careful observation (although they might call it “close looking”) to do their work as well. Perhaps a more diverse approach would have nudged the theoretical advances of the book even further toward a clear articulation of the relationship between foreignness and photography as history.
Oddly, three of the essays do not include any images at all, however, and it is therefore impossible for the reader to see (in a literal sense) the author's empiricism at work. James T. Siegel's “The Curse of the Photograph: Atjeh 1901” and Patricia Spyer's “In and Out of the Picture: Photography, Ritual, and Modernity in Aru, Indonesia” deal intriguingly with questions of absence. (Siegel discusses the disavowal of photography by holy warriors in Atjeh against the Dutch, and Spyer the problems of photography in Aru, especially in relation to “tradition.”) As such, there is certainly an argument to be made against including photographs with their texts. After all, how to display that which has not been made? But Roland Barthes, for one, in his Camera Lucida famously omits a picture of his dead mother, using instead other images that work with, or perhaps even as arguments in his moving essay. Nickola Pazderic's “Mysterious Photographs” likewise includes no examples of the Taiwanese wedding portraits he discusses so intriguingly in his essay. Some readers will find the lack of images in these chapters distracting.
The final essay in the volume, Thomas LaMarre's “Cine-Photography as Racial Technology: Tanizaki Jun'ichiro's Close-up on the New/Oriental Woman's Face,” a provocative chapter that is not really about photography (or if it is, it is about the residue of photography in cinema more than photography itself), relies on still photographs made from the films (now lost) under discussion for its analysis. It is a fascinating analysis of the racialization of technology and the fetishistic structure of Tanizaki's films. However, one would have liked to see other essays complementing LaMarre's understanding of cinematic camera work as an extension of still photography, as a way of bridging the discussion of photography and film more consciously; as it stands, the chapter feels rather orphaned, especially coming as it does at the very end of the volume.
Although the quality of reproductions in the book is disappointing, the images themselves are almost uniformly well selected, critically examined, and used productively to explore exciting new directions in the study of Asian photography. Despite the almost inevitable problems of coherence that Photographies East shares with most edited volumes, this is without question an important collection that greatly expands our knowledge about the history of photography and photographic practice in Asia. This book will surely inspire valuable new projects in the years to come.
