A significant body of photography in China, is gathered at the GRI, dominated by two large collections, both related to the activities of Joan and Clark Worswick. The Worswick collection of photographs of China and Southeast Asia comprises around 1500 photographs, with about sixty known photographers represented. These include many early Western and domestic photographers active in China such as Ye Chung, Yueh Chi, Thomas Child, John Hing-Qua, Afong Lai, Pun Lun, Milton Miller, William Saunders, See Tay, and John Thomson. The Oscar Birkett Payne collection contains almost 1,000 views of Shanghai and the surrounding areas taken by Payne when he was working as an interior decorator in Shanghai during the 1920s. It includes images of key religious sites destroyed during the Chinese Revolution of the late 1920s.
While the earliest Chinese photographs in the collections date from the 1850s, the majority of the holdings reflect the opening of the interior of China to the West after the conclusion of the Second Opium War in 1860. These include a copy of the Scottish photographer John Thomson’s famous four volume study, Illustrations of China and Its People, photographed during his extensive travels in China between 1868 and 1872. Other albums were compiled by British, French, and American naval officers and foreign service employees, and are composed of images by both Chinese and Western studios and amateur photographers. These include two albums compiled by Herbert Brady documenting the British community in and around Peking (Beijing), while a carte-de-visite album of Japanese and Chinese portraits, many taken by Felice Beato, was assembled by the American naval officer, Lieutenant Commander William Starr Dana. Two albums belonging to the French silk inspector G. Prat show views around Shanghai and his base in Canton (Guangzhou). An important twelve-part panorama photographed by Kung Tai of the Shanghai Bund, documents the city’s international and financial center running along the Huangpu River.
Image: Tung Hing (Chinese, active 1860s-1880s). Tou-mao-feng in Fuzhou. Ca. 1860-1870. Albumen print. Getty Research Institute, 2003.R.22.39.
For an extended discussion of the China holdings, readers can consult the catalog and exhibition curated by F. Terpak and J. Cody, Brush & Shutter: Early Photography in China, published in 2011. The J. Paul Getty Museum also holds a large collection of photographs by Felice Beato, including over 200 of his China photographs.
Although there are important nineteenth-century holdings from Japan, by Kimbei Kusakabe and others, the GRI’s Japanese collections tend to concentrate in the twentieth century. They comprise hard-to-find photographic journals as well as photographs and photo books by photographers including Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikō Hosoe, Keizo Kitajima, Daido Moriyama, and Daisuke Yokota. Items of particular significance include two portfolios associated with Hosoe’s and Moriyama’s teaching at the Workshop Photography School, founded in Tokyo in 1974, and a set of Araki’s Xerox photo albums from 1970.