Photography as Mud: On the Ruins of John Thomson’s Hong Kong

As cameras arrived with European warships in Nineteenth-century China, they established a brand new visible regime that propagated photographs of China within the metropoles whereas concealing the worlds that imperialism had disrupted. It is mostly recognized that pictures from this era are imperfect information of Chinese historical past, however how do their imperfection and overabundance restrict our capacity to think about historical past as such? This lecture examines the work of John Thomson (1837-1921), a Scottish geographer and photographer who first used the digicam to systematically doc China. It turns to the residues of empire in Thomson’s archives to articulate a idea of images across the materiality and metaphor of mud. Contrary to picture idea’s tendency to deal with the medium as relics and fetish objects of the previous,  theorizing images as mud means redefining historical past by means of its imperishability and endurance. I suggest “dusting” as an anti-imperial technique—not an act of full elimination however of mild disturbance of imperial particles—to rearrange how they collect on the floor and to glimpse what lies past their settled layers. 

Image: The roots of an previous banyan tree masking a plaque at King George V Memorial Park, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong, 2024. Photograph by Jiangtao Harry Gu. 

Dr Jiangtao Harry Gu 

Assistant Professor of Media and Society 

Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York State

Jiangtao Harry Gu is an Assistant Professor of Media and Society at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York State. His analysis explores questions of aesthetics and epistemology in late Nineteenth – and early Twentieth-century Chinese and Chinese diasporic visible tradition. His writings have appeared within the Journal of Asian Studies, the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, amongst others. He is writing a ebook that examines how summary shapes and colours—resembling bar charts, passport picture codecs, and public well being surveys—structured the understanding of Chinese immigrants as a racial and demographic group within the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth-century United States. He has obtained fellowships and awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Association for Asian Studies, the East-West Center, Project Pericles, and the Tanaka Foundation.