John Thomson: Forerunner of Death

During four years of expeditions in the wake of the second Opium War the scottish photographer John Thomson was one of the first one who took photographic portrays of Chinese individuals from street beggars to princes and senior government officials. In the introduction to his 1873 photoalbum “China and Its People” Thomson gives silver-tongued account of his entrepreneurship as a “forerunner of death”: “As the ‘Fan Qui’ or ‘Foreign Devil’ who assumed human shape,... I... frequently enjoyed the reputation of being a dangerous geomancer, and my camera was held to be a dark mysterious instrument, which, combined with my naturally, or supernaturally, intensified eyesight gave me power to see through rocks and mountains, to pierce the very souls of the natives, and to produce marvelous pictures by some black art, which at the same time berefit the individual depicted of so much of the principle of life as to render his death a certainty within a very short period of years.” Thomson did not hide at all his cynical amusement about primitive ignorance, but he “blithely ignores the familiar tradition of Chinese official scroll portraiture” (Marina Warner).