by Gilles Massot
Fig. 1. Jules Itier, Pagode, Singapour (gate of the Tian Hock Keng temple). 6 July 1844. Courtesy of Françoise Gimon.
My research on Jules Itier was initiated in 2011 within the context of a photography history course I was developing for the School of Art Design and Media, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. The assignment given to me in 2007 was to develop a regional angle as much as possible, a rather challenging task considering how scarce academic resources were on the topic at that time. Western photo history literature was plenty but Asian photo history publications in English were rare, and mostly concerned with Japanese photography. In fact, books which have since then become references such as Christopher Pinney’s book on The coming of photography to India or Terry Bennett’s first volume of his Chinese photography history were respectively published in 2008 and 2009. The curriculum of my course was thus growing year by year, thanks to publications concerned with this new field of research. However, despite this shortage of resources, Itier had been part of my course right from the start with his daguerreotype of the signatories of the Treaty of Whampoa featured in Mary Warner Marien’s Photography, a cultural history. The plate commemorates the signing of the first treaty between China and France on 26 October 1844. It was available for reproduction from the Musée Français de La Photographie in Bièvre and thus given a prominent place in this course book for its historical significance. Two years later, Bennett was using one of Itier’s views of Macao as the cover of his book in which he was identifying Itier’s daguerreotypes of Macao and Canton as the first existing photographs of China.
Uncanny coincidences between Itier’s life and my own made me personally interested in the character. The fact that he had travelled around Asia with a daguerreotype camera in 1844-45 made him particularly relevant to the development of my course. I could buy a facsimile edition of his travel journal and quickly realized how groundbreaking his journey had been. Gilbert Gimon had first written about Itier in a 1980 article that made him known for some of the earliest extant photographs of Asia and Egypt. These included three published views of Singapore and two of Manila, but somehow public attention focused on the Chinese part of his trip. Yet his journal also clearly stated the use of the camera in Singapore and an extensive visit of Manila prior to his stays in Macao and Canton. Based on Bennett’s contribution to the Chinese photography timeline, I concluded that the earliest extant photographs of Asia were not that of China but of Singapore as well as the Philippines. But where could we place the actual tipping point of the coming of photography to Asia? Which image allowed us to see this part of the world the furthest back in time? See not just a graphic representation of exotica as had been mostly the case until then but see the actual light that felt from outer space on a specific day and place?
Fig. 2. Gilles Massot, Time Frame, 1977. Photography, ink and gouache on paper. Image courtesy of the Artist.
This question was triggered by my interest in the theory of photography, more specifically its phenomenology. My work, both as an artist and an academic, is based on a piece I did in 1977, prior to entering a photographic school after spending a year doing intricate pen and ink drawings. The piece, titled Time Frame, raised the question: photography-painting/time-space, what happened when photography manifested a new form of memory, a technological memory that made the world look at itself existing as if in a mirror? I explored the question through art works at first and when I started teaching in 2001 it spontaneously came at the forefront of my approach to make students “think” about photography and not just “do” photography. This is when history of photography became particularly interesting to me since it was concerned with the process by which this radical transformation of human society had taken place. Photography had instigated the relation to time and space that now defines human society forty years before electricity changed anything to everyday life. It had played an unassuming but decisive role in the development of quantum mechanics, which in turn led to electronics and today social media as argued in my paper White Space Conflict Theory. Niepce’s Point of view from a window at Le Gras (1826/27) can be identified at the tipping point of this transformation which then progressively spread around the world. Within the context of my photography history class, the coming of this revolution to Asia became a topic that called for further research.
The spreading of photography around the world was remarkably fast. As Geoffrey Batchen expressed it in the title of his influential book, it was indeed as if the world was Burning with (the) Desire to photograph. In my first lectures of 2007, the coming of photography to Asia could already be traced has having taken place within a matter of month after the announcement of the daguerreotype by Arago in Paris on the 19 August 1839. The earliest known sale of the equipment in Asia was advertised by Thacker and Company in January 1840 in Calcutta. The sale of that equipment in Calcutta in turn seems to have fuelled speculations about the possible purchase of a daguerreotype camera there by Sinibaldo de Mas to justify the claim that he had brought photography to the Philippines as early as 1841. By 1842, Harry Parker, a young British trainee Chinese interpreter, described a daguerreotype session by Major Malcolm and Dr. Woosnam on the Yangzi scenery downstream from Zhenjiang in China. The first use of the daguerreotype in Singapore took place in 1841 or 42 as related by Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir, the Malay teacher of Raffles, in his memoirs Hikayat Abdullah, where he describes the working of a daguerreotype demonstrated by an American doctor on board a military ship. By December 1843, Gaston Dutronquoy was advertising his services as a daguerreotypist in the Singapore Free Press. But all these are only mentions of occurrences. No actual images resulting from the use of these cameras have survived to give a physical trace of the “decisive moment”: the turning point marking the stepping of Asia into pictorial modernity, with the chronological sharpness expected from photography’s indexing capability.
There are though a few early surviving images of India mentioned by Piney that should be taken in consideration. They are calotypes, possibly from Uttar Pradesh, found in the journal of probably a lady and dated between 1843 and 1845. Exact date, place and author however remain unclear. In that respect, the image made by Itier on the 6 July 1844 of the Tian Hock Keng temple in Singapore takes on the sharp historical dimension we can rightly expect for such an event. Is such precision in the information concerning this “decisive moment” that important? In no way should history be written as a competition between proponents, whether nations or individuals, bent on being the “first” at something. One might argue that from a historical point of view this event is part of a network of similar occurrences which taken together make that moment from a wider perspective. Yet, I like to think that the matter is vastly different if one stops looking at photography as a pictorial medium, however revolutionary it might have been, to rather consider the meaning of its apparition from a phenomenology point of view. I believe that a true comprehension of this meaning has been marred by the fact that photography is perceived primarily as producing images, just as painting and drawing had done for millennium before. But photography wasn’t just a form of visual manual transcription like they were. It was a new form of memory, a technological memory produced by the very energy making the world visible to human eye. Painting and drawing are said to produce the “recording” of a moment in time. The paradigm shift that took place with photography is that it was first making the duplicate of a quantum of electromagnetic energy, which in turn became a recording. It was the apparition of what I came to identify as the duplicording energy, a form of mnemonic energy by which the world is now looking at itself existing in real time-real space. It is from this point of view that identifying the so-called “first photograph” of a part of the world isn’t just a matter of anecdotic precision. Rather, as mentioned earlier, it is about knowing where we can physically “see” the furthest back in the time-space continuum.
Fig. 3. Gilles Massot, COS•MO or the Constant Self-recording Mode, 2004. Lecture slide. Image courtesy of the Artist.
This question, and many others concerning what was known about Itier’s life and journeys turned into a five year research that resulted in the publication of the article Jules Itier and the Lagrené Mission in 2015. Since then, more contributions have come to enrich the field of Asian photography history. In 2023, an article by Neomie Espinosa delt with the coming of photography to the Philippines by way of a focus on some mysterious views of Manila, unidentified daguerreotypes discovered in the Hispanic Mission, New York, in 2007. What to do of Itier’s daguerreotypes of Singapore and Manila in that context? In which chronological sequences should they be considered? And did Sinibaldo de Mas brought photography to the Philippines in 1841as often claimed? Three years before the date of 1844 we can be certain of with Itier? Where can we place the tipping point of that paradigm shift for the Philippines? All these are questions I will explore in part 2 of this article to be published in edition 3 of Insights.
June 2024
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