8.1.3: Photographic Exchange Between Cultures

Photography’s global spread during the nineteenth century was never a simple story of European invention radiating outward. It was, instead, a dynamic network of adaptation, collaboration, and exchange—a world system of images in which local cultures absorbed, transformed, and re-exported the medium according to their own visual languages. Cameras, chemicals, and prints moved through imperial trade routes, but so did the techniques, aesthetics, and ambitions of those who used them. The result was not uniformity but hybridity: a series of distinct photographic modernities shaped through encounter.

Ports, Studios, and Cross-Cultural Apprenticeships

Seaport cities and colonial capitals became fertile sites for intercultural photographic exchange. In Hong Kong, the Chinese photographer Lai Afong (active 1859–1890s) built one of Asia’s most respected studios, producing images for both Chinese and Western audiences. His View of Praya Central, Hong Kong (c. 1870s) exemplifies how local photographers appropriated Western techniques of composition and perspective to articulate their own modern vision of an increasingly globalized city.¹ While British customers admired Lai’s work for its “accuracy,” Chinese patrons saw it as a statement of national sophistication. Lai’s studio, employing both Chinese and European assistants, became a site of cultural collaboration—where the Western notion of the documentary photograph merged with traditional Chinese sensibilities of balance and order.

In the Ottoman Empire, Pascal Sébah established his studio in Constantinople in 1857, producing portraits and “types” for an international clientele. His Dervish, Constantinople (c. 1870) combined Western ethnographic framing with Ottoman aesthetics of portraiture.² Sébah’s images were exhibited at the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair, where they represented the Ottoman Empire to Europe—an instance where the colonized subject became the photographer, and the West, the consumer of “Oriental” images produced within the East. The same album would later influence European artists and designers engaged with Orientalist motifs.

Across the Indian subcontinent, similar exchanges flourished. Raja Deen Dayal, India’s most celebrated nineteenth-century photographer, mastered Western chemistry and optics under British tutelage yet developed a distinct visual style rooted in Indian court portraiture. His Maharaja of Indore in State Dress (1889) demonstrates a blend of Victorian formality and Mughal visual symbolism.³ The resulting image, simultaneously local and global, transforms photography from an imperial tool into an Indian expression of authority and modernity.

Hybrid Aesthetics: The Fusion of East and West

Nowhere were these aesthetic exchanges more vivid than in Japan. Following the opening of Yokohama’s treaty port in the 1850s, photographers like Felice Beato and Stillfried & Andersen trained Japanese assistants who soon became masters of the craft. One of the most influential, Kusakabe Kimbei, established his own studio in the 1870s. His hand-colored albumen print Tea-House Musume (c. 1880s) merges Western photographic realism with the delicate tonalities of ukiyo-e woodblock printing.⁴ These prints—painstakingly tinted with watercolor pigments—became prized exports, shaping European tastes for Japonisme and influencing artists like Whistler and Van Gogh. Through Kimbei’s images, Japan visually negotiated its entry into modernity on its own terms, absorbing the camera while maintaining traditional aesthetics.

Similarly, in the Middle East and North Africa, studios like Abdullah Frères in Constantinople and Lehnert & Landrock in Cairo produced images that blurred the line between ethnography and art. The Abdullah Frères’ Interior of Aya Sofya, Constantinople (c. 1865) captures sacred architecture with scientific precision and devotional reverence.⁵ Though commissioned by Western travelers, such images also resonated with local audiences who saw them as symbols of cultural pride. These dual readings—scientific and spiritual, foreign and domestic—embodied the layered meanings of cross-cultural photography.

Albums, Exhibitions, and the Circulation of Vision

The nineteenth-century photographic album served as a vessel for cultural exchange, moving across continents through exhibitions, embassies, and private collections. For the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair, the Ottoman firm Sébah & Joaillier compiled an album representing “modern” Ottoman life, blending architectural studies, portraits, and urban scenes.⁶ Meanwhile, Indian albums prepared for the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition in London offered curated views of a diverse empire, often photographed by local professionals. These compilations complicated the notion of photographic authorship: though produced for imperial display, they were assembled through transnational collaboration and local expertise.

In Latin America, French expatriate studios like Courret Hermanos in Lima adapted European portrait conventions to Peruvian subjects. Their Danza de los Morenos (c. 1875) depicts dancers in local costume against theatrical backdrops borrowed from Parisian studio design.⁷ The photograph’s dual character—a European technique narrating an Andean ritual—demonstrates how photography became a dialogue between cultures rather than a monologue of domination.

Indigenous Modernities and the Return Flow of Images

Perhaps most significantly, photography allowed colonized peoples to participate in shaping the visual record of modernity. In Qajar Iran, the Armenian-Iranian photographer Antoin Sevruguin created powerful images such as Bakhtiari Tribesmen (c. 1880s), balancing ethnographic detail with empathetic portrayal.⁸ His works circulated in Tehran bazaars and European salons alike, offering Western audiences a vision of Persia authored from within. In West Africa, photographers like J. A. Green in Sierra Leone and J. B. Lutterodt in the Gold Coast produced portraits of civic leaders and professionals who embodied African modernity.⁹ Their photographs, carried by merchants and missionaries to London and Liverpool, became transnational symbols of dignity and progress—visual arguments against colonial stereotypes of primitiveness.

Through these diverse exchanges, photography evolved into a shared global language—one that could both reinforce and resist imperial hierarchies. It was a medium of commerce and communication, but also of cultural self-definition. The same image that might have been used to classify or exoticize in one context could, in another, become an instrument of pride and belonging. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the circulation of photographs across borders had created an interconnected visual world: a dialogue of light that transcended geography and ideology alike.

Footnotes

¹ Lai Afong, View of Praya Central, Hong Kong, c. 1870s, albumen print, Hong Kong Maritime Museum. See Roberta Wue, “Lai Afong and the Amateur Ideal: Photography and the Formation of Art in Late Qing China,” in Picturing Hong Kong: Photography 1855–1910, ed. Sarah Fraser (New York: Asia Society, 1997), 45–52.
² Pascal Sébah, Dervish, Constantinople, c. 1870, albumen print, Musée du Quai Branly, Paris. See Zeynep Çelik and Leila Kinney, “Ethnography and Exhibition at the 1873 Vienna World’s Fair,” Assemblage 13 (1990): 34–59.
³ Raja Deen Dayal, Maharaja of Indore in State Dress, 1889, albumen print, Alkazi Collection of Photography, New Delhi. See Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica: The Social Life of Indian Photographs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 98–103.
⁴ Kusakabe Kimbei, Tea-House Musume, c. 1880s, hand-colored albumen print, J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. See Luke Gartlan, A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 157–175.
⁵ Abdullah Frères, Interior of Aya Sofya, Constantinople, c. 1865, albumen print, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. See Nissan N. Perez, Focus East: Early Photography in the Near East 1839–1885 (New York: Abrams, 1988), 215–218.
⁶ Sébah & Joaillier, Album of Photographs for the Vienna World’s Fair, 1873, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna. See Mary Roberts, “The Album, the Bazaar, and the Gazetteer: Re-Collecting the Ottoman Empire,” in Intimate Outsiders: The Harem in Ottoman and Orientalist Art and Travel Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 67–103.
⁷ Courret Hermanos, Danza de los Morenos, c. 1875, albumen print, Museo de Arte de Lima. See Natalia Majluf, “Peru in Photographs: The Courret Brothers and the Imaginary of the Nation,” in Citas de la Fotografía (Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima, 2001), 45–57.
⁸ Antoin Sevruguin, Bakhtiari Tribesmen, c. 1880s, albumen print, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. See Layla S. Diba and Maryam Ekhtiar, Royal Persian Paintings: The Qajar Epoch 1785–1925 (Brooklyn Museum of Art, 1998), 199–203.
⁹ J. A. Green, Family Portrait, Sierra Leone, c. 1900, gelatin silver print, Royal Commonwealth Society, Cambridge. See Erin Haney, Photography and Africa (London: Reaktion Books, 2010), 42–48.

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