Beato’s ‘Beauty’ Photos a Telling Document of China’s War

For Hughes Electronics and Boeing, for News Corp. and Time Warner, indeed for just about any other sizable business with an eye on massive growth today, China is the marketplace waiting to happen. All that product in search of all those people.

And so it was 140 years ago.

“Of Battle and Beauty: Felice Beato’s Photographs of China” is a fascinating exhibition whose 94 images chronicle the exasperated military efforts of Britain and France to open the Chinese market with brute force, hot on the heels of Europe’s explosive Industrial Revolution. Although the players weren’t the same, the technology was dissimilar and the social dynamic was substantially different than now, the economically determined impulse is instantly recognizable.

At the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, curator Karen Sinsheimer and her colleague, guest curator David Harris, have scrutinized an album of photographs in the prodigious collection of Michael and Jane Wilson. With some additions, it unfolds a remarkable story.

The young medium of photography had earlier recorded aspects of war in Mexico, Burma and the Crimea, but Beato’s 1860 pictures of China are the first photographs to chronicle the progress of an actual military campaign. They show the massing of warships in Hong Kong harbor, the trading port at Canton (now Guangzhou), the carnage at forts protecting the mouth of the river leading to Peking (Beijing), the majestic grandeur of the Forbidden City, the elaborate imperial summer palace before it was burned--and after. Journalistic and cinematic, the collective photographs possess an epic sweep.

What they don’t tell is the complex social and political context in which the battle was fought. The culmination of the Second Opium War, the fight involved a monumental clash of cultures.

Britain’s empire was profiting hugely from the illegal drug trade, which financed half the cost of the Indian raj and the maintenance of more than a few manor houses back home. The huge monetary reward from an illicit source only exacerbated the foreign superpower’s anxious desire to expand legitimate commerce into China.

The Chinese, meanwhile, regarded anyone in the merchant class as occupying the bottom of the Confucian social barrel. Morally suspect, merchants were a necessary evil essential to closely regulate.

The British mind tended to favor an unfettered free trade, whether of textiles or opium. In the wake of the nation’s rapid, tumultuous industrialization, it seemed the natural order of things.

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To China’s emperor and mandarin court, on the other hand, the mere fact that the British were allowed to trade at all in the highly restricted milieu of Canton was a noble offering of imperial largess. Worse, the lowly foreign merchants weren’t even grateful.

Push, needless to say, soon came to shove. Ten thousand British troops met up with 6,000 French in Hong Kong, and they headed for Beijing.

Not much is known about Felice Beato, Italian-born and perhaps trained in the still newfangled process of camera work by his brother-in-law, James Robertson. What his photographs of China do show is what an episode in the traumatic cultural collision between East and West looked like, from a point of view held by a commercial photographer working in the service of the invading foreign power.

Two features of his work stand out. Both are self-evident in a stark, two-part panorama, photographed from the northeast corner of the wall of the inner city of Beijing, looking south toward the Dongzhi Gate. (Beato was scrupulous in inscribing his pictures with documentary details.)

First, the panorama focuses on an architectural subject, as almost all the pictures in the exhibition do. Forts, encampments, government buildings, pagodas, temples, palaces--Beato’s photographs mostly comprise an inventory of buildings, or else gardens and ship-filled harbors. A few portraits do turn up, including a dour image of Prince Kung, brother of the emperor, but they’re exceptions proving the real-estate rule.

Second, when people do appear in Beato’s architectural landscape pictures, they are not going about the ordinary business of daily life. No one is shown doing marketing or farming or working at a trade. Beato made no genre scenes.

Look closely at the two-part Beijing panorama and you’ll make out a lone figure standing just below the wall, to the right of the seam between the two pictures. In 1860, the cumbersome glass-plate photographic process Beato employed required a lengthy exposure time (that’s why the skies in all his images look like flat expanses of steely gray). A long exposure suggests that the solitary figure out in the field was not a passerby, but was instead posed there by the artist.

Why would Beato do that? The obvious answer is to enhance the dramatic scale of the monumental architecture.

The panoramic angle emphasizes distance, showing a wall of remarkable length that looms into an imposing building at the right. The little figure in the field is dwarfed by the immense Chinese structure beyond.

There are several ways to interpret this carefully considered figure-ground relationship, which is common in Beato’s work. The power of the state looms over the anonymous and lowly individual. As a photograph made by the invading winner in a war, the magnitude of the victory is enhanced by emphasizing the imposing strength of the vanquished. Or, from the point of view of a foreign visitor who makes his living selling his photographs, China is a place of eye-popping wonders. (A concurrent exhibition at the museum, “Precious Cargo: Treasures of the China Trade,” underscores the 19th century European vogue for Chinese goods and artifacts.)

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Choose whichever interpretation you like. One constant remains: People are merely props in Beato’s photographs.

In the show, individual men and women rarely appear amid the grand architectural settings. It’s as if you’re witnessing the aftermath of a neutron bomb. On those occasions when figures do turn up, it’s for a dehumanized purpose.

Not surprisingly, the photographs that picture the largest number of people are those meant to show after-battle carnage--photographs that record dead-body count on the road to victory. Lives actually lived are less important to these images than great events enacted on a world stage.

Is Felice Beato a major artist? No. A formulaic quality marks his pictures.

Nor are these photographs, which exude a remote and chilly beauty, great works of art. That was never their aim.

They are, however, remarkable and telling documents. Think about them next time you see a news story that portrays current efforts in the West to open the phenomenal marketplace to the East. These impersonal pictures of earth-shattering events might give you pause.

* “Of Battle and Beauty: Felice Beato’s Photographs of China,” Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., (805) 963-4364, through May 14. Closed Mondays.