Felice Beato
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Felice Beato (born 1833 or
1834, died c.1907), sometimes known as Felix Beato, was a Corfiote
photographer. He was one of the first photographers to take pictures in
East Asia and one of the first war photographers. He is noted for his
genre works, portraits, and views and panoramas of the architecture and
landscapes of Asia and the Mediterranean region. Beato's travels to many
lands gave him the opportunity to create powerful and lasting images of
countries, people and events that were unfamiliar and remote to most
people in Europe and North America. To this day his work provides the key
images of such events as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Second Opium
War. His photographs represent the first substantial oeuvre of what came
to be called photojournalism. He had a significant impact on other
photographers, and Beato's influence in Japan, where he worked with and
taught numerous other photographers and artists, was particularly deep and
lasting.
The origins and identity of Felice Beato have been problematic issues, but
the confusion over his birth date and birthplace seems now to have been
substantially cleared up. Based on an application for a travel permit that
he made in 1858, Beato was born in 1833 or 1834 on the island of Corfu. At
the time of his birth, Corfu was part of the British protectorate of the
Ionian Islands, and so Beato would have qualified as a British subject.
Corfu had previously been a Venetian possession, and this fact goes some
way to explaining the many references to Beato as "Italian" and "Venetian"
member of the Corfiot Italians. The Beato family is recorded as having
moved to Corfu in the 17th century and was one of the noble Venetian
families that ruled the island during the Republic of Venice.
Because of the existence of a number of photographs signed "Felice Antonio
Beato" and "Felice A. Beato", it was long assumed that there was one
photographer who somehow managed to photograph at the same time in places
as distant as Egypt and Japan. But in 1983 it was shown by Chantal Edel
that "Felice Antonio Beato" represented two brothers, Felice Beato and
Antonio Beato, who sometimes worked together, sharing a signature. The
confusion arising from the signatures continues to cause problems in
identifying which of the two photographers was the creator of a given
image.
Little is certain about Felice Beato's early development as a
photographer, though it is said that he bought his first and only lens in
Paris in 1851. He probably met British photographer James Robertson in
Malta in 1850 and accompanied him to Constantinople in 1851. Robertson had
been an engraver at the Imperial Ottoman Mint since 1843 and had probably
taken up photography in the 1840s. In 1853 the two began photographing
together and they formed a partnership called "Robertson & Beato" either
in that year or in 1854 when Robertson opened a photographic studio in
Pera, Constantinople. Robertson and Beato were joined by Beato's brother
Antonio on photographic expeditions to Malta in 1854 or 1856 and to Greece
and Jerusalem in 1857. A number of the firm's photographs produced in the
1850s are signed "Robertson, Beato and Co." and it is believed that the
"and Co." refers to Antonio.
In late 1854 or early 1855 James Robertson married the Beato brothers'
sister, Leonilda Maria Matilda Beato. They had three daughters, Catherine
Grace (b. 1856), Edith Marcon Vergence (b. 1859) and Helen Beatruc (b.
1861).
In 1855 Felice Beato and Robertson travelled to Balaklava, Crimea where
they took over reportage of the Crimean War following Roger Fenton's
departure. They photographed the fall of Sebastopol in September 1855,
producing about 60 images.
In February 1858 Felice Beato arrived in Calcutta and began travelling
throughout Northern India to document the aftermath of the Indian
Rebellion of 1857. During this time he produced possibly the first-ever
photographic images of corpses. It is believed that for at least one of
his photographs taken at the palace of Secundra Bagh in Lucknow he had the
skeletal remains of Indian rebels disinterred or rearranged to heighten
the photograph's dramatic impact (see events at Taku Forts). He was also
in the cities of Delhi, Cawnpore, Meerut, Benares, Amritsar, Agra, Simla
and Lahore. Beato was joined in July 1858 by his brother Antonio, who
later left India, probably for health reasons, in December 1859. Antonio
ended up in Egypt in 1860, setting up a photographic studio in Thebes in
1862.
In 1860 Felice Beato left the partnership
of "Robertson & Beato", though Robertson retained use of the name until
1867. Beato was sent from India to photograph the Anglo-French military
expedition to China in the Second Opium War. He arrived in Hong Kong in
March and immediately began photographing the city and its surroundings as
far as Canton. Beato's photographs are some of the earliest taken in
China.
While in Hong Kong, Beato met Charles Wirgman, an artist and correspondent
for the Illustrated London News. The two accompanied the Anglo-French
forces travelling north to Talien Bay, then to Pehtang and the Taku Forts
at the mouth of the Peiho, and on to Peking and the suburban Summer
Palace, Qingyi Yuan. Wirgman's (and others') illustrations for the
Illustrated London News are often derived from Beato's photographs of the
places on this route.
Beato's photographs of the Second Opium War are the first to document a
military campaign as it unfolded, doing so through a sequence of dated and
related images. His photographs of the Taku Forts represent this approach
on a reduced scale, forming a narrative recreation of a battle. The
sequence of images shows the approach to the forts, the effects of
bombardments on the exterior walls and fortifications and finally the
devastation within the forts, including the bodies of dead Chinese
soldiers. Interestingly, the photographs were not taken in this order as
the photographs of dead Chinese had to be taken first before the bodies
were removed; only then was Beato free to take the other views of the
exterior and interior of the forts. In albums of the time these
photographs are placed in such a way as to recreate the sequence of the
battle.
Beato's images of the Chinese dead — he never photographed British or
French dead — and his manner of producing them particularly reveal the
ideological aspects of his photojournalism. Dr. David F. Rennie, a member
of the expedition, noted in his campaign memoir, “I walked round the
ramparts on the West side. They were thickly strewn with dead — in the
North-West angle thirteen were lying in one group around a gun. Signor
Beato was there in great excitement, characterising the group as
‘beautiful’ and begging that it might not be interfered with until
perpetuated by his photographic apparatus, which was done a few minutes
afterwards…”. The resultant photographs are a powerful representation of
military triumph and British imperialist power, not least for the
purchasers of his images: British soldiers, colonial administrators,
merchants and tourists. Back in Britain Beato's images were used to
justify the Opium (and other colonial) Wars and they shaped public
awareness of the cultures that existed in the East.
Just outside Peking, Beato took photographs at the Summer Palace, Qingyi
Yuan (Garden of Clear Ripples), a private estate of the Chinese emperor
comprising palace pavilions, temples, a large artificial lake and gardens.
Some of these photographs, taken between 6 and 18 October 1860, are
haunting, unique images of buildings that were plundered and looted by the
Anglo-French forces beginning on the 6 October, and then, on the 18 and 19
October, set to the torch by the British First Division on the orders of
Lord Elgin as a reprisal against the emperor for the torture and deaths of
twenty members of an Allied diplomatic party. Among the last photographs
that Beato took in China at this time were portraits of Lord Elgin,
arrived in Peking to sign the Convention of Peking, and Prince Kung, who
signed on behalf of the Xianfeng Emperor.
Beato had returned to England by November 1861, and during that winter he
sold four hundred of his photographs of India and China to Henry Hering, a
London commercial portrait photographer. Hering had them duplicated and
then resold them. When they first went on sale single views were offered
at 7 shillings, while the complete India series was priced at £54 8s and
the complete China series at £37 8s. Knowing that by 1867 the average per
capita income in England and Wales had climbed to £32 per year puts the
price of Beato's photographs into perspective.
By 1863 Beato had moved to Yokohama,
Japan, joining Charles Wirgman who had been there since 1861. The two
formed and maintained a partnership called “Beato & Wirgman, Artists and
Photographers” during the years 1864–1867. Wirgman again produced
illustrations derived from Beato's photographs while Beato photographed
some of Wirgman's sketches and other works. Beato's Japanese photographs
include portraits, genre works, landscapes, cityscapes and a series of
photographs documenting the scenery and sites along the Tōkaidō, the
latter series recalling the ukiyo-e of Hiroshige and Hokusai. This was a
significant time to be photographing in Japan since foreign access to (and
within) the country was greatly restricted by the Shogunate. Beato's
images are remarkable not only for their quality, but for their rarity as
photographic views of Edo period Japan.
Beato was very active while in Japan. In September 1864 he was an official
photographer on the military expedition to Shimonoseki. The following year
he produced a number of dated views of Nagasaki and its surroundings. From
1866 he was often (gently) caricatured in Japan Punch, which was founded
and edited by Wirgman. In an October 1866 fire that destroyed much of
Yokohama, Beato lost his studio and negatives, and he spent the next two
years working vigorously to produce replacement material. The result was
two volumes of photographs, ‘Native Types’, containing 100 portraits and
genre works, and ‘Views of Japan’, containing 98 landscapes and
cityscapes. Many of the photographs were hand-coloured, a technique that
in Beato's studio successfully applied the refined skills of Japanese
watercolourists and woodblock printmakers to European photography. From
1869 to 1877 Beato, no longer partnered with Wirgman, ran his own studio
in Yokohama called “F. Beato & Co., Photographers” with an assistant named
H. Woolett and four Japanese photographers and four Japanese artists.
Kusakabe Kimbei was probably one of Beato's artist-assistants before
becoming a photographer in his own right. Beato photographed with Ueno
Hikoma and others, and possibly taught photography to Raimund von
Stillfried.
In 1871 Beato served as official photographer with the United States naval
expedition of Admiral Rodgers to Korea. The views Beato took on this
expedition are the earliest confirmed photographs of the country and its
inhabitants.
While in Japan, Beato did not confine his activities to photography, but
also engaged in a number of business ventures. He owned land and several
studios, was a property consultant, had a financial interest in the Grand
Hotel of Yokohama and was a dealer in imported carpets and women's bags,
among other things. He also appeared in court on several occasions,
variously as plaintiff, defendant and witness. On 6 August 1873 Beato was
appointed Consul General for Greece in Japan, a fact that possibly
supports the case for his origins being in Corfu.
In 1877, Beato sold most of his stock to the firm, Stillfried & Andersen,
who then moved into his studio. In turn, Stillfried & Andersen sold the
stock to Adolfo Farsari in 1885. Following the sale to Stillfried &
Andersen, Beato apparently retired for some years from photography,
concentrating on his parallel career as a financial speculator and trader.
On 29 November 1884 Beato left Japan, ultimately landing in Port Said,
Egypt. It was reported in a Japanese newspaper that he had lost all his
money on the Yokohama silver exchange.
From 1884 to 1885 Beato was the official
photographer of the expeditionary forces led by Baron (later Viscount) G.J.
Wolseley to Khartoum, Sudan in relief of General Charles Gordon. None of
the photographs Beato took in Sudan are known to have survived.
Briefly back in England, in 1886 Beato lectured the London and Provincial
Photographic Society on photographic techniques. But by 1888 he was
photographing in Asia again, this time in Burma, where from 1896 he
operated a photographic studio (called ‘The Photographic Studio’) as well
as a furniture and curio business in Mandalay, with a branch office in
Rangoon. Examples of his mail order catalogue — affixed with Beato's own
photographs of the merchandise on offer — are in the possession of at
least two photographic collections. Knowledge of his last years is as
sketchy as that of his early years; Beato may or may not have been working
after 1899, but in January 1907 his company, F. Beato Ltd., went into
liquidation and it is presumed that he died shortly thereafter.
Photographs of the 19th century
often now shows the limitations of the technology used, yet Felice Beato
managed to successfully work within and even transcend those limitations.
He predominantly produced albumen silver prints from wet collodion
glass-plate negatives. Beyond aesthetic considerations, the long exposure
times needed by this process must have been a further stimulus to Beato to
frame and position the subjects of his photographs carefully. Apart from
his portrait-making, he often posed local people in such a way as to set
off the architectural or topographical subjects of his images, but
otherwise people (and other moving objects) are sometimes rendered a blur
or disappear altogether during the long exposures. Such blurs are a common
feature of 19th century photographs.
Like other 19th century commercial photographers, Beato often made copy
prints of his original photographs. The original would have been pinned to
a stationary surface and then photographed, producing a second negative
from which to make more prints. The pins used to hold the original in
place are sometimes visible in copy prints. In spite of the limitations of
this method, including the loss of detail and degradation of other picture
elements, it was an effective and economical way to duplicate images.
Beato pioneered and refined the techniques of hand-colouring photographs
and making panoramas. He may have started hand-colouring photographs at
the suggestion of Wirgman or he may have seen the hand-coloured
photographs made by partners Charles Parker and William Parke Andrew.
Whatever the inspiration, Beato's coloured landscapes are delicate and
naturalistic and his coloured portraits, though more strongly coloured
than the landscapes, are also excellent. As well as providing views in
colour, Beato worked to represent very large subjects in a way that gave a
sense of their vastness. Throughout his career, Beato's work is marked by
spectacular panoramas, which he produced by carefully making several
contiguous exposures of a scene and then joining the resulting prints
together, thereby re-creating the expansive view. The complete version of
his panorama of Pehtang comprises nine photographs joined together almost
seamlessly for a total length of more than 2.5 metres.
While the signatures he shared with his brother are one source of
confusion in attributing images to Felice Beato, there are additional
difficulties in this task. When Stillfried & Andersen bought up Beato's
stock they subsequently followed the common practice of 19th century
commercial photographers of reselling the photographs under their own
name. They (and others) also altered Beato's images by adding numbers,
names and other inscriptions associated with their firm in the negative,
on the print or on the mount. For many of Beato's images that were not
hand-coloured, Stillfried & Andersen produced hand-coloured versions. All
of these factors have caused Beato's photographs to be frequently
misattributed to Stillfried & Andersen. Fortunately, Beato captioned many
of his photographs by writing in graphite or ink on the back of the print.
When such photographs are mounted, the captions can still often be seen
through the front of the image and read with the use of a mirror. Besides
helping in the identification of the subject of the image and sometimes in
supplying a date for the exposure, these captions provide one method of
identifying Felice Beato as the creator of many images.
