The French archaeologist Édouard Chavannes (1865-1918) constituted the first photographic inventory of archaeology in China, which he published in his Mission archéologique dans la Chine septentrionale in 1909.
As a trained archaeologist, Chavannes employed a blunt gaze that was consistent with a methodical approach focused strictly on the subject represented rather than giving expression of one’s self. Such an emphasis on the documentary precision was particularly visible within the visual aspects of the photographs: frontality, sharpness, clarity, the use of a local person near a monument to give a sense of scale amongst other pictorial methods.
These pictures above were part of a vast corpus of material occasioned by a succession of French archaeological expeditions in China that burgeoned from the 1890s onwards. These began with Chavannes and his research trips in 1893 and 1907. Following this, successive expeditions were conducted up until the 1920s, such as the voyages of Victor Segalen and Augusto Gilbert de Voisins (1909-10), Henri Maspero (1914), Victor Segalen – Augusto Gilbert de Voisins – Jean Lartigue (1914), Victor Segalen (1917), and Jean Lartigue (1921-23). These expeditions explored primarily central and eastern parts of China and each brought back extensive photographic archives, as well as an abundance of antiquities. These specialists belonged to a generation of scholars that was immersed in centuries of Sinological studies as nineteenth century France experienced an intensifying of interest in Sinology.
Images: © Paris, Musée Guimet, © Direction des Musées de France, 2005
