At 18-year-old, Louis-Philippe Messelier (1901-1986?) left his hometown in France to go to China and engaged in the business of wool during the 1930s. Based in the French concession of Shanghai, he juggled his business career with taking photographs as a journalist for the French Journal of Shanghai. Louis-Philippe Messelier was everywhere: down the streets to see the ritual processions, the acrobats and the snake charmers; at the races with the local aristocracy; inside film studios; on the top of roof taking aerial views; in the countryside admiring the beauty of antic remains or fishermen’s cottages. He captured everything in a sincere and singular manner. Far from falling into the easy ‘exotic’ pitfalls, Louis-Philippe Messelier distinguished himself by the dynamism of his angles of view, his atypical subjects, and his mastering of contrasts. This rare collection is composed of nearly 250 photographs extracted from original stereoscopic glass plates, which depict the rapid changes occurring in Modern China.
