Lai Afong

Lai Afong was a Chinese photographer who established Afong Studio, considered to be the most successful photographic studio in the late Qing dynasty. He is widely acknowledged as the most significant Chinese photographer of the nineteenth century.

Life and work
Lai Afong was born in Gaoming, Guangdong and arrived in Hong Kong in the 1850s as a refugee of the Taiping Rebellion. It is not known how he learned the wet-plate collodion process, but, it is said that by as early as 1859 had learned the art of photography. At some point between 1865 and 1867, Lai Afong worked at the Hong Kong studio of Portuguese photographer José Joaquim Alves de Silveira; by 1870, the earliest known announcement of the Afong Studio was printed as an advertisement in the Hong Kong Daily Press. Lai Afong's subject matters ranged from portraits and social life pictures to cityscapes and landscapes. Little is known about his life, although many of his images survive today as testament to his extraordinary talent. After Lai Afong's death, the business was taken over by his son in the 1890s.

Lai Afong traveled through the provinces of Fujian, Guangdong, Hebei, Songjiang (today Shanghai), and Hong Kong, creating photographs. His collection of views included photographs of masterpieces of Chinese architecture such as sites within the Summer Palace and the Fragrant Hills Pagoda in Beijing, the Temple of the Six Banyan Trees in Guangzhou, and numerous others, as well as magnificent panoramas of such locations as Victoria harbor and Gulangyu island. As Lai Afong's reputation quickly grew, both Chinese and foreign clientele flocked to his studio for portrait sessions, including some of China's most important people such as Qing dynasty official Li Hongzhang. According to the verso of many of his Carte de visite works, he was photographer to Governor of Hong Kong Sir Arthur Kennedy KCB and Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich of Russia.

Lai Afong was the most successful of his generation of Chinese photographers in appealing to both a Chinese and foreign cosmopolitan clientele. Lai Afong advertised in English-language newspapers - offering a "Larger, and more complete collection of Views than any other Establishment in the Empire of China" - and the artist captioned much of his work in both Chinese and English. Afong Studio photographs were sold to both Chinese patrons - both those local to Hong Kong and those visiting from other parts of China - and foreign visitors to China.

The Afong Studio became a destination and training ground for foreign photographers in the region, and photographers such as Emil Rusfeldt and D.K. Griffith began their careers under the tutelage of Lai Afong. In 1875, Griffith claimed that his mentor had "entered the arena of European art, associating his name with photography in its best form, and justly stands first of his countrymen in Hong Kong." John Thomson, a Scottish photographer working in China at the time, praised Lai Afong's images as "extremely well-executed, [and] remarkable for their artistic choice of position," in his book The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China, and China.

Lai Afong seems to have been the only Chinese photographer of his generation to be embraced by his foreign contemporaries. However, his work is distinct among them, as many of Lai Afong's photographic compositions show the technical and aesthetic influence of traditional Chinese painting, known as guóhuà. Additionally, Lai Afong favored the panorama more than any other photographer working in China in the 19th century, earning his work a place among the giants of 19th century landscape photography such as Carleton Watkins in America and Gustave Le Gray in France. No other nineteenth-century Chinese photographer offered as extensive and diverse a view of late Qing dynasty China.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024