Thomson, John (1837-1921), Scottish photographer and writer, active in Asia, Cyprus, and England. Born in Edinburgh, Thomson was apprenticed to an optician and instrument maker before moving to Singapore to set up a photographic studio in 1862. From this base he travelled and photographed widely in the South-East Asian archipelago. In 1865 he visited Thailand (where he photographed King Mongkut) and in early 1866 spent four months in Cambodia, where he took the first photographs of the great temple complex at Angkor. On his return to Europe the same year, sixteen of these views were published as original prints in his The Antiquities of Cambodia: A Series of Photographs Taken on the Spot (1867). Thomson went east again in late 1867, and in early 1868 transferred his studio from Singapore to the more flourishing photographic scene of Hong Kong. By now more professionally secure, he was commissioned in 1869 to photograph the royal visit, which led to the publication of seven of his photographs in William Beach's Visit of His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh … to Hong Kong in 1869 (1869). This period also saw the creation of Thomson's most celebrated body of work, the result of several extended and often hazardous forays, 1870-2, into mainland China and Taiwan. The first published result, the fourteen albumen prints of his Views on the North River, appeared in Hong Kong in 1870.
Disposing of his Hong Kong studio, Thomson returned to Britain in 1872 and devoted himself to the publication of his China photographs. The first of these, Foochow and the River Min, containing 80 carbon prints, appeared in a limited edition in 1873 and is one of the most beautiful of 19th-century photographically illustrated books. His next work, aimed at a broader market, was the four folio volumes of Illustrations of China and its People, which appeared in 1873-4. Illustrated with 200 collotypes and with a descriptive text by the photographer, it was hailed as the most thorough visual record to date of the human and physical diversity of the Chinese Empire. In 1877-8, in collaboration with Adolphe Smith, Thomson published Street Life in London, issued in twelve monthly parts and containing a total of 36 Woodburytypes. These images of working-class Londoners, though posed, are masterpieces of early social documentary photography. A journey to the newly acquired colony of Cyprus resulted in his last major photographic publication, the two-volume Through Cyprus with the Camera in the Autumn of 1878 (1879), illustrated with 59 Woodburytypes and autotypes. A busy schedule of writing, translating, lecturing, and the maintenance of a fashionable London studio evidently precluded further major travels, although from 1886 he maintained his links with the world of exploration, as instructor in photography to the Royal Geographical Society. In addition to consummate photographic skill and determination, Thomson was an able writer who, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, successfully realized the marriage of text and photograph in the production of illustrated travel books. A major collection of his negatives is held by the Wellcome Institute, London.
— John Falconer
Bibliography
- Thomson, J., The Straits of Malacca, Indo-China and China: Or, Ten Years' Travel, Adventures, and Residence Abroad (1875).
- Ovenden, R., John Thomson (1837-1921) Photographer (1997)
