Colonialism: what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Say it again.
And in the magazine Third Text, edited by the very distinguished Richard Dyer, it is said many times, in many ways, and I just got around to reading Number 182, May 2023, my eye caught by an article titled ‘Martin Parr and the Legacy of British Colonial Photography’ by Cammie Tipton-Amini.
This is Martin Parr in his own home in Bristol, shortly after I’d bought him a pizza. I was interviewing him for a magazine.
Cammie Tipton-Amini has a lot to say about a small publication of Parr’s titled 7 Colonial Still Lifes, published in 2005, consisting of seven images taken in Sri Lanka, six forming a slim volume, the seventh a signed print.
Tipton-Amini is especially taken by this image, which is simply titled (or captioned) ‘Nawara Eliya.’
Nawara Eliya is the name of a city known locally as ‘Little England,’ and that’s a helping of porridge served in a bowl with the crest of The Hill Club, and as Tipton-Amini points one, the bowl is showing signs of wear, though The Hill Club itself seems to be thriving. This is from their website:
Tipton-Amini doesn’t seem to be any keener on porridge than she is on colonialism. She says porridge is ‘outstanding in its ordinariness’ and ‘the most boring food imaginable.’ but worse than that it is ‘a sign pointing directly to a sinister British colonization.’
‘Like porridge’ she says, ‘many of Parr’s photographs are shrewdly thick in layers of ambiguity and nuanced meaning.’
Am I being a complete literalist if I find myself asking how porridge can be the most boring food imaginable, while also being ‘shrewdly thick in layers of ambiguity and nuanced meaning.’ Or are we just talking negative capability here.?
She then goes to attempt a postcolonial reading of Martin Parr’s 1986 collection The Last Resort, to argue that the images in that book ‘bear a striking resemblance to the nineteenth-century British colonial photographer John Thomson’s collection Street Life in London (1877). Thomson is the first street photographer to reverse the colonial lens back on to his own people with similar results. ‘
Thomson was a Scotsman, and it does seem that Street Life in London made his reputation, though only after he’d been one of the first photographers to travel to the Far East. Illustrations of China and Its People, ran to four volumes, and yes many of the pictures in those volumes do seem to present the Chinese people as the exotic other. There's a lot of text in the books too.
Tipton-Amini focuses on the image below which she names as ‘The Fruits of China,’
though anywhere else I’ve found it, it’s just called ‘Fruit,’ a collotype, dating from 1868.
Tipton-Amini writes, ‘In a nearly sexual enactment, China lays herself bare for the English viewer to take.’ I can’t even, but I’m glad it’s only ‘nearly.’
And then she says, ‘The glass of wine front and centre is the only non-Asian, Occidental element. Wine and the glass itself are of European descent and make for a jarring juxtaposition. The central wine glass and wine impose a Eurocentric presence.’
Is this true? Now I’m no expert on Chinese food and culture – I leave that to Fuchsia Dunlop, but there is this thing called the internet, and a bit of online research suggests that wine was around in China from at least 7000BC, so I’m not sure how entirely European that is.
As for the glass, well, that’s far more interesting. My further patch research suggests that 19th century Chinese wine goblets looked like this:
or this:
So yes, that does look like a European wine glass in the Thomson photohgraph, but how did it get there? Did John Thomson carry it around with him waiting for the moment when he could use it in a still life? Or did he just pick it up on his travels because maybe European-style wine glasses were already around in China at the time? Although of course that would still make them bad or wrong.
I don’t expect an answer.
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