Juan Mencarini and Amateur Photography in Fin-de-siècle China

Xavier  Ortells-Nicolau

doi:http://doi.org/

Abstract

Juan Mencarini Pierotti (1860 – 1939) was a Spanish employee of the Imperial Maritime Customs Service of China from 1881 to 1912 and later a businessman in the import-export sector with base in Shanghai. Parallel to his professional career, Mencarini pioneered in the history of postage stamps in East Asia, contributed to learned societies with articles and lectures, and was reputed among the foreign community of the treaty ports as an accomplished amateur pictorialist photographer. Based on previously unexamined repositories, contemporary press records, and the cataloguing and analysis of over two hundred photographs, this paper analyzes Mencarini’s preserved corpus of photographs as well as his participation in the creation of the first associations of amateur photographers in Shanghai and Fuzhou. Mencarini’s photographs captured human types, examples of craftsmanship and agriculture, and architectural landmarks of the area of Fuzhou, and reveal a generic Western imperialist gaze that articulates visual and textual discourses to support knowledge production and commercial opportunities, leaving room for the exploration of the aesthetics of pictorialism.

Keywords

amateur photography, China’s treaty-ports, Customs Service, early photography, Fuzhou, Juan Mencarini

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Kritika Kultura
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Katholieke Universiteit te Leuven (Belgium)

Joel David
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Faruk
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Leela Gandhi
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Inderpal Grewal
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Peter Horn
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University of Cape Town (South Africa)
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University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)

Anette Horn
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University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa)

David Lloyd
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University of California, Riverside (US)

Bienvenido Lumbera
National Artist for Literature
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University of the Philippines

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Professor of Humanities
Yale NUS College (Singapore)

Vicente L. Rafael
Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor of History
University of Washington (US)

Vaidehi Ramanathan
Department of Linguistics
University of California, Davis (US)

Temario Rivera
Professorial Lecturer
Department of Political Science
University of the Philippines

E. San Juan, Jr.
Philippines Studies Center (US)

Neferti X.M. Tadiar
Professor of Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies
Barnard College (US)
Director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race
Columbia University (US)

Antony Tatlow
Honorary Professor of Drama
Trinity College Dublin (Ireland)

Juan Mencarini and Amateur Photography in Fin-de-siècle China

Xavier Ortells-Nicolau: Universitat de Barcelona

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