Photography as Dust: On the Ruins of John Thomson’s Hong Kong

As cameras arrived with European warships in 19th-century China, they established a new visual regime that propagated images of China in the metropoles while concealing the worlds that imperialism had disrupted. It is generally known that photographs from this period are imperfect records of Chinese history, but how do their imperfection and overabundance limit our ability to imagine history as such? This lecture examines the work of John Thomson (1837-1921), a Scottish geographer and photographer who first used the camera to systematically document China. It turns to the residues of empire in Thomson’s archives to articulate a theory of photography around the materiality and metaphor of dust. Contrary to photo theory’s tendency to treat the medium as relics and fetish objects of the past,  theorizing photography as dust means redefining history through its imperishability and endurance. I propose “dusting” as an anti-imperial method—not an act of complete removal but of gentle disturbance of imperial debris—to rearrange how they gather on the surface and to glimpse what lies beyond their settled layers. 

Image: The roots of an old banyan tree covering a plaque at King George V Memorial Park, Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong, 2024. Photograph by Jiangtao Harry Gu. 

Dr Jiangtao Harry Gu 

Assistant Professor of Media and Society 

Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York State

Jiangtao Harry Gu is an Assistant Professor of Media and Society at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in New York State. His research explores questions of aesthetics and epistemology in late 19th - and early 20th-century Chinese and Chinese diasporic visual culture. His writings have appeared in the Journal of Asian Studies, the Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, among others. He is writing a book that examines how abstract shapes and colors—such as bar charts, passport photo formats, and public health surveys—structured the understanding of Chinese immigrants as a racial and demographic group in the late 19th and early 20th-century United States. He has received fellowships and awards from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Association for Asian Studies, the East-West Center, Project Pericles, and the Tanaka Foundation.