 Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Is this okay? This you can hear me. Yeah I'm Betty Yao co-curator of the John Thompson exhibition currently over at the Brunei Gallery with Narissa Chakabong here and Thank you so much for coming this evening This is the last of the two lectures although we have a couple of gallery tours still going on And we're closing the exhibition last day is 23rd of June When I embarked on the John Thompson project the exhibition project over 10 years ago My go-to reference as a word my my Bible as it were Was Richard Ovidin's book This was first that your John Thompson book was first published in 1997 It remains the most authoritative book work on John Thompson Today Richard is Bodley's librarian at the University of Oxford It is the top job in one of the top Libraries in the world and he has an incredibly busy schedule He travels, you know constantly So I was really really chuffed when Richard said You always have a soft spot in your heart for John Thompson and he agreed to come today to do this talk and Also with honor to introduce Hillary Thomas and her daughter Caroline because Hillary is a great-granddaughter of John Thompson So she's come especially Let's hand over to Richard. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed Betty For that very generous introduction and thank you all very much indeed for coming along this evening and giving me this opportunity to revisit one of my former research topics this extraordinary man John Thompson and I'd like to Apologize for having a crib sheet because it's been a long time since I Looked in any depth that John Thompson and when Betty asked me to come and give this talk I was slightly nervous because it's been so long since I did the research But it's been a wonderful opportunity to kind of revisit some of the things which I thought about at the time that I was doing the book and an exhibition that toured around the UK and Europe at the time And I'd like to also pay tribute to Betty and Narissa's Wonderful show across the road, which I hope after this talk You'll gravitate just across to the Brunei gallery to see their exhibition and to see Thompson's work in these extraordinary enlargements from Thompson's negatives, which are quite extraordinarily striking But I've got About 50 minutes where I'm going to share some reflections really on John Thompson's work and I'm not quite sure I hope that you can all hear me those of you who can't Mark if you could just raise your hand if I drift off As I as I may well do But as Betty said I Had an extraordinary opportunity when I worked in Edinburgh the town of John Thompson's birth And I think we should also reflect that Today is John Thompson's birthday. So we should all We should all sing him happy birthday at some point and Edinburgh was the town of John Thompson's birth and I as a curator in the National Library of Scotland with a great interest in the history of photography discovered him and Felt that Scotland at least its National Library ought to celebrate one of his at that point relatively unsung Great innovators and great individuals great characters great artists great pioneering photographer and I found it stuck in my own copy of that book the invitation to the exhibition opening back in 1997 and a huge amount of scholarship has happened both before during and after I did my work and I'd like to pay tribute to This just a snapshot of some of the books The ones just dedicated to Thompson There'd be many others very erudite works on the history of photography in China written by some of the people in this audience Terry Terry Bennett I like pay tribute to his extraordinary achievement in bringing together the history of Photography in China in the 19th century in particular So And Thompson is beginning to be recognized in China itself as being a Great photographer and his photographs are have been over the over recent decades become more appreciated and And that's part in tribute to the welcome Institute for the history of medicine and in particular their library and William Shuck back its curator who will first introduce me To the materials they have has done over the years a great service to photography and to John Thompson by Allowing his photographs to travel and to be seen by broader and broader audiences So my reflections are going to take a couple of Approaches and the first is to reflect on Thompson's own Origins, which were in the city of Edinburgh and Edinburgh in the 19th century was an incredible place It was of a place of extraordinary ideas of intellectual energy It was not just a regional capital. It was a capital of a country Which still has obviously very proud traditions of its own its own legal system its own educational Ethos it had a great university. It still does in the city. Now it has four universities and It was a place where John Thompson was born of Relatively humble origins his father was a tobacconist I managed to find the census records and the details of of his early life and his family but Edinburgh was the play was a place where it was possible to improve yourself and there were infrastructures in the city to allow for that self-improvement as there were in many other cities of Victorian of 19th century Britain and He was fortunate to serve an apprenticeship to a scientific instrument maker and in a city like Edinburgh where Science was incredibly important. Edinburgh was The place where Charles Darwin went to study its medical school still retains an extraordinary reputation that it took from its Enlightenment heyday, which continued into the 19th century. So scientific instruments were made. There was a ready audience for those They were very established Practices and Thompson was an apprentice to one of the best of those a man called James Bryson But at the same time doing that he attended an evening evening classes and so he did not He did not go to Edinburgh University But he went to the Edinburgh School of Arts or the Watt Institution, which was part of a movement called the Mechanics Institutes and they allowed him to attend lessons in chemistry and English and other subjects in the evening and he was able to improve himself and get qualifications. He obtained diplomas in those subjects and He obviously recognized that he required an education and One of the interesting things about Edinburgh at the time was that it played crucial part in the history of photography in the early history of photography in particular and David Brewster this individual was at the heart of those movements. He corresponded with everybody who in certainly in Britain who was important in the early history of photography And he was indeed the director of the Mechanics Institute the institution and School of Arts that Thompson attended So there's there's somehow and I think there's more work could be and should be done on these some of these potential links between the scientific instrument trade between the Watt institution which became Herriot Watt University and Individuals like David Brewster and this of course is a portrait of Brewster taken by the great pioneers of photography in Edinburgh David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson so Thompson was born on the 4th 14th of June 1837 and by the early the late 1850s and early 1860s he'd Served his apprenticeship. He gained an education for himself But like many Scots he could not be confined to the country of his birth and there was Scotland was and still is a relatively small country and the opportunities for self-improvement Economic improvement were relatively Small and so like lots of Scots he went abroad and he went actually to follow his brother who his brother William who Was also worked in the scientific instrument trade, but he went to Singapore and Thompson John followed his older brother to Singapore where they Can be seen in the advertisements in the newspapers in particularly in the Straits Times as Chronometer optical and nautical instrument makers the Thompson brothers and But Thompson is also listed separately in 1862 as a photographer Open for business so he must have learned the basics of photography before he went to Singapore And that must have happened in Edinburgh and it's not surprising because there was so much Edinburgh is so central to the early history of photography in these islands and his Connections with people like Brewster may well have played a part, but we don't know and need to know more But one of the interesting things and so this is just another example of Edinburgh in the time Of Thompson's youth. This is another photograph by Hillan Adamson of The Scott Monument on Princess Street The subject of many early photographs some of them by William Henry Fox Talbot himself who made Several pilgrimages to Edinburgh. He had family connections there as well as scientific and intellectual ones So Edinburgh is vital vitally important and there's there's more to be told about this part of Thompson's life Before we go any further into Thompson's life I just thought I'd reflect partly on the archive or indeed on the archives Because there is no single archive of Thompson's life There's no document single place where his documentary record can be told So it has to be accumulated from a whole variety of sources actually now spread across the world But there is this extraordinary Photographic archive in the form of negatives which are just up the road in the library of the Welcome Institute for the history of medicine and There are these extraordinarily evocative crates lined with lead which contain the glass plate negatives that traveled from China and from the east back to the UK with John Thompson and they are Extraordinary just kind of touching them is gave when I first laid hands on them. There was a kind of electric charge I felt this kind of You know like it must have felt like medieval pilgrims touching the knee bone of some Whoever that's what it felt like for me and inside those crates are thousands of negatives glass plate negatives with collodion emulsion and These themselves have an extraordinary evocative nature to them and You can see those in the prints next door in the Brunei gallery. You can see the marks the emulsion has flaked off They've been scratches. They've been deliberately Handled by Thompson in particular ways and those marks I became very excited at one point when you could see Thompson's thumb print in The collodion as he would have dipped it in the bath to coat the plate You know those thumb prints have are still to be seen and Here's the positive of the same Shot of of Hong Kong And you know, there are many famous images of Thompson's work This is perhaps the most famous it appears on the cover of Stephen White's book I like to pay tribute to that because that book Really inspired me to do more work into Thompson the island pagoda which appears as a most extraordinary carbon print in Fuchia and the River Mina book I'll come back to in a moment And it's one of the most powerful images in the history photography in my humble opinion But when you see the negative you can see The interaction with the material culture of photography the negative the negative itself has been treated by Thompson and by the process The the the process printers who made the prints that appear in that book and that sort of You can see the the emulsion has has Suffered not only the passage of time with the I'm struggling to find the word for the the crackling But also the deliberate acts of masking out to originate the the prints for the for the publication And then you also see these moments this extraordinary Print which appears in another of Thompson's books from the 19th century illustrations of China And in that book there's this extraordinary account of Thompson setting up his tripod Taking the picture of this old bridge and you can see the people Viewing him who were really not actually very happy about the thought of being photographed So they started to take bits of the bridge and throw it at him And so he ducked behind the camera and the plate which was in the back cracked with the result Having been hit by one of these bricks from the bridge itself And here it is here's the here's the negative with the crack in it, which of course has been removed by the The colotype printers so you don't see that in the publication, but you can very clearly see it in the negative And then the the archive itself has been really well served by the Wellcome trust Then there are institution with resource as they say But they've spent that resource very well in making Thompson's entire archive available In a very open way. And so that's a wonderful thing for Which I did not have at the time that I was doing my research There was a typescript list and I had to imagine what the prints looked like and go to the kind of tiny copy Tiny copy prints that they had to try and Select images for the project that I that I did so well done. Well done. Welcome. I One of the things I wanted to reflect on and occasionally do in my own life is the benefits of indolence and One of the benefits of indolence was in Singapore in Thompson's early life where He arrived in Singapore at a time of an economic slump in the city So his business did not do well his brother's business did not do well and he records finding himself with time on his hands and one of the things that he did he had access to was a library and Not quite sure which library it is again, there's more work to be done here. I think in Singapore but the 19th century was a world of print and one of the things I want to Leave you with is the importance of print culture on the history of photography and the interplay between the worlds of the book and the worlds of photography and One of those aspects is Thompson Bored in Singapore going into a library and reading a book and that particular book is an English translation of a French Traveller called Henri Mouot who wrote a book called which it's English translation It's called travels in Siam, Cambodia and Laos A journeys that he made Mouot in the 1858 1861 were published in London in translation in 1864 earlier in Paris and that book was Available for Thompson to read in Singapore in 1865 so it didn't take long for that book to get to Singapore Bored Thompson reads it as and sees one imagine it doesn't describe in detail that experience of reading But the count is very evocative of Mouot's travels Into Cambodia to visit the ruins that we now call Angkor Wat and there are these illustrations in the book which You later see kind of reflected back in Thompson's own photography and you can see those across the road and Then you see Thompson's own photographs of his trip to To Cambodia so he reads that book and he's inspired to go to Siam and Cambodia and he goes first to Siam and he He's able to take extraordinary series of photographs and he you can just imagine, you know the board Thompson in Singapore in a in a you know an English a British colony suddenly going Somewhere with great deal more life and interest and new experiences and with his camera able to photograph Scenes like the King's barge and Again, this interplay between print culture and the culture of photography Is that you see that image then sent back to London and reproducing wood engraved form in One of the most popular weeklies the Illustrated London news and So this is how many people experienced photography in the 19th century first because it was cheaper Until the technology caught up It was easier to mass reproduce the photographic image Translated by a skilled wood engraver and these these are two Thompson images which were used And you can see both of them across the road But you also see Thompson Tropes through his own photography his his interest in different strutters of society Here's a Siamese boatman. I don't know whether he was one of the boatman on the on the barge, but he likes to take photographs of different people at different levels in society and Here is King Monkut the the King of Siam Dressed in his It's a French Field Marshal Costume isn't it and that he was given by King Napoleon the third and and as a Symbol perhaps of the King wanting to portray his own Sophistication his own connection with the West But Thompson photographs him in other other guys is as well And he is of course the the the figure that the King in the King and I the musical Is based on Doesn't bear much resemblance to Yule Brinner. I think you agree But an extraordinary an extraordinary character in himself and a great figure in Thompson's own life because not only was he I Think he must have Got on well with Thompson. He certainly sits for him a number of occasions Gives him extraordinary access to the court to the other figures in the royal family who also sit for him and he gives him Importantly a letter to take with him to Cambodia to give him access to the ruins of Angkor Wat So Monkut is an extraordinary figure in The history of his own country and his and and of Asia in general, but he's very important in Thompson's own career And here is another member at this time the Cambodian royal family. This is King Norodom and What he's able to do is? Travel to Angkor and this really makes his career This visit he's the first photographer just by a few days There's a French photographer called Henri Gelle who gets there literally just a few days after Thompson Thompson had got there first and takes an extraordinary series of images in Angkor and He's able I'll tell this story a little a little bit later on he's able to to Make his career makes his reputation based on this visit and The room the kind of romanticism of ruins is something which features prominently in English artistic life British artistic life of the 19th century And it's played out again in a different location But that same romanticism about decayed ruins and kind of lost civilizations But he's also And to go back to my quote at the start A congenial and profitable occupation is that Thompson is a commercial photographer So he's earning his living by photography and in all of the places that he visits He stops and makes prints that are sold at the time So he's having to fund his own travels and his own imagine, you know his his own ambition as a photographer through commercial photography and you see that Often in more humble images can't devise eats. This is one Taken in Vietnam on the on the same trip Which were sold at the time so he's able to kind of almost take a portable studio approach and set up For a limited periods of time just perhaps days or weeks again, I think more work is needed on this aspect of You know the the peripatetic studio as it were But I think one of Thompson's necks Is being at the right place at the right time and luck plays such an important part in everyone's lives But it certainly did in Thompson's but it's also More than luck, I think he knew That Singapore was not a place to be based in its economic slump It wasn't as vibrant and he had somehow learned that Hong Kong was the place to be and Hong Kong It's trajectory begins a little later as a British colonial Entrepot But it takes off and becomes a very vibrant economic center as of course it still is today and much of Thompson's most successful work is based in Hong Kong that's where his His studio is based and where his travels radiate out from and so After the the South Asian trip he goes back to the UK and then he goes out then in 1868 and the China Mail in on the 11th of March if that year announces that mr. Jay Thompson is prepared to take portraits views and other photographs in his rooms on the commercial bank buildings Queens Road and Again, so there's a commercial studio at the heart He's selling prints to be sold He's having sitters come, but he's taking some of the work and again, you'll see this very very beautiful portrait Blown up extremely large across the road, but it's very familiar appears in a number of Thompson's books And it's here in an album in the ability to take national which is compiled by a French traveler to Hong Kong in the 1860s 1870s, so he's selling these these prints which I'm sure many of you will be familiar with these albums which are gathered together from Studios and photographers on trips around the world or around particular regions and here's some more of those And again classic Thompson images Which are radiate out of his out of his studio But he's there at a time where Hong Kong is on the up and one of that one of the reasons That we can see that is a visit of the Duke of Edinburgh in 1869 on board the HMS Gallatier and Hong Kong gets the bunting out in the style that only Hong Kong can do and They have an extraordinary celebration and Thompson makes a book there in Hong Kong which is published by a Hong Kong publisher with his photographs pasted in and There are then several other books which are published of The region which allows Thompson to establish another aspect of his commercial life in Hong Kong Through the medium of the photographically illustrated book So they're the individual prints which are being sold but increasingly it's through the medium of the printed book the publication that his photography becomes disseminated and He makes a series of journeys and this becomes a the great feature of his time spent in China a series of journeys in between 1870 and 1872 this one in 1870 up the north branch of the Pearl River This is actually back in Hong Kong in happy what it what it what is happy Valley and Then There are also Experimentation so here's a still life called the fruits of China which appears in one of his books But I always draw the association with Roger Fenton So Fenton takes, you know, they're a familiar artistic tropes which did Thompson see Fenton and Is inspired to take that? Who knows? I Think one of the other aspects of this period in China is His ability his personal charisma and it comes across. It's quite difficult to Unearth that from his writings which are mostly quite Victorian in their style. They're quite relatively formal lots and lots of detail meticulous detail, but his character Only kind of comes to the surface from time to time And but you see you do see it in the photographs and that's partly the way his own Personality must have enabled the sitters to feel at ease or at least to Pay attention to him to give him this extraordinary access to very senior figures in the The Chinese courts that he was able to photograph and then very intimate scenes in Chinese life You know foot binding is You know, there's a particular again a particular Lens through which we must now interpret some of these photographs But at the time being able to be given the access to take photographs like this was Extraordinary I think and then also being given access to You know private scenes fairly intimate scenes in Chinese households Says something about his own a personal Personality his own charisma as an individual This is Betty was asking me which is my favorite they change But this the Manchu bride is one of the most extraordinary photographs in the surviving over of Thompson, I think and there are series of Street scenes again the different strat as a society Thompson He's concerned to photograph the whole of Chinese society and the whole of societies that he encountered and again very They have a kind of I think this one in particular has a kind of striking modernity about about it in the way that some of the other images have I'm sorry going in the wrong direction have You know typical studio accoutrements to locate the sitter in their own culture, but this one You know could is is somewhat timeless and and placeless and you can see in this one some of the fairly rumored rudimentary studio Arrangements that Thompson would have put up to take to take some of these photographs So I'm going to I'm conscious of the time and I go to speed up at this point. I'm sorry to race through these towards the end of Thompson's Not towards the end of his career, but towards the end of this extraordinary period between 1868 and 1878 where Thompson makes these extraordinary photographic journeys in Asia and then comes back and makes a journey Equally extraordinary within around the streets of London in another very groundbreaking series of photographs which we know is street life in London and They have become as powerful as an inspiration to other photographers in the history of photography as his China China work has or his Asian work has but what I want to come back to and perhaps in the last kind of 20 minutes or Perhaps even less than that is again to reemphasize this connection between print culture and the culture of photography So we often experience photography today in going to shows and seeing the photographs Framed and hung on walls and indeed there were many exhibitions of this kind in the 19th century but I think particular with photographers like John Thompson the way that their work was shared and appreciated and understood was through the cultural print and Thompson understood that and I think that understanding made his reputation his career and his fortune one I think fortune is perhaps overstating it, but it gave him a living and We can see that both in his interaction with the magazines which reproduced original photographs. Thank you to Terry for sharing this image with me We've already seen his interaction with the more popular Press the Illustrated London News and the graphic which didn't reproduce Photographs photographs but photographs as wood engravings and so they provided an income stream for him whilst he was undertaking these travels that the magazine work and Then through periods. He's able to establish serious books which have literally a weight to them They are serious publications. They're large format. They look like photographic albums, but they are publications which sold relatively expensively This is the first of his series books In 1867 after he comes back from that first trip to Southeast Asia from Singapore and he recognizes that he's onto a winner He's been the first one to get there. He's going to come back and he's going to make his reputation. He does that partly by Offering himself as a lecturer to the learned societies of London the London Ethnographic Society and the Royal Geographical Society and you can see that he becomes a fellow Royal Geographical Society So this is not bad for a tobacconist son to come back Having failed to establish a business in Singapore comes back as FRGS And he does that because he knows he's he's got you know an extraordinary body of material and he again, I think this shows something about his charisma is that he's able to interact with a number of Serious scholars one of whom is a great Orientalist and architectural historian called James Ferguson who provided some of the text for this book and Ferguson says in one of his own histories the great greatest amount of information could be obtained from the photography of mr Jay Thompson and from his personal communications from these sources a tolerably connected account is condensed in my history of architecture So, you know Thompson is suddenly able to rub shoulders with serious scholars who have high reputation in London And he gathers some of this reputation this intellectual credit for himself through his own work and it's published in in a in this serious book with you know serious scholarship in it as well as his Photographs and this these get reviewed and establish his reputation and allow him to feel confident that he can make other books And so then he goes back to Hong Kong back to China I think with the idea that he can make books that he can make money out of making books if he can take the right photographs and I'm sorry, you know the The slide show doesn't do justice to the experience of seeing these books in the flash as it were there This is a big panorama a joiner of several Individual photographs that have been pasted together on to the book and extraordinary And again, one of the things that I don't have time to talk about in detail is the way that Thompson is interested in the The technology of reproducing the photographic image in print and He is part of that movement from seeing original photographs pasted in by hand into publications of retired consuming expensive process with the latent Problems with early well in 19th century photography the fading of those prints To using photomechanical means where ink permanence permanent printing processes can be used And you see that most in this extraordinary book called illustrations of China in its people a visual in encyclopedia of China as seen by this great photographer who comes back from the this intense period of of six Journeys in China comes back to London and he upgrades his publisher from Good old Edmondson and Douglas in Edinburgh to Samson Lowe, Marston, Sirling, Rivington one of the great publishers of the 19th of 19th century London And they do justice to this book in this to his work in this great book for volumes large format Printed by the Cheetah press one of the great printers of Victorian London and with these most magnificent plates printed in this cutting-edge technology called colotype and Colotype is an ink process so the prints don't fade, but it allows for a better tonal range and They're printed on coated paper, so they have a kind of sheen to them and They reproduce his work Extremely well, you can just kind of see these are large format books They don't they don't the pages don't lie flat so you can see the little of the the buckling of the page And here's that image of the bridge and you can see the colotype printer has managed to remove the crack in the negative Again, here's you can see this image across the road These books are extraordinary. They're so beautiful and they were they must have been an extraordinary experience in the 19th century to open one of these in a you know a gentleman's club or in one of the subscription libraries or to be able to afford to own one yourself and When I first began it became interested in Thompson you could buy these books For a thousand pounds in the mid in the early 1990s fifteen hundred pounds perhaps And the interest in in photography in China in Thompson since then means that this is a 70,000 pound book today. I want I want as William Blake once said and I'm just going to skip and it the the colotype printers were able to print more than one image on a page with the single In a single printing plate So there were lots of innovations That Thompson was clearly interested in and you you see that in the introductions he talks about the improvements that these processes give the experience of appreciating his photography and his Approach to the places he visited and documented I'm going to speed up And again here you can see the kind of sheen that and the colotype process has on these this kind of coated paper They're extremely difficult to make Actually But then Thompson again and again unfortunately the Samson low archive was destroyed in the Blitz So we don't have the publishers archive and there's so much that I want to know about the relationship between Thompson and his publisher so Pretty quickly after the success of illustrations of China and it gets fantastic reviews and he quickly has to reprint Even for a very expensive book. He produces this cheaper version So it's more than a cheaper version. It actually has the bulk of our the text written by Thompson But it reproduces his photographs again in wooden gray form so that they can produce Reproduce a lot of images and then it could be affordable to a broader audience. So his work his thoughts about The places he's visited reach a much bigger audience and Samson low have publishing relationships in other parts of the world So you see a French translation an Italian translation and you see Harpers in America printing the book as well. So it's reaching a pretty huge audience and Again, they treat his his images They give it a little bit of pizzazz by these little glassy tissues in front of the wooden grave They're not necessary. There's no not going to be any offsetting But it's just to give a little theatricality a little bit of deluxe flavor to them And you can see actually the skill of the wood engraver, you know the fine line to reproduce the total range of the photographs So here's the color type and here's the same image in the wooden grave version in the straights of my If I had time there's another as a whole lecture in this most extraordinary book a very small illustrated Photographically illustrated book a small run But there are only 45 copies produced from one of the the journeys that Thompson made up them in River to Fuchow his most magnificent book of all and It's really it's all it's almost printed by subscription I think he knew who the customers were we don't have the records unfortunately of exactly who they were But from the surviving copies are only about five or six surviving copies We know that they were largely merchants particularly American merchants Fuchow was a trading capital. So it's one of the centers of the opium trade But they are they are truly magnificent. I just like to finish on street life in London. So this again Has in the photographs here Arguably or they've certainly been described as the earliest street photography the earliest Social documentary photography. It was it was a partnership between Thompson and a socialist Journalist called Adam Smith and they worked together to really get under the skin of people who were suffering from the economic climate in London at the time and who they wanted to tell their story to explain the hardships that they were suffering and There's a bit of a dichotomy here because the subjects that they're treating are Very humble people many of them suffering from economic and social deprivation But they're again using a very deluxe form of reproduction of the images So this is called the woodbury type and the woodbury types are designed to reproduce high works of art So you see them reproducing great oil paintings of the period Renaissance art is reproduced. These are very it's a very expensive process And the the books normally illustrated by the woodbury type are books which the elite are buying to Educate themselves about art primarily not exclusively but primarily to see subjects of very humble citizens Treated in this high art reproduction way is quite an interesting Notion I have again, it's the same publisher We don't know exactly why they chose this method. It was relatively new and cutting edge at the time But it does it is this kind of idea of faithful reproduction What you're seeing here is the best the closest that you can get to the scenes that I'm photographing through this combination of technologies and There's you know extraordinary detail and again it shows something of his personal charisma Getting close to the people that he's he's photographing And It has a great impact partly because of the text because of Smith's text It's reviewed in all sorts of publications, you know, NPs are talking about it It certainly has an extraordinary impact at the time and other photographers have also been inspired by Thompson's work street photographers and One of the other interesting and he is perhaps the most famous of these images reproducing every history of photography pretty much And that's how it appear actually appears on the page a street life in London Very very powerful image But one of the interesting things about them is that these these were issued as parts So a bit like Dickens's novels which you you bought every week or every fortnight and then bound up at the end This is how these works were disseminated. So relatively affordable Given the cost of the the quality of the reproduction But you you you gathered them together and it became a kind of a sequential story You can imagine Dickens, you know with his kind of technique of ending each of those weekly parts with a Cliffhanger, it's not quite the same, but you know, you want to know more as you're as you're looking through them And then of course the book actually the series don't sell that well And so the publisher is left with overstock and like all good publishers they put a new title page on it and a new binding and Reissue the unsolved sheets This time is called street incidents a few few years later to recoup some of their investment And then finally again with the technology as the technology of reproducing the photographic image changes and improves and with the the market of literate people with Disposable income to buy books grows through the 19th century by the end of the century you find this book reproduced using the half-tone process Still, you know relatively high quality, but cheap cheaper than the other processes that we've seen allows a much bigger print run and allows Easier serialization of the book across different regions of the world here again. You can see Harper's playing a role and One of the things that interests me is who were reading who was reading Thompson? Who was actually looking at Thompson? What what difference? Did access to these books make to people at the time and subsequently and I think that's another field for study that? is is is there In the books on the libraries on the shelves of libraries Public institutional and private around the world and I think there's something to be recovered about Thompson's impact both both then and now And here he is happy birthday to you John Thank you for giving me such a wonderful opportunity to explore new new worlds that you had traveled before And thank you all very much indeed for listening I think there are there is some time if anybody has any questions. I'd be very happy to answer any Yes So the question was how did the welcome acquire the archive well he decided to sell The collection towards the end of his life He didn't actually end up doing the deal. It was it was done by By the family after after he had actually died But so Henry welcome Left an extraordinary, you know was a great collector himself But left extraordinary resources to the library and they had kind of omnivorous collecting Ambitions and they had great resources through his Farm pharmaceutical the income from his pharmaceutical Empire and so he was Interested in his own field medicine, but he interpreted that very very broadly so anything that kind of vaguely Fitted they just had the money to hoover up Yeah, yeah So I'm the question here was was John Thompson the David Roberts of the later 19th century or the David Roberts of photography I think there's You know, there is a certain resonance with that David Roberts of course in the Middle East in particular Another Scott who traveled who traveled there and used the medium of the book as the Principal but not the sole way of disseminating his own Artistic vision. I think the difference. I don't I can't remember Roberts's work so well, but I think Thompson may have written more actually there may be more Of Thompson's own words to go along with the images and David Roberts Yes Yes Yes. Yes. Yeah, very much so. Yeah Yes so the question was about Thompson's lecturing and magic lantern work And actually Deborah Island from Deborah's here from the Royal Geographical Society is doing a lot of work on this at the moment Which I think will be very interesting to hear more about Thompson certainly did do a lot of lecturing and that was you know It was very common to have Lecturers and he did do magic lantern shows And they're just sort of part of that Projecting a reputation establishing a reputation And he certainly did it after he came back from Cambodia And I think that was a one of the steps that enabled him to gain access to the Royal Geographical Society The London Ethnological Society and to start mixing with a different social circle than he had been Used to in his own upbringing in his own early life And that gives him a certain credibility To actually then go and get a publisher. I don't know whether you know There was a recommendation from one of these people to Edmondson and Douglas. Maybe it's James Ferguson That gives them the confidence to publish a book by this kind of you know relatively unknown person But he lectures all through his life And one of the things that I didn't say at the end there is that You know after all these great journeys and the last one is to Cyprus he established himself as a London Society photographer in Bond Street and gets the Royal Warrant Photographs Queen Victoria members of the Royal Family and Many other you know people very much in the upper echelons of society. So I think You know that that sort of social and economic trajectory of him personally I think the lecturing plays and does play an important part In that but my own view is that the books are what make what really make the reputation and also give him the income Oh, I'm sorry two two questions. Yes you first By the That's right. Yes Two questions How long To I'm going to ask Betty to talk about Betty and Terry to talk about that in a moment You know the exposure times vary on the lighting conditions. So You know, they they it's all that. Yeah, there's no artificial lights all natural light and you know photographers You know, it's tripod photography. It's not handheld photography Um and In Thompson's own lifetime the the process is improve So that you're able to take faster images, but they vary a lot depending on the particular conditions that you're You're photographing in How much natural light there is available to you? Just from the exhibition the side of floor you still see the neck holders, right? Yes. Yes Yeah, so it's improved. Yes. Do you want to say something about the grave restoration? Okay. Yeah, great Yes The sensitivity of the the the colloquium on the glass. Yes They're affected by the the the actual exposure times are much shorter than that from a few seconds to a few minutes I'm sorry. Yeah Deborah I'm going to here's the the Isabella expertise in the room Okay, thank you Miriam Yes So The the question is how my own Uh encounter with the photography both when I did the book and now seeing the so When I did the book, um, I did make new prints using, um with uh Using 19th century techniques. So we made we were allowed to make copy negatives From the glass plate negatives in the welcome and we made new albumen prints, whoops Which were sun printed gold toned Using as much as we could recover from Thompson's own techniques and these were the prints that were Exhibited as well as vintage Thompson prints from Collections around the world And so the exhibition across the road is our modern enlargements very very large prints Which are are made from digital scans in the welcome And I think the thing that most strikes you about that strikes me about that is that You see just how much data the collodion process captures So that it's you know, we think today of digital imaging as being, you know, extraordinary high resolution But collo the collodion process actually captured an immense amount of detail and it can bear being blown up to enormous scale without losing Resolution without losing definition and so there's a lot of Information you can gather by seeing them in in such a large scale But they're very much it's a very different experience to the one that you would have experienced Seeing the print, you know, the prints were all You know copy prints so their contact prints made from the negatives and they're the ones which Were bought by the travelers in Hong Kong in the 1860s and 70s and stuck into those albums So it's a very different experience But you get something completely different from it as you do from the the the welcomes website and looking at the digital images through Um on on your screen Perhaps the last question Yeah, um, well, there's no instant photography So he's not printing the images on the spot. There's no polaroid aspect to this So he would have had to have to do that He would have to be able to go back and find the people again Once he's gone back to somewhere where he can make the prints Yeah She has really posed Yeah, yeah Yeah, who know I don't I don't remember any Thompson writing about doing that It would be it would be wonderful to find them if they survive Um, I think at this point I'm going to hand over to to betty Well Richard thank comprehensive talk we've had and and also I think the time you spent preparing you're putting them just together filled in a lot that's Not in the exhibition and and so we know much much more and Certainly myself Arisa and I'm sure everyone here I feel this is the highlight of our three months exhibition here in london. So thank thank you again And comes his birthday to because you picked that date One day um, anyway, I just want to take this opportunity to also thank the Exhibition supporters in king power and also the bufini child foundation who's who's helped us to put the show together and the um restoring the grave this is Really, I think a sort of cold cold email we got from um friends of terry bet Terry actually was the person who found the grave in the stratum cemetery in tooting It was quite difficult to find because the stone has killed over Teres taking some photos And really, you know with this london exhibition opening and all the people seeing the show It was just the effort that we could at least we could do Is to re talk we restore the grave and so Very quickly. So we set up this just giving link and it's three parts the sum of the link the amount is to restore the stone We're actually quite some way towards that already If we had more support We can perhaps do a rededication ceremony or maybe a little Memorial book, but it's step by step. But certainly I think just restoring the the stone physically would be I want the full thing to do and also Well, the exhibition is is closing and says say on the 23rd and and it'd be a lovely legacy to sort of connect The world of people who are sort of interested in Thompson so we can keep you posters to say or what's happened next because the street life We're going to have a small case in the museum of london um Exhibition this autumn and then the exhibition will travel on to Bournemouth to Leicester and other places So any what what we'd like to do is to invite you all to come with us back to the gallery Certainly nervous and I and and I think for a little time tariff be there. We can answer questions And to also thank again for hillary and caroline to be here this evening Did you have a question hillary? Is too well to Richard Oh So hillary's question was about the status of thompson's father and My certainly in the census Records he's described as a tobacconist and I think I found him in one of the street directories and one of the commercial directories as a tobacconist so I think it does but um, I think um, you know thompson his two of his siblings were Sent to a school But thompson himself is not Registered at the same school. I went through all the archives and couldn't find him in any of the school registers He appears as an apprentice to a scientific instrument maker and then he's not He's not of a class that sends that sent their children to the university. So he's educated in in a night school So I think that says something about The social status of his family Which are aspirant Very much aspirant. Um So I just wanted to also introduce you to Andrew term. Who's our PhD student who's Studying doing her research on thompson. So hopefully all You know, everybody's work will come together. That's what we'd like to do is maybe try and pull the resources Absolutely. Yeah, bring it together. Good. Well, we should go and see the book