[ATO PHOTOGRAPHIC ASSOCIATION.]
Album of 100 gelatin silver prints of Tianjin (Tientsin), the Hai (Peiho) estuary, and Beijing (Peking) and surroundings.
[Circa 1930s.]
Album, with 100 gelatin silver copy-prints, each c. 110 x 155 mm, on 50 black card mounts, each with a printed caption label; black stiff card covers.
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Album of 100 gelatin silver prints of Tianjin (Tientsin), the Hai (Peiho) estuary, and Beijing (Peking) and surroundings.
An attractive example of the commercially available albums produced by the Ato Photographic Association in the 1920s–30s. The present album is devoted to the area formerly known as Zhili or Chihli, encompassing Beijing and Tianjin. Small groups of images are devoted to the Hai forts and to Wanshou Shan in the summer palace near Beijing; and the album closes with views of the Lan River.
The Ato Photographic Association was a Japanese company founded by Ato Inga Kyokai and based in Dalian (Dairen in Japanese) in 1922–44. They were responsible for many thousands of topographic photographs of China, subsequently published in albums like the present one, designed for the Western tourist market. The English captions reflect their origin and are poetic, if not entirely fluent (‘All is not marble the famous Stone Barge is made of’). They show in places an anti-Chinese bias: ‘The Foreign settlements [in Tianjin] afford to them [the Chinese] safe shelters to save their precious skins in case of need.’
Among the more unusual images here is one entitled ‘Dust (near Peking)’: ‘The crenellated wall, ashen with a thick layer of dust seems to tell the tales of the town during several centuries past … The sun’s rays filtering through the grey dust, as raised by the animals’ trampings, light upon the rear half of the flock, imparting to the scene a quiet rural tone.’
