Louise Abbott has written on the subject of photography for more than thirty years. Below is a review that appeared in The (Montreal) Gazette on December 11, 2010. It was reprinted in The Edmonton Journal and in the Ottawa Citizen.
Photographers Explore the World
LOUISE ABBOTT SPECIAL TO THE GAZETTE
After the photographic process was invented in the nineteenth century, two kinds of photographers emerged: those who set up their equipment in a studio, and those who took to the road or the high seas with their cameras. Photographers today continue to pursue studio or field work. This season’s photo books embrace both genres of photography, but the most compelling showcase visual explorations of the real world.
In the mid-1850s, Italian-born Felice Beato was hired by an older photographer to record battlefields of the Crimean War, and then religious architecture and biblical sites in the Middle East. When he branched out on his own, Beato kept up a peripatetic existence, driven by a combination of wanderlust and entrepreneurialism. “As Western interests expanded across the globe in the second half of the nineteenth century, European publics sought images of newly accessible countries and culture,” Anne Lacoste writes in a handsome new coffee-table book, Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road (Getty Publications, 204 pages, $47.95).
Beato, a flamboyant, forceful personality, journeyed extensively in the Sudan, Burma, India, and the Far East. He created detailed images of buildings, monuments, landscapes, and people, and sold them as illustrations for popular anthropological and travel accounts; over the years, he gained fame, “made many fortunes and lost them.”
Today Beato’s photographs are represented in private and public collections internationally, and he is recognized as a seminal nineteenth-century photographer. But Lacoste is the first to provide an overview of his life and work. Her book was published in tandem with an exhibition of the same name at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It boasts 162 reproductions of sepia-toned and sometimes hand-coloured images, and it bears the high-quality printing, design, and binding that have become the hallmark of Getty Publications.
