Asian Studies

Introduction to Photography Collections at Cornell

This set of photographs, intended to support classes and research in Asian Studies, draws from Cornell’s extensive holdings in this area. The Museum’s collection includes historic nineteenth-century photographs of China, India, and Southeast Asia by European photographers, and approximately 1500 photographs and stereographs of Meiji-era Japan (1868–1912) by foreign and Japanese photographers. The Museum’s twentieth-century holdings include photographs that exemplify tendencies in Japanese art photography of the period by Shoji Ueda, Kikuji Kawada, Shomei Tomatsu, and Daido Moriyama, as well as documentary and photojournalistic work made in Asia by the Western photographers Margaret Bourke-White, Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein, and Leon Levinstein. The Museum’s collection is growing in works by contemporary Asian photographers and new media artists such as Shirin Neshat, Liu Bolin, Cao Fei, Dinh Q Lê, Vandy Rattana, Nam June Paik, Koo Bohnchang, and Yasumasa Morimura.

The Library’s holdings extend across the breadth of Asia and Asia Minor. Nineteenth-century photographs of Palestine, Syria, and Turkey are contained in the Andrew Dickson White Architectural Photographs Collection. East Asia is well represented in the Wason Collection, which contains photographs as well as documents and personal papers of diplomats, missionaries, scientists, business people, politicians, alumni, and educators involved in China, Japan, and Korea from the nineteenth century to the present. In the archive of Willard Dickerman Straight, who worked for Reuters during the Russo-Japanese War and for the Department of State in Korea and Manchuria from 1904 to 1909, are photographs he made in Korea, Manchuria, and Peking during this period. Holdings related to Southeast Asia are particularly rich. Niels Douwes Dekker served as head of the Netherlands East Indies Visual Information Service. His papers contain eight thousand photographs of Indigenous folkways, rituals, and diverse aspects of life throughout the archipelago during the final decades of colonial rule in Indonesia. These holdings are complemented by a vast collection of photographs taken by Hedda Morrison in Sarawak, Borneo during her twenty-year residence in the region from the 1940s to 1960s.

Considered together, the Library and Museum’s holdings provide powerful documentation and catalysts for discussion on themes of genocide and memory, justice and reconciliation. For instance, although they are not presented as part of this digital set, the Library holds five thousand photographs, along with testimonies, from prisoners at Tuol Sleng who were killed by the Khmer Rouge in the late 1970s. These stark identification photographs, which provide chilling evidence of Pol Pot’s systematic purges during his regime, have been taken up by contemporary Southeast Asian artists. In a work from the series Cambodia: Splendor and Darkness, Dinh Q. Lê uses his signature method of interweaving strips of photographs, following traditional bamboo mat weaving techniques, to juxtapose battle scenes from the twelfth-century temple of Angkor Wat with photographs of prisoners from Tuol Sleng, creating a dialogue between two episodes of Cambodian history and producing an alternative means of memorializing these victims.

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Introduction to Photography Collections at Cornell

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Asian Studies

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