Having received an invitation for an artists’ residency from NiMAC, a contemporary arts organisation with a critical photography locus in Nicosia, I was looking forward to spending time on the island of Cyprus, at the start of the Mediterranean spring. Having seen my work as part of the Drone Vision: Warfare, Protest, Surveillance project and exhibition in the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, May 2018 the curator suggested that my interests in the spaces of warfare and the imperial would be apt in the socio-political context of Cyprus. The island has long attracted tourists for its micro-climate of warm springs and hot summers, extending into winter. As an artist with an interest in the sun, albeit UV light and its photo-image developing properties rather than in beach towel mode, my proposal was to explore some of the earliest photographic depictions of the island, those made by Victorian photographer John Thompson in 1878. Dating from the beginning of British colonisation of the island, the images could arguably be said to have laid the foundations of the tourist trade, and so it was a neat double-knot of concerns and contradictions that I would be unravelling during the month of April in Nicosia.
Like many best laid plans for the Spring of 2020 it didn’t happen. Flight BA662 from Belfast to Larnaca may or may not have taken off, empty of passengers. Cypriot and other European borders closed. Global soundings grew louder and more insistent, and lockdown started with sensations of bewilderment, change and fear rolling over our ordinary lives like a slow tsunami. When I called my sister on the last day of March she answered from an ambulance, already masked and gowned and on her way to the Covid care at Sligo University Hospital. It would be three weeks before she left ICU and another seven before finally leaving the hospital, one of the lucky ones.
John Thompson was a Victorian photographer (1837 – 1921) from Edinburgh, best known for his travels and photographic images made throughout Asia, including Siam, Cambodia, Vietnam and many areas of China. Unusually for the time, he was abroad as a professional photographer rather than as an official or a missionary. In 1878 the British took control from the ruling Ottoman empire of the island of Cyprus, which became a British Protectorate. Thompson was the first photographer to travel and take photographs of this newest British colony, produced as a two-volume album Travels Through Cyprus With My Camera in the Autumn of 1878. Thompson’s oeuvre is widely and justifiably acclaimed in terms of the geographic scope, photographic innovation and sheer aesthetic power of the collections. Some of the most exquisitely crafted ethnographic and travel photographs ever made, and all the more compelling for their part in early photographic history, with its technical and mobility challenges.
Such accomplishment however, cannot be the complete story of these images. In the sense that Azoulay says that neither the addressed – the historical and contemporary viewers, not the addressee - the photographed subjects, nor indeed the photographer herself, can claim the only true, or full meaning of the image. Interestingly it falls to us, if we so wish, to explore and add to the multiplicity of meanings presented by such images. Thompson, experienced in photographing and presenting images of remote people and places, seems to approach his subjects in a briskly comprehensive way, displaying the signifiers of a remotely exotic Mediterranean island; indigenous people, men and women in traditional clothing, ruins and traces of previous antiquities, a harbour, a city gate and transport by donkey. That we recognise these signifiers of authenticity. or rather what they signify as a dominant, colonised version of what ‘authentic’ may look like, is testament to the influence of early and enduring framing of appropriated lands and peoples, through reproducible and captioned photographic images.
I have lots of questions around Travels Through Cyprus With My Camera in the Autumn of 1878. Cyprus was the last foreign expedition for Thompson before being appointed as effectively the Photographer-Royal by Queen Victoria and settling in London with his family. Did he visit because the island became a British Protectorate? Had he been before? Was he commissioned to take the photographs, or just saw an opportunity? Did Thompson want to be the ‘first’ photographer of Cyprus, similar to the trajectory he had taken through parts of Asia and China? What, if any, photographs had been taken of the island and its people before Thompson. These questions will be explored primarily within the photographs themselves, both positive and negative, and hopefully with access to a hard copy album including captioning and narration by Thompson. Thompson’s collection of wet-collodian glass plates is housed in the Wellcome Trust Library and is toured regularly, nationally and internationally.
Credit: The Wellcome Library, photographer John Thompson, 1878
Even viewed online, the prints are exquisite, the negatives equally compelling. As the original impression on the plate, unmediated by later darkroom manipulation, their reversed, mirrored image is directly connected to our physiology of vision. They also ‘reverse’ the quality of a typical Thompson photograph, rich in detail and information. The negs are muted and withheld, nebulous, framed with makers and identifying numbers. Another reason is coincidental, or synchronistic or perhaps even talismanic. For some of the time I had expected to be in Cyprus, I spent in self-isolation, in a relative’s vacant home. Photographs were dotted about, in frames, tucked into the edges of pictures and mirrors, mismatched bundles of soft, glowing early kodacolour and smaller, curled black and white prints. Sifting through the photographs I found a bunch of negatives, bigger than 35ml and without their partnering positives. These standing, reclining and linked women and girls have a corresponding quality of obfuscation, withheld but activated by a sense of originality. Their blurred and smudged surfaces still hint at a story, suspended and speculative. Distanced by time and intention, one distinguished photographer chronicling the colonial, the unknown other snapping at family life but unwittingly, also photographing within a related colonial framework. One set of questions, perhaps, will unfold into another.
‘Reclining Woman’ N Ireland/Donegal, date + photographer unknown, circa 1960’s
‘Standing Woman’ N Ireland/Donegal, date + photographer unknown, circa 1960’s
‘Girls in back garden’ Derry, N Ireland, date + photographer unknown, circa 1950’s