June 2019
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) (photographer)
The Universal Photo Art Co., (C.H. Graves) (publisher)
At the barber’s, Peking, China
c. 1902
Albumen print on card
Fabulous, early Herbert Ponting social documentary stereoviews. I have never seen these before.
The placement of figures and the formal construction of the pictorial plane – strong diagonals and verticals, near to far, vanishing point – make for beautifully balanced, tensioned and dynamic images.
Marcus
Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) (photographer)
The Universal Photo Art Co., (C.H. Graves) (publisher)
A Chinese strawberry garden. Proprietor and coolie. China
c. 1902
Albumen print on card
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) (photographer)
The Universal Photo Art Co., (C.H. Graves) (publisher)
En Route to the Great Wall of China. Entrance to the city of Nankow
c. 1902
Albumen print on card
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) (photographer)
Underwood & Underwood (publisher)
Where China’s Great Wall begins its 1,250 mile course – from Shan-hai-ewan (N.) to Liao Hsi Mountains
1904
Albumen print on card
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935)
Herbert George Ponting, FRGS (21 March 1870 – 7 February 1935) was a professional photographer. He is best known as the expedition photographer and cinematographer for Robert Falcon Scott’s Terra Nova Expedition to the Ross Sea and South Pole (1910-1913). In this role, he captured some of the most enduring images of the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. …
Early life
Ponting was born in Salisbury, Wiltshire in the south of England, on 21 March 1870. His father was a successful banker, Francis Ponting, and his mother was Mary Sydenham. From the age of eighteen Herbert was employed at a local bank branch in Liverpool, where he stayed for four years. That time was long enough to convince him that he did not wish to follow in the profession of his father, and attracted to stories of the American West, he moved to California where he worked in mining and then bought a fruit ranch in the 1890s. In 1895 he married a California woman, Mary Biddle Elliott; their daughter Mildred, was born in Auburn, California in January 1897.
Ponting sold his fruit farm in 1898 and, with his wife and daughter, returned to Britain to stay with his family. When they returned to the USA he turned his long-standing hobby of photography in his next career. Following a chance meeting with a professional photographer in California, to whom he had given advice about the locality and showed his own photos, he entered his pictures in competitions and won awards; he also sent some of his stereoscopic photographs to companies who published them. His work was also selected for the first San Francisco Salon; at that time he was living in Sausalito, north of San Francisco. He took stereoviews of and reported on the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-1905, and afterwards continued to travel around Asia, working in Burma, Korea, Java, China and India taking stereoviews and working as a freelance photographer for English-speaking periodicals. Improvements in the printing press had made it possible, for the first time, for mass-market magazines to print and publish photographic illustrations.
After spending much of 1901-1906 travelling around photographing in Asia, Ponting returned to Europe, where he continued to take stereoviews (including in Switzerland and Spain) and wrote illustrated articles for magazines including Country Life, the Graphic, the Illustrated London News, Pearson’s, and the Strand Magazine. In the Strand, Ponting’s work appeared side by side with the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle, one of Ponting’s contemporaries.
Ponting expanded his photographs of Japan into a 1910 book, In Lotus-land Japan. He took extensive photographs in Spain. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS). His flair for journalism and ability to shape his photographic illustrations into a narrative led to his being signed as expedition photographer aboard the Terra Nova, the first time a professional photographer was included on an Antarctic expedition.
Text from the Wikipedia website
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) (photographer)
The “Perfec” Stereograph. H.C. White Co., (publisher)
The-Tien-ning-ssu Pagoda, near Peking, China
1907
Albumen print on card
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) (photographer)
The “Perfec” Stereograph. H.C. White Co., (publisher)
Peking, the capital of China, looking east from a balcony of the Drum Tower
1907
Albumen print on card
William Cooper (British, 1878-1945)
Drum Tower, Peking
1910
Gelatin silver print
University of Bristol – Historical Photographs of China
Creative Commons 3.0
Beijing’s Bell and Drum Towers are situated on a small square north of the Forbidden City. The towers, which were used for telling time until 1924, were built in 1272 during the reign of Kublai Khan and were rebuilt after two fires during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The Bell and Drum Towers are quintessential landmarks of historic Beijing.
William Boyd Cooper (1878-1945)
William Boyd Cooper (1878-1945) was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Around 1911, he was appointed Professor of Commerce at Peking University, where he lectured in English and French. Cooper joined the North China British Volunteer Corps. On 12 February 1917, he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Chinese Labour Corps (CLC). He served in France with the CLC and rose to be a captain, relinquishing his Commission in 1919. William Cooper and his family returned from China and settled in Wimbledon, London. The William Cooper Collection is held in Special Collections, University of Bristol Library (Special Collections ref DM2823). 336 images.
Anonymous text. “Cooper, William Collection,” on the Historical Photographs of China website Nd [Online] Cited 04/06/2023
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) (photographer)
The “Perfec” Stereograph. H.C. White Co., (publisher)
A Tea seller in the streets of Moukden, Manchuria
c. 1906
Albumen print on card
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) (photographer)
The “Perfec” Stereograph. H.C. White Co., (publisher)
A poppy field in Manchuria, natives extracting fluid from which opium is made
c. 1902-1907
Albumen print on card
Herbert Ponting (1870-1935) (photographer)
The “Perfec” Stereograph. H.C. White Co., (publisher)
The Old Bell Tower in the heart of Mukden, Manchuria
1905
Albumen print on card
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) (photographer)
The “Perfec” Stereograph. H.C. White Co., (publisher)
Along the Great Wall of China (originally 1700 miles long), looking east up to a watch tower
1907
Albumen print on card
Herbert Ponting (British, 1870-1935) (photographer)
The “Perfec” Stereograph. H.C. White Co., (publisher)
Scene on Ha-ta-Men St., one of the principal thoroughfares of Peking, China
1907
Albumen print on card
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