The Embassy of Italy in Yangon, in partnership with Myanmar Photo Archive, is pleased to present “Rethink Beato: from Italy to Burma (1832-1909)”, an exhibition exploring the intriguing life and legacy of Felice Beato, the Italian-born photographer who captured the spirit of Myanmar while living in Mandalay from 1887 to 1905.
Visitors will step back in time and discover Beato’s powerful imagery from Myanmar alongside his works across Japan, China, India, Crimea, and the Middle East. A unique journey through history, captured through Beato’s lens, offering insights into Myanmar’s historical importance in global trade and economics.
Rethink Beato will be open to the public at Turquoise Mountain (47B Pho Sein Street, Bahan Township, Yangon) from Saturday, 30th November 2024 to Sunday, 15th December 2024, from 11AM to 6 PM.
The Italian Embassy in Yangon is extremely proud to partner with Myanmar Photo Archive in presenting to the Myanmar public the complex and elusive figure of Felice Beato (1832-1909), one of the most talented pioneers of the nascent photographic art, and in highlighting his role in shaping the image of Burma in the eyes of the world. The Italo-British photographer settled in Mandalay at the apex of an extraordinary career and of lifelong peregrinations. He immediately left a profound mark through his advanced photographic techniques, his exquisite artistic taste and his marketing skills and expanded the horizon of Myanmar knowledge in Europe and elsewhere. His iconic photos have forged an “idea of Burma” that – however stereotyped as it might be considered today – is still part of the collective imagination and memory of Myanmar.
By presenting Felice Beato’s body of work in Myanmar, we hope to contribute to the multifaceted effort by Myanmar Photo Archive and many other private institutions and people to preserve, promote and hand down memory, an effort that becomes even more important as the shattered history of the Country has adversely impacted a sense of ownership of the past by the people of Myanmar. Critically encompassing the different layers of history is, in Myanmar as elsewhere, a way to foster a stronger and richer identity.
But who was indeed Signor Beato? His biography has long eluded the efforts of historians and only recently it has been brought to daylight. His intimate feelings, ideas and identity are however still shrouded in mystery. Beato could be considered an adventurer, a pioneer, a lifelong traveler, an explorer, an astute entrepreneur. The exhibition aims at proposing some possible clues, leaving it to the public to forge its own opinion.
As imperfect as Beato’s portrait might still be, all the facets of his life and work point in one direction: modernity. Beato’s life has been a constant effort to master technological progress and to scout pioneering opportunities. He saw the infinite possibilities opened by the globalization of 19th century.
He bet on the crave for tourism and exoticism of the affluent western middle class, tired of confining itself to the classic Grand Tour of Southern Europe. He thus started his career in Constantinople, a landmark of the “Near East travels”. Then, he helped his brother Antonio to establish a photo studio in Luxor in Egypt, where more adventurous travelers where flocking. And finally, at the end of his life, he settled in Mandalay, newly conquered by the British. His idea to prepare readymade photo albums of Japan and Burma, made available worldwide by post, anticipated trends that have consolidated one century afterwards through postal catalogues and later on through online shopping!
Beato understood the growing role of public information, newspapers and magazines and saw it as an essential component of the functioning of liberal democracies and as a means for building political consensus around Great Britain’s colonial adventures. He thus decided to embark in a perilous career as war photo reporter. He documented the Crimean War in 1855, the Indian repression of 1857, the Second Opium War in China, the United States Naval Expedition to Korea in 1871 and finally the British repression of insurgency in Upper Burma. As disturbing as his war photos are, they have paved the way for photography to become the most powerful tool both for documenting truth and for supporting propaganda in wartime.
Beato was as well acutely aware of the epochal shift from a society of ideas, as the one existing up to the mid of 19th century, towards a society of images, thanks to the photographic medium that was making them available almost instantly to a wide public. His photos were not only commercial objects, but also an instrument to transform society, to fuel knowledge, to nurture desires, ambitions, trends, fashions and to shape the perception of reality for an exponentially growing number of people.
Furthermore, Beato foresaw the opportunities offered by the limited but not irrelevant blending of western and local societies in the Far East. He established the Yokohama School of Photography in Japan, expanding photographic knowledge to a generation of Japanese photographers but also incorporating ukiyo-e techniques in the coloring process of his photos, one of the trademarks of his commercial success. For instance, in a beautiful album of Burmese views and portraits at the British Library, Beato combined together an attractive Burmese textile cover with Western binding and handmade paper. Producing, through a careful blend of local taste and western techniques, a high-quality object of desire called “Burma”, he secured his commercial success and made the idealized image of Burma fashionable. However, not only did Beato astutely cater to the crave for exoticism of the West, but he also nurtured the desire of the affluent class of Japan and Burma to immortalize itself through the new “western” medium of photography, thus creating a local market for his photographs and expanding his portrait studio business.
How much of Burma has permeated Beato’s identity after a decade and half of residence in Mandalay and Rangoon we cannot tell. The fact that he married a Burmese woman is however an indication of the homely sense that Burma inspired him and the beauty of his Burmese portraits might have been difficult to achieve without love and admiration for the Country and people he found on his last Eastern journey.
Nicolò Tassoni Estense
Head of Mission
Embassy of Italy in Yangon