Photographs Of Asia

There is a fascinating set of photographs here of nineteenth century Asia. They're from an exhibition at the Museum of Asian Art in Florida. Like the famous photographs of Native Americans in the same period, these Asian images are very much a product of colonial expansion and the desire to record what was often in the process of being brutally destroyed. Nonetheless they are a singular historical record. Here I reproduce a photograph of Penang around 1890. Its shophouse frontages are still there today.

(Via wood s lot)