John Thomson: a window to the orient.

From the "blurb" :
One of the great figures of nineteenth-century photography, John Thomson stands out for the unusual and exotic nature of his subject matter. Born in Edinburgh in 1837, Thomson took up photography as a profession in his early twenties. For ten years, from 1862, he traveled and explored the Far East, visiting Penang and the Malay peninsula, Siam, Cambodia, Vietnam, Formosa, and China — recording with his camera the kings and flower-sellers, the great court ceremonies and scenes ot daily life, the palaces, temples, and remote monasteries of an era now vanished. These photographs are a unique record of this lost society and its monuments and entitle Thomson to be regarded as the first great photo-journalist.
Thomson's photographs are equally valued for their intrinsic qualities - the beauty of their imagery, their vivid sense of immediacy, and their unconventional approach to composition.
This is the first monograph to be published on John Thomson, and the entire series of plates included is magnificently reproduced in duotone. Each of the important periods of Thomson's working life is fully represented, from his earliest portraits in Siam to his moving, and more famous, records of nineteenth-century London street life.
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