ABSTRACT
Late-nineteenth-century Western expatriates in East Asia used photographic travel albums to privately negotiate their political experiences, geographical limitations, and anxieties within semi-colonial cities. This chapter focuses on the album of G. Prat, a French silk inspector active in Canton from 1874 to 1900, who chose and sequenced commercial and amateur photographic prints to create multi-angled points of view and moving experiences of a floating tour. The essay foregrounds “floating” as a key theme to articulate distinctive ways in which the times and spaces of photography intersect in the album, foregrounding the influence of Asian visual culture on his colonialist creation. It further contextualizes Prat's album in the physical milieu of late-nineteenth-century Canton, and demonstrates that, as a liaison between global travelers and local photographers in tourist photography business, Prat's photographic album-making engaged multi-layered spaces to deal with real-life limitations and the precariousness in international contact zones.
