Cabinet card showing two Chinese women.

Vladivostok: Livay Studio, No. 11 Svetlanskaya Street,, [c.1890]. A scarce late 19th-century record of styles of clothing and foot-binding followed by well-to-do Chinese women in the Russian border city of Vladivostok. The Livay photographic studio catered specifically to Chinese residents and visitors, and we have not been able to trace any other surviving examples of its work. Following China's transfer of the Haishenwei region to the Tsar in 1860, Vladivostok became a thriving centre of economic activity and cultural interchange between Russians and Chinese, with both of these communities served by the Livay studio, based on the city's main boulevard. This photograph is a pleasing corrective to the many surviving photographs of late-imperial Chinese women, often produced in cities such as Shanghai, which adopt an orientalizing gaze. While photography was introduced into Russia soon after its invention, it remained a preserve of the very wealthy until the 1860s when technological changes fuelled an explosion in the number of photographic studios in major cities. "In the hands of commercial studio photographers, the medium retained its original social function, namely "to solemnize and to immortalize" the portrayed subject. The studio photograph was an index and a means of communicating one's status; it indicated the sitter's place in the social hierarchy both as a commodity object and as information. But more importantly, photography dominated the market for portraiture and democratized visual self-representation. It captured people from across the social spectrum and brought about a visual levelling, whereby the social benefits (and drawbacks) of this type of publicity was showered equally on kings, nobles, lawyers, merchants, and cobblers. Photography as a mechanized medium of self-representation pulled members of different social class onto the same visual level in the public sphere" (Stolarski, pp. 4-5). Cabinet card (164 x 108 mm), mounted gelatine photograph (140 x 103 mm) with glossy finish, card lettered in red in Russian and Chinese. Small scuff to upper right corner of photograph, image substantially unaffected, couple of faint stains to card, verso skinned where sometime mounted. A very good example. Christopher Stolarski, "The Rise of Photojournalism in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1900-1931", PhD Diss., 2013.