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China
COMMENTARY
I’m struck by the ways in which Gardner has combined nature and artifice in this spread. Pressed leaves extend the bare winter branches of trees in Thomas Child’s photographs of the Beijing Observatory. The delicate twigs stand in stark contrast to the two hulking bronze astronomical instruments upheld by writhing dragons at the center. The spheres are centuries-old models of stars that once guided the emperor, or Son of Heaven.
They evoke an image of China as a timeless and unchanging “Celestial Empire,” as it was often called in the 1800s.
Yet the land that Gardner visited in 1883 was modern and dynamic, changing as quickly as the seasons. How do the stories that surround us change our experience of a faraway place?
—Stephanie Tung, Byrne Family Curator of Photography, Peabody Essex Museum