1. Lai Afong or Lai Fong was a Chinese photographer who established Afong Studio, considered to be the most successful photographic studio in the late Qing dynasty.
10 Facts About Lai Afong
1. 2.
Lai Afong is widely acknowledged as the most significant Chinese photographer of the nineteenth century.
3.
Lai Afong was born in Gaoming, Guangdong and arrived in Hong Kong in the 1850s as a refugee of the Taiping Rebellion.
4.
At some point between 1865 and 1867, Lai Afong worked at the Hong Kong studio of Portuguese photographer Jose Joaquim Alves de Silveira; by 1870, the earliest known announcement of the Afong Studio was printed as an advertisement in the Hong Kong Daily Press.
5.
Lai Afong traveled through the provinces of Fujian, Guangdong, Hebei, Songjiang, and Hong Kong, creating photographs.
6.
Lai Afong was the most successful of his generation of Chinese photographers in appealing to both a Chinese and foreign cosmopolitan clientele.
7.
Lai Afong seems to have been the only Chinese photographer of his generation to be embraced by his foreign contemporaries.
8.
Additionally, Lai Afong favored the panorama more than any other photographer working in China in the 19th century, earning his work a place among the giants of 19th century landscape photography such as Carleton Watkins in America and Gustave Le Gray in France.
9.
The album People and Views of China, attributed to Lai Afong, contains images from Milton Miller, St John Edwards, and other unidentified photographers.
10.
However, as Lai Afong Fong expanded his collection of views through extensive photographic expeditions, he replaced the negatives by others with his own views.