The Research Of British Man, John Thomson's Photography Works In The Late Qing

Historiophoty is a new kind of historiography research types produced in the 20 th century, it relies on the photography technology produced in the 19th century and movie and television culture prosperous in the 20th century, it represented history and the thought of historian about it in visual images and filmic discourse. Compared with writing historical data, historiophoty can afford more direct and authentic reappears of the local and current historical scene. The author make use of "Photography Attesting History",which is one kind of the methodology of historiophoty,to do the research and practice.This paper take John Thomson's photography works in the Late Qing as the research object, collected the historical material relating to Hong Kong, Macao, Guangdong, Taiwan in John Thomson's photography works for generalization and quantitative statistical, summarized the content and characteristics of the historical data. The objective is to reveal the value and insufficient of historical materials to a comparative study of other historical literature. The studies suggest that, John Thomson's photography works in the Late Qing save a lot of reliable graphic and text information, showing the local customs and feelings of each place he visited and the Chinese people of all classes. Many material had no attention to the photographers who visit China on the same time, had no records in historical documents all over the world and also had not been excavaed, studied and used by historians. As a result, those historical material have high historical value. The insufficient is a few of the historical material exist expression error, it had a bad influence on the veracity of historical.