Felice Beato
Felice Beato was an Italian–British photographer. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, and views and panoramas of Asia and the Mediterranean region. His work provides images of such events as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Second Opium War, and represents the first substantial body of photojournalism.
About Felice Beato in brief
Felice Beato was an Italian–British photographer. He was one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, and views and panoramas of Asia and the Mediterranean region. Beato’s travels gave him the opportunity to create images of countries, people, and events that were unfamiliar and remote to most people in Europe and North America. His work provides images of such events as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Second Opium War, and represents the first substantial body of photojournalism. He influenced other photographers, and his influence in Japan, where he taught and worked with numerous other photographers and artists, was particularly deep and lasting. A death certificate discovered in 2009 shows that he was born in Venice in 1832 and died on 29 January 1909 in Florence. It is likely that early in his life Beato and his family moved to Corfu, at the time part of the British protectorate of the Ionian Islands, and so he was a British subject. He probably met the British photographer James Robertson in Malta in 1850 and accompanied him to Constantinople in 1851. In 1853 the two began photographing together and they formed a partnership called “Robertson & Beato” either in that year or in 1854, when Robertson opened a photographic studio in Pera, Constantinople. He and Robertson travelled to Balaklava, Crimea, where they took over reportage of the Crimean War following Roger Fenton’s departure.
Their Crimean images dramatically changed the way that war was reported and depicted. In February 1858 Beato arrived in Calcutta and began travelling throughout Northern India. He produced possibly the first-ever photographic images of corpses. For at least one of his photographs taken at the palace of Sikandar Baghnow in Delhi he had disinterred or rearranged the remains of Indian rebels to heighten the dramatic impact of the photograph. In 1860 Beato left the partnership of Robertson and Beato & Co. to photograph the Anglo-French military expedition to China in the SecondOpium War. He later joined his brother Antonio, who later left India, probably for health reasons, in December 1859 for Egypt, setting up a studio in Thebes in 1860. He died in Hong Kong in March 1867, though he retained the use of the name Beato until the end of his life in 1867. A number of photographs produced in the 1850s are signed ‘Felice Antonio Beato’ and it is believed that the ‘and Co.’ refers to Antonio. It was long assumed that there was one photographer who somehow photographed at the same time in places as distant as Egypt and Japan, but the confusion continues to cause problems in identifying which of the two photographers was the creator of a given image. In late 1854 or early 1855 James Robertson married Beato’s sister, Leonilda Maria Matilda Beato. They had three daughters, Catherine Grace, Edith Marcon Vergence, and Helen Beatruc.
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This page is based on the article Felice Beato published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
