The Early Shanghai Photographs of Pierre Gendron

Sometime between the 1880s and early 1900s, a Frenchman named Pierre Gendron photographed Shanghai. And miraculously, his glass stereoscopic slides, some of the earliest photographs of Shanghai in existence, have survived. As a banker based in Hué (which was then French Indochina), Pierre traveled throughout the region—to Tonkin, Japan, Java, and China–from the 1880s to the early 1900s, and everywhere he went, he took pictures. Over 900 of them.

*Quai de France, or the “French Bund”, today’s Zhongshan Dong Er Lu. The crowd is waiting for the boat “Whampoa” at the dock. None of these compradoric style buildings still stands, alas.*

Stereoscopic photographs are photographs taken with two lenses, from slightly different viewpoints, and then viewed through a stereoscope–a binocular viewing device—which creates an illusion of depth. The stereoscope was very much in vogue in Second Empire France (and Victorian England), from the mid-1880s to the end of the century, exactly the time period when Pierre Gendron was taking his photographs.