The photography show which was seen last spring at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the one which opened during the summer at Asia House here in New York have a lot in common. In fact, they seem in some ways to be a single show which is being put on in installments. In the first place, the two shows deal with the same subject, 19th-century China. They are both now off touring other parts of the country. And they were curated by two men—Michael Hoffman in Philadelphia and Clark Worswick at Asia House—who have collaborated in the past. It is therefore not surprising that there are similarities

From this statement prefacing his show, it follows naturally that Worswick should arrive at the conclusion with which his excellent essay “Photography in Imperial China” ends:

It is in the work of heretofore unknown photographers . . . that the true importance of the camera’s contribution to history can be measured. For it is in the mass of attributed and unattributed images that the new medium of photography was able to capture and preserve the look of imperial China.

As long as you think of all photographs as facts, all are on at least one level equivalent. No matter how much we know about the