I came across Felice Beato again this week.

Again, because his images have been part of my visual vocabulary for a long time.I just hadn’t followed them back to the man.

Beato, an Italian–British photographer, was working across Asia at the end of the nineteenth century.

Among the first to photograph war.
Running a studio that developed its own methods for hand-colouring photographs, in collaboration with Japanese watercolour artists.

Learning that changed how I read the work.
The images didn’t change.
My distance from them did.

What I had taken as historical records began to read as deliberate constructions.Images made with an awareness of how they would circulate, how they would be seen.
It left me with a deeper appreciation, not just for the photographs,
but for the intention and labour behind them.

Sometimes that’s all it takes.
Not a new image.
Just the story around it.