Celebrating Thirty Years of East Asian Collections

Sidney D. Gamble photographs, 1906-2007

Shot over four trips between 1908 and 1932, more than 5,500 photographs in the Sidney D. Gamble collection represents an extraordinary contribution to the visual archive for an important period in Chinese history from which few images survive today. As an amateur photographer and trained sociologist, Gamble worked as secretary for the Beijing YMCA, helping to coordinate educational and social reform projects. Through his education in the social sciences, Gamble brings to his photography an informed perspective that extends beyond the simple documentation of the passage to modernity. His intimate photographs of people in the midst of a transitioning society demonstrate a sensitivity to individual humanity and the phenomena of everyday life. This broad array of portraits of men and women engaged in the various activities of public life provide us with a glimpse of social change not as a mere institutional process, but as the lived experience of a diversity of people.

This collection also includes images captured by Gamble when he traveled with parents, David Berry and Mary Huggins Gamble, to Korea.