A Roadside Shrine, Taiwan
Photograph by John Thomson
In Victorian times, Europeans had developed a
taste for exotic scenes - for landscapes as well as for people
in faraway places. But Thomson was not interested in producing just
"lifeless charts of the mechanical proportions of nature". A number
of his landscape photographs of China, Taiwan and South-east Asia
show inherent atheistic or materialistic qualities in his work as
well as the human and spiritual dimensions behind each scene. In
this photograph the enormous tree and small roadside shrine are
brought alive by each other's presence, and they display the
connection between man and nature. This small shrine not only
represented the spiritual centre of the village, it also connected
with the root of the gigantic old tree, and through it was joined
to the earth. By making their offering to the altar in the centre
of the shrine, people found a connection with mother earth.