The Nightmare of Felice Beato

2025

In 1860, during the Second Opium War launched by the British and French allied forces, photographer Felice Beato took the famous photograph After the Capture of the Taku Forts (1860). According to Claire Roberts in Photography and China, Beato rearranged the positions of the corpses to achieve a “perfect” composition of the battlefield. In this work, the artist reconstructs the war scene through staged settings but removed the bodies, leaving behind a ghostly landscape.