Accessing the Gerald Warner Collection
The Warner Collection is housed in Special Collections & College Archives, at Lafayette College's Skillman Library. The digititized collection can be searched, browsed by image or by subject , and sorted in various ways. The interface allows users to select images and create temporary personal collections that can be saved locally. Users can also zoom, pan, crop, compare images, and create slideshows as detailed in the help pages. This site uses Chinese and Japanese fonts, so please make sure that your browser and operating system can display East Asian characters. Recent Macintosh systems should work by default, but Windows users may need to Enable Chinese language support.
About the Collection
The Gerald Warner Taiwan Image Collection is a photographic record of a US consul's impressions of urban and rural life in Taiwan under Japanese colonial rule. Totaling 340 photographs and postcards gathered by Warner between August 26, 1937 and March 8, 1941, these images provide a snapshot of Taiwan's hybrid culture of Chinese, Taiwanese, Austronesian, and Japanese influences. The subjects represented are wide-ranging, including clothing, arboriculture, urban structures, agriculture, religious rituals, topography, highways, parks, and more. These digitized images have been researched and annotated to serve as a web-based encyclopedia of colonial Taiwan's material culture.
Most of these photographs were taken for commercial purposes under conditions of colonial domination. Artistic license, ethnographic sensibilities and propagandistic intentions are all documented herein, revealing a cross-section of the early twentieth-century Japanese imperial imagination. Through the use of captions, staged "traditional" motifs, and colorization, cropping, and re-touching of photos, idealized portraits of Japan's largest tropical possession were disseminated throughout the empire and abroad.
To track the "careers" of these images in print, genealogical records have been created for each entry. By tracking the history of images as they re-appear in subsequent publications, the cumulative process through which photographs become icons of peoples, places, and practices can be charted.
Gerald Warner was born in Boothwyn, Pennsylvania on August 12, 1907. He commenced his East Asia foreign service as US vice consul at Tianjin (1931) and at Mukden (1934). Warner worked as language officer in Tokyo from 1935 and as consul at Taipei in 1937. After three and a half years in Taiwan, he was appointed consul at Tokyo in February 1941. Warner and his American colleagues were put under house arrest in Japan until November 2, 1942, when they were freed in a prisoner exchange. After Japan's surrender, Warner returned to Asia as 2nd secretary and consul at Chongqing. Warner retired from the foreign service in 1967. He died at age 81 on June 20, 1989.