Philip Adolphe Klier

There, he found better chances for selling his photographs used on mailable postcards that he had printed in Germany with the inscription “Copyright’ P. Klier, Rangoon”.

For five years after 1885, Klier temporarily entered a partnership with J. Jackson, an established British studio photographer,[3] but after that, he continued working on his own.

[8] The wide range of Klier's images documents his strong interest in both colonial British as well as Burmese life and culture.

They stand in contrast with his later portraits, such as the picture of a Burmese lady on a hand-colored photoprint on postcard after an original albumen print of 1907, with a blurred background and crisp details of her person, clothes and jewellery in the foreground.

Klier also took photographs of famous buildings, including Burma's most important religious monument, the Shwedagon Pagoda[10] or the great mosque[11] in Rangoon.

Ahuja, published by Myanmar Photo Archive, art historian Carmín Berchiolly examined some of Klier's portraits of Burmese women from a contemporary perspective.

Analyzing two postcards showing the same young woman, one of them titled "A Burmese Village Girl" and the other "A Burmese lady", Berchiolly notes an unusual exposure of bare shoulders and arms of the village girl, and in the reclining lady a "composition that belongs in the Odalisque type, as popularized in French Orientalist painting and which promoted the freedom of the male gaze.