The exhibition looks closely at the photographs Beato made during his peripatetic career that spanned four decades. Following in the wake of Britain's colonial empire, Beato was among the primary photographers to provide images of newly opened countries such as India, China, Japan, Korea, and　Burma. "Felice Beato was one of the first global photographers," explains Anne Lacoste, curator of the exhibition from the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. "No one before him was present with a camera in so many different countries to chronicle conflicts or to record their foreign cultures... ."

His photographs of battlefields, the first to show evidences of the dead, provided a new direction for war photography. Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road examines also the ways Beato tailored his images of foreign cultures to the Western audience. As Western colonial empires expanded in the second half of the nineteenth century, the market for photographs of distant lands grew dramatically. Tourists and armchair travelers who sought enrichment through reading image-laden travel diaries were Beato's primary clients. Beato produced an exceptionally diverse oeuvre: topographical and architectural views, including panoramas, as well as portraits and costume studies of the countries he visited or in which he resided.