Book Review: Ross, K. (2015). Photography for everyone: The cultural lives of cameras and consumers in early twentieth-century Japan. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Although an academic text, this is an easily readable account of popular photography in Japan in the two decades prior to World War II.  Where the work of this period is typically characterized as dominated by modernism, Ross is interested in exploring the wider practice of hobby photographers and their practice of geijutsu shashin.  The Japanese word can be literally translated as art photography, and is typically taken to mean pictorialism, photos that mimic the standards and conventions of painting, particularly impressionism.  Ross argues that the term as used in Japan encompassed a number of styles, including realism, but cites only one prominent text (Saito Tazunori’s 1932 How to Make Art Photographs) as evidence while admitting that most images in reader contests employed “lyrical or expressionists modes,”  and as elsewhere in Europe and North America, the historical trend was away from pictorialism towards realism.  Nevertheless, the text is chock full of interesting information on how cameras were sold (in large department stores and a wide network of second-hand shops);  how they were marketed (professional-level kit to men, easy-to-use gear to women);  and the role of clubs and photo contests in the dissemination of aesthetic (and democratic) values.  Included are a generous selection of period advertisements and how-to illustrations.  Perhaps of most interest is the question of why photography was so popular among the Japanese middle class, a question Ross answers with reference to JB Jackson, editor of Landscape magazine, on the dignity and self-affirmation of craftwork in the industrial age.  (Kerry Ross has a PhD from Columbia University and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at DePaul University.  A short professional biography from a 2009 conference is available here.)

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