Kurokawa Suizan 黒川翠山, untitled, ca 1906

Suizan has a minimal English Wikipedia entry, and no entry at all in Japanese. It seems he has been largely ignored.  This image suggests this is a mistake.

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Fraser, K. (2011). Photography and Japan. London: Reaktion Books.

This volume on Japan is one in a series of short texts exploring various aspects of Photography and ..., such as Literature, Science, Death, Anthropology and Cinema.  Among the country specific titles are Australia, Egypt, Ireland, Italy and USA.  The Japan volume contains no information on its author, Karen M Fraser, apart from her being an Assistant Professor in Dept of Art and Art History at Santa Clara University.  Her university page does not list publications and a search of her name at Google Scholar is empty.  An internet search reveals she is an American scholar with a BA, MA and PhD in Art History, the last at Stanford, and that she teaches a course on the very subject of her book, suggesting it may function as a class text.

At 170 pages and containing a generous 104 images, the actual text is quite short.  Given Fraser’s direct and unaffected writing style, the book is easily and quickly digestible. If you are reading with or near an internet connected device, however, you may find your reading experience greatly lengthened by searches for images from the many photographers introduced within its pages.

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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Fuchigami Hakuyo's “A Train Rushing”

列車驀進, Ressha bakushin by 淵上白陽, Fuchigami Hakuyo

“A Train Rushing” first appeared as the opening gravure image in the October 1930 issue of Asahi kamera. From the moment it was published, this image has symbolized the mastery of photographic form exhibited in Japanese modernism of this period. Today, “A Train Rushing” regularly appears in exhibition catalogues and histories of modern Japanese photography as the pinnacle of modernist photographic aesthetics.

Excerpt From:  Ross, Kerry. Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early Twentieth-Century Japan. Stanford University Press, 2015

列車驀進, Ressha bakushin
淵上白陽, Fuchigami Hakuyo

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Ina Nobuo - Return to Photography

Japanese Masters: Shinzo Fukuhara

I found this remarkable description of a remarkable person and could not help but share.  Links to photo resources can be found below.  

After Shinzō Fukuhara returned to Tokyo in 1913 from the United States and Europe, where he studied pharmacology [at Colombia University] and pursued his interests in photography, he took over the day-to-day management of his family’s company, [the Tokyo pharmacy] Shiseidō, when his father retired and neither of his older brothers was found fit to run the company.

Two views of Emperor Meiji

Theses two portraits Emperor Meiji, made one year apart by photographer Uchida Kiuchi, suggest how Japan used photography to shape its global image.  According to Fraser, govt officials were unhappy with the 1872 image as it portrayed the Japan as feudal, backward looking nation.  A second portrait was commissioned, shot a year later in 1873, with the Emperor seated in a western chair and dressed in Prussian military uniform, his top-knot replaced by a contemporary western hair style.  This image better displayed Japan as modernizing and an equal of the Western powers.  Fraser suggests this type of image may have been calculated to help Japan win better treaty conditions.  

Fraser, K. (2011). Photography and Japan. London: Reaktion Books.

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Eliphalet M Brown Jr, the first to make photographs in Japan

Eliphalet Brown's portrait of Namura Gohachiro 1854

Brown was the official photographer to Perry's 1853 expedition and made his first images in the contested territory of Okinawa, about which there is a frequently reproduced lithograph (below).  Of the possibly hundreds of images taken, according to Bennett (2006), only 16 have been positively identified.

A collection of lithographs made from Brown's images can be viewed here.

Bennett, T. (2006). Photography in Japan, 1853-1912. Tokyo: Tuttle.

Brown at work, center, in Okinawa, ca 1853

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Japan's oldest known photograph

Oldest extant photograph made in Japan by Japanese: Shiro Ichiki's Portrait of Shimazu Nariakira (the daimyo of Satsuma), 1857, daguerreotype.