JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Album with 63 hand-coloured albumen prints. An album of large hand-coloured albumen prints, mainly depicting areas popular with tourists such as Yokohama, Nagasaki, and Hakone. Many are not listed in Bennett's bibliography.Photography arrived in Japan shortly before the 1867 Meiji Restoration, when both Westerners and Japanese started to set up studios. The likes of Tamamura Kozaburo, Ogawa Kazumasa, Kajima Seibei, and Usui Shusaburo became popular domestically and internationally and albums of photographic prints became a popular item among tourists. The present example is made up of 63 prints, the majority of which were produced by unidentified studios. Those that can be traced include a shot of three washer women by Adolfo Farsari, the owner of one of Yokohama's most profitable photographic firms and whose work was praised by the likes of Rudyard Kipling. They also include a shot of a bamboo garden by Ogawa, the pioneer of Japanese collotype printing, and two scenic landscapes from Hakone by Kajima, the "Millionaire Photographer". The remaining prints show many famous locations from across Japan, such as Nagasaki harbour, Mukojima in Tokyo, the Great Buddha at Kamakura, and the main street of Yokohama. There are also many prints of women in traditional Japanese clothing, riding rickshaws, and admiring the cherry blossoms in spring.

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