JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Album of 50 coloured prints. An engaging souvenir album indulging orientalist visions of Japan increasingly detached from the country's post-Meiji Restoration reality. 25 photographs show Japanese women in traditional kimono dresses and surroundings, accompanied on the reverse by a corresponding number of images of bucolic buildings and rural scenes.Photography arrived in Japan approximately a decade after its invention and 20 years before the 1867 Meiji Restoration. The latter marked the beginning of a period of dramatic modernization and Westernization, with foreign tourists flocking to the country. Souvenir photograph albums showing "traditional" Japanese culture and dress became popular keepsakes for these travellers. Albums of 25, 50, or 100 photographs were often extremely expensive.

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