Shashin!! Japanese Photography in the 19th Century

Shashin!! Japanese HandColoured Photographs of the Late Nineteenth Century. Ideas Modelling Reality. This monograph examines the development of the photographic craft in the newly-emerging studios and ateliers in Japan, from the 1870s to the onset of the First World War, against the backdrop of the wide-ranging changes in traditional Japanese society. Visitors from abroad commissioned documentary photographs from reputed photographic studios that produced lavish albums with pictures of Japan’s famous landmarks, or comprising traditional ethnographic types of figures engaged in characteristic activities. However, stronger and better-known trade companies eventually absorbed their competitors, frequently also taking over their archives of negatives into their own portfolios, a practice that currently makes it difficult to identify the authors of the individual images. These artists included numerous talented master photographers, who became true pioneers of the photographic medium in Japan.