Pretty much as soon as photography was invented in the 1830s,
there was a desire to see it in color.
The new medium was hyper realistic, but without color, incomplete.
Hand-coloring photographs using paints or dyes began in Europe.
But the best hand-colored photographs of the 19th century came from Japan.
For over 200 years, almost no one outside of Japan knew what the country looked like.
The government closed the borders in 1635.
To halt growing colonial influence – mostly from Catholic missionaries – that took hold
in the late 1500s.
Leaving the country was forbidden.
Those who tried were executed.
And, with some exceptions, contact with the outside world was cut off for two centuries.
But in 1854, a US naval expedition of warships, led by Commodore Matthew Perry, forced Japan
to open its ports.
Leading to an influx of travelers and traders from Europe and North America.
Foreigners coming to Japan brought their clothes.
Their culture.
And their cameras.
Photography was relatively new at the time, and became a lucrative trade for foreigners
in newly-opened Japan.
Starting in the 1860s, photographers – mostly European, but some Japanese – documented
Japan’s landscape and people.
Creating collectible and highly-prized images of Japanese culture.
Photography played very well into this kind of desire to learn more about Japan.
This sense, I think, of Japan as being, you know, formerly kind of forbidden and beyond
reach, and all of a sudden now somehow knowable.
The technology of photography really played into that, because
Photography studios flourished in port cities like Yokohama.
And as the medium became more popular, cameras began appearing in ukiyo-e – traditional
Japanese woodblock prints – too.
In this 1878 ukiyo-e print, a wealthy Japanese woman admires photographic portraits.
With a stamp on the back indicating the studio of Uchida Kuichi.
A well-known Japanese photographer at the time.
But it was a foreigner, Italian-English Felice Beato,
that made expert-quality hand-coloring the defining characteristic of this era of Japanese
photography.
He was the first to really take advantage of color photography on a commercial scale
in Japan.
And what he was able to do was draw on this large body of highly-trained artisans from
the ukiyo-e, the woodblock print industry.
Beato, and eventually other foreign photographers in Japan, hired fine artists as their apprentices
to carefully hand-color photographic prints.
Tapping into an expertise of patient precision in the application of color onto flat images
that had been in place in Japan for generations.
Unlike many hand-colored photographs in Europe and North America, which often ended up looking
more like paintings than photographs,
Japanese artists mostly used watercolors.
It created just a beautiful effect on the photographs.
The aesthetic quality and slight difference to other kinds of color photographs made them
very desirable. Taking advantage of that pool of talented,
highly skilled artisans from the woodblock print industry made that all the more possible.
The color added to the sense of realism in these images, which made them even more collectible.
But many of these photos, especially the ones staged in studios, have artificial elements
– like backgrounds, and fake snow – added to dress up the scene.
And some constructed images of a society that was already largely in the past when they
were made.
The samurai, for example, had all but disappeared by the 1870s.
These are models wearing old armor.
By the 1880s, those same Japanese apprentices that had made foreign-operated businesses
profitable dominated the market with photography studios of their own.
Like Kusakabe Kimbei — one of the most lucrative photographers at the end of the 19th century
in Japan.
An artist and former apprentice to foreign photographers.
Who built on the precedent they set:
Staging elaborate, sometimes mythic scenes of Japanese culture, carefully applying watercolors,
and packaging them in expensive photo albums to sell to foreigners.
This photo of a woman holding an umbrella “caught in a rainstorm” is a good example
of the meticulous work that photographers like Kimbei put into staging supposedly-typical
scenes of Japanese life.
The “rain” is simulated by scratches into the glass plate negative.
And the subject’s kimono is attached to the photo studio’s background to simulate
wind.
These techniques drew on recognizable tropes from Japanese fine art
In Japan, I think most directly we can see the relationship from ukiyo-e woodblock print
art to photography.
Composition and more importantly, subject matter, I think you can see a really direct
relationship.
And because I think even with Western audiences, the knowledge of subject matter that was
pictured in woodblock prints was sort of growing in the 19th century.
So it only made sense for photographers to build on this familiarity.
The rise of amateur photography in the 20th century caused a decline of studio souvenir
photography in Japan.
Kodak introduced the Brownie camera in 1900, and travelers could take their own photos.
Plus, the introduction of postcards and mass-printed volumes of travel books meant the images made
in Japanese photo studios were less and less precious.
And therefore no longer profitable to spend so much time staging and then hand-coloring.
Studios like Kimbei’s shifted their business model to accommodate a new amateur market.
Selling supplies and offering darkroom space to tourists.
But for the second half of the 19th century, images like these from Japanese photo studios
– even though many were staged and sometimes
already-dated stereotypes – – had a lasting effect on how outsiders
perceived Japanese culture.
That image of the woman with the umbrella relates to previous, centuries, really, of
the way women were sometimes portrayed in Japanese art.
So you have that trope.
But what happens when you translate it into photography is it takes on the sense of realistic
representation in a way that a painting or woodblock print does not.
That photo of the woman with the umbrella is often credited to Kimbei.
But it's also often credited to his predecessor, Austrian photographer Baron Raimund von Stillfried.
One of the tricky parts of 19th century photography in Japan is accurately identifying the original
photographer.
As studios closed and photographers retired, they sold their negatives to the competition,
who, without copyright laws, could claim the photos as their own.
So even after copyright laws were established, it was very hard to enforce.
So as a result, you see – over decades – the same images produced and reproduced under
different studio labels.
Which is one of the reasons why it’s very difficult to attribute certain images to a
specific photographer.
Which explains why this photo of the Empress of Japan, taken by Uchida Kuichi in 1872,
appears in later photo albums, mislabeled, and credited to either Felice Beato or Raimund
von Stillfriend, neither of whom took the picture.
And if you want to learn more about this, I really recommend this book by Terry Bennett,
who I also interviewed for this episode.
Reading this was a huge inspiration for this episode, and it’s got a lot of great info
about how photography first came to Japan, and more detail about the photographers that
were working there in the 19th century.
So, check it out if you’re interested.
And thanks for watching.