On the occasion of

Shomei Tomatsu
SKIN OF THE NATION


Shashin monogatari

One hundred years
of photography in Japan


Although photography was discovered in Europe, in China, in Korea and in Japan printing on paper was well-acquainted from II century AD and it contributed to photography introdution and evolution in Far East. Especially in Japan, where ukiyoe prints were very common above all in the first decades of XIXth, photographic technique was completely understood by Japanese artistic style. The first Japanese photos had the same subjects of ukiyoe prints. The first albumen prints were watercoloured therefore in the beginning photography in Japan was an hybrid art between painting and printing.
Japanese photography formally began in 1857 when Ichiki Shirō (1828–1903) made a calotype of his clan chief Shimazu Nariakira. Before, in 1843, when Japan was still isolated from the rest of the world, Ueno Shunnojo-Tsunetari (1790-1851) made an attempt to introduce daguerreotype into Japan. He required it to Dutch merchants but the daguerreotype was wrongly shipped back from Nagasaki bay. In 1848 Ueno Shunnojo-Tsunetari eventually received the daguerreotype, but it was damaged and not working. After the end of sakoku, the isolation of Japan during Edo-Tokugawa period (1603-1868), lots of Western voyagers began to go to Japan and among them there were some photographers as well. The British photographer Felice Beato (1833 or 1834 - c. 1907) arrived in Japan in 1863 and opened a commercial photography studio in Yokohama, Japan’s most important port and cosmopolitan city.
The first photography studios set up by Japanese photographers originated under Beato’s influence. The first Japanese photography studio was established in 1862
in Nagasaki by Ueno Hikoma (1838 – 1904), the son of Shunnojo-Tsunetari. Uchida Kuichi (1844 – 1875), owner of a photography studio in Yokohama, was the first to take a picture of Emperor and Empress Meiji in 1872 and 1873. Yokohama Shashin, “photography of Yokohama”, began. From then on Japanese photography “watched” all Japan’s events: westernization, militarization, Second World War and atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the postwar period and American occupation, industrial and technological progress, the contemporary society full of obsessions and paradoxes, the live suicide of Mishima Yukio in 1970, Kobe earthquake in 1995, the sarin Tokyo subway attack in 1995.
Shashin monogatari is a journey through the most important pictures and photographers of Japan: Araki Nobuyoshi, Hoshino Komaro, Fuji Hideki and others whose names are world famous or not yet.

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