The History of Japanese Photography (review)

The trope that best reflects the history of photography in Japan is, arguably, irony. People worldwide associate Japan with photography but more often with its technology than with its practitioners. Names such as Nikon, Canon, Fuji, Mamiya, Pentax, and Contax are synonymous with the highest quality photographic equipment available. Yet names such as Shima Ka-koku, Nojima Yasuzō, Yamamoto Kansuke, Domon Ken, Tokiwa Toyoko, and Kon Michiko are familiar only to cognoscenti, although all are superbly proficient photographers with highly expressive personal visions.

One reason for this lack of familiarity with Japanese photographers among Americans and Europeans is their impression of Japan as a "backward" country. They expect that Japan, like most other non-Western countries, can, at best, be little more than a proficient imitator of "developed" cultures. One should not, the thinking goes, expect to find in Japan an original vision executed with a technology that is both foreign and modern. Yet this line of thought ignores the history of photography in Japan. By 1843 people there understood much about the daguerreotype process, which had been invented only four years earlier. By no later than 1857, Japanese photographers were making daguerreotypes on their own. Since then, Japanese women and men have been using photography to create profoundly original visions of the world.

The important question is not how well Japanese photographers measured up to their Western peers but how they used photography. Answers to that question tell us how the Japanese saw the world around them, and The History of Japanese Photography goes far to answer that question. This book is nothing less than a monumental landmark. Its images and essays will remain important for decades to come as starting points for understanding how this medium developed in Japan from its introduction in the mid-nineteenth century down to the beginning of the twenty-first century. A few of the images reproduced here (the work contains 206 plates and numerous smaller figures) are iconic and well known, but most have rarely been seen outside Japan. All of the reproductions, both color and black and white, are of excellent quality. In this respect, The History of Japanese Photography represents a paragon of collaborative efforts by four eminent curators.

This is a very exciting book for many reasons. It represents a rising interest in Japanese photography among contemporary museum curators and private collectors. It declares that Western audiences have, at last, discovered Japanese photography and that the age of irony for the history of Japanese photography is coming to an end. The exhibition for which this book is the catalogue is not the result of Japanologists peddling their wares, but is the outcome of participation by one of the editors, Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, as a juror for the first Tokyo International Photo Biennial in 1995. Thanks to the support of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Japan Foundation, and a very large number of individual photographers, collectors, museums, galleries, critics, and scholars, what must have been a monumental exhibition (unfortunately, I did not see it) and an equally monumental catalogue have become reality. Contributions from individuals and institutions in Japan, the United States, Germany, England, France, and Canada map an intricate web of cooperation.

While it is hard to overstate the importance of this volume, it is useful to point out one of its limitations: a more accurate title would perhaps be The History of Japanese Art Photography. By no means does this limitation diminish its importance. Rather, it delineates the range of photography the curators have chosen; a "complete" history of photography in any country would be not only extraordinarily difficult but perhaps absurd. This is because photography has been an important tool in many fields of natural science as well as in other fields of study such as anthropology, cartography, criminology, and military science, to name but a few. A...