Content area
Full Text
The History of Japanese Photography by Anne Wilkes-Tucker, Dans Friis-Hansen, Kaneko Ryuichi, and Takeba Joe with essays by Iizawa Kotaro and Kinoshita Naoyuki Yale University Press in association with the Museum of Fine Arts, 2003/ 432 pp. (356 color+ 36 b/w illus.) / $56 (hb) and $50 (sb).
The History of Photography is the 406-page catalogue of an exhibition that originated at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and is currently on view at the Cleveland Museum of Art (until July 27, 2003.) Almost every illustration of this coffee-table size book can be seen on the walls of the Cleveland Museum of Art. The show and catalogue cover a span of 150 years of Japanese photography that only started to develop with the Meiji era, when, following decisions of the new emperor, Meiji, Japan opened itself to the rest of the world and more specifically to European and American influences and commerce.
For the first 100 years, Japanese photography seemed to have emulated western influence; going through successive periods of intense portraiture, pictorialism, and modernism. The founders and developers of Japanese photographic technology were trained in Germany as soon as the 1900s. The real revolution happened after...