Looking east: a revelatory survey traces the history of photography in Japan, from the reticent culture of the Chrysanthemum Throne to the consumer-driven society of today - Photography

Art in America, July, 2003 by Lyle Rexer

In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay and initiated what many Japanese would later call "the unprecedented national difficulty." The phrase referred to the opening of Japan to Western influence after nearly two centuries of deliberate exclusion. But it might just as well have referred to one of the things Perry brought with him--photography.

The first photograph made in Japan was taken by a member of Perry's expedition, and within a few years, foreigners were teaching the first generation of Japanese photographers. This was an international medium from the outset, and, as with every country where it appeared, photography immediately tended to level national identity and fine-art traditions, imposing the discipline of the lens. Indeed, the more one considers "The History of Japanese Photography," the straightforwardly titled yet monumental--if not canonical--exhibition of more than 200 works organized by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Japan Foundation, the more Japan begins to look like Europe, England and the United States during the last 150 years of photography's evolution.

The exhibition ranges from the earliest images of the 1850s, made with paper negatives, to high-gloss contemporary C-prints. As in the West, ceremonial ambrotype (glass plate) portraits dominated early on and offer fascinating glimpses of a changing culture. The topknotted samurai in photographs of the 1860s are replaced just a few years later by fake samurai wearing wigs: 1868 saw the end of the Tokugawa shogunate and its itinerant warrior class, but a market for such images remained.

Here, too, is Tanaka Takeshi's 14-print panorama of Tokyo, a city already enormous by 1890. Such scenic views were among the many documentary and commercial uses to which the Japanese put the medium--as did photographers everywhere. Their propagandistic battlefield scenes of the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95 could have come straight from the studio of the Englishman James Thompson, who recorded the Crimean War, and many of the landscapes could have been done by W.H. Jackson, photographer of the American West. Even the so-called geisha pictures, which were labeled as such for Westerners but were in fact local tradeswomen or prostitutes--they were sold simply as "beauties" to Japanese buyers--have their counterparts elsewhere in the world. (At the turn of the last century in Iran, for example, Antoin Sevruguin was enthusiastically engaged in reconfirming Westerners' Oriental stereotypes with posed odalisques and pashas.) No matter how Japanese photographers attempted to frame photography in terms of traditional arts--say, by mounting a straight-on photograph of Mount Fuji on a beautiful hanging silk scroll, or by creating an elaborate ceremonial display stand for the first photograph of a Japanese emperor (which, alas, was not allowed to leave Japan for this exhibition)--photography brought its own camera-mediated air of documentary neutrality.

Japanese art photography likewise evolved as it did elsewhere in the world, from hazy pictorialism in the early 20th century through a formal and sharp-edged modernism with surrealist undercurrents, through a post-World War II documentary realism, to the political and sexual provocations of the 1960s, and beyond, to the postmodern manifestations of Japan's contemporary consumer society. As the exhibition's absolutely essential catalogue documents in detail, from the 1890s through the 1950s, camera clubs and photo societies proliferated; photo publications sprang up like weeds. Yet even the intensity of Japan's national photomania was hardly unique. We might just as easily be describing the same period in Czechoslovakia or Hungary, whose princes and princesses often frequented photo exhibitions.

For curator Anne Wilkes Tucker, whose idea eight years ago was the seed from which this landmark exhibition grew, the very lack of an overriding national character in the history of Japanese photography is the show's central revelation. In her view, there is a discernible trajectory to photography's development worldwide, and this reflects not only the globalization of culture but also the nature of the beast itself as the first truly modern medium of representation.

But does some hint of the kimono sash peep through between the buttons of the Western suit? Quite apart from subject matter and the basic evolutionary stages of the medium's history, are there elements of a national practice or esthetic that survive translation into the visual lingua franca of modernity? Given that the exhibition represents a collaboration among Japanese and American curators (Kaneko-Ryuichi, guest curator at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Takeba Joe, curator at the Nagoya City Art Museum; Dana Friis-Hansen, executive director and chief curator of the Austin Museum of Art; and Tucker), we might expect the Japaneseness of Japanese photography to have been muted. Yet one of the great pleasures of this exhibition is the opportunity to see how photography was subtly adapted to a dense and highly traditional visual culture.