Name: How colorized photos helped introduce Japan to the world
Uploaded: 2020-10-08T18:10:21.000Z
Duration: 8 min 5 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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Pretty much as soon as photography was invented in the 1830s,

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

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

Leading to an influx of travelers and traders from Europe and North America.

Foreigners coming to Japan brought their clothes.

Photography was relatively new at the time, and became a lucrative trade for foreigners

Starting in the 1860s, photographers – mostly European, but some Japanese – documented

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

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

He was the first to really take advantage of color photography on a commercial scale

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

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

The samurai, for example, had all but disappeared by the 1870s.

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

An artist and former apprentice to foreign photographers.

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

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

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

Composition and more importantly, subject matter, I think you can see a really direct

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

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

That image of the woman with the umbrella relates to previous, centuries, really, of

the way women were sometimes portrayed in Japanese art.

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

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