Following the typical geographical travel route at the end of the 19th century, the catalog presents the Japanese island world as mirrored in historical travel photography. The route leads past some of the most spectacular sights and natural attractions of Japan and opens up intriguing insights into the country’s cultural life. While imposing cityscapes bear witness to the rapid progress of industrialization and urbanization in Japan in the modern era, the photographs of teahouses and artistically arranged parks and temple grounds provide a fascinating impression of the diversity and continuity of traditional Japanese culture. A further focal point is the human and his environment. The photographs demonstrate Europe’s encyclopedic interest in everyday Japanese life by presenting Japanese people as actors in genre scenes as well as in the setting of their own homes. As photographic documents, the elaborately hand-colored albumin prints are evidence of the quality of Japanese photography in the late 19th century, which has lost nothing of its fascination today, anticipating as it did the advent of color photography a whole century before its invention.

Editor: Alfried Wieczorek, Claude W. Sui
Authors: Alfried Wieczorek, Claude W. Sui, Stephanie Oeben

Hardcover
24x30 cm
160 pages
180 color ills.

German
available
ISBN 978-3-86828-269-6
36 Euro
2011