Presentation for the panel, Mediascapes in Asia at the International Convention of Asia Scholars 11, Leiden, Netherlands.
When Tokyo-based commercial photographer Matsuzaki Shinji made the first photographs of the Ogasawara Islands during a Japanese colonial expedition in 1875, he also created the first photographs of the multicultural islanders residing there, and among the first sets of colonial photographs commissioned by the emerging modern Japanese Empire. Ogasawara, known as the Bonin Islands in Western languages, was first settled by a cosmopolitan group of people from...
Center for Japanese Studies, University of Hawaii, Manoa
Abstract: When is a photograph a souvenir? A work of art? Anthropological data? How can tourist photographs, produced to appeal to foreign visitors of “exotic” lands, become scientific data? Based on his studies of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology’s collection of early photographs of Japan at Harvard University, David Odo, author of The Journey of “A Good Type”: From Artistry to Ethnography in Early Japanese Photographs, will discuss this complicated terrain. The collection—comprised of highly aesthetic photographs...
Paper:Place, Image, Identity: Nagasawa Shinichiro’s photographs of the Ogasawara (Bonin) Islands
Panel: To Seek, To See, To Find, To Create a Place
Abstract: When Tokyo-based commercial photographer Nagasawa Shinichiro first visited Japan’s Ogasawara Islands more than a decade ago on assignment for a travel magazine, he was struck by the subtropical archipelago’s natural beauty. But as he learned more about the islands, he became...
Paper: New Curatorial and Teaching Practice at the Harvard Art Museums
Panel: Contemporary artistic productions and intercultural dialogues
Abstract: Along with the recent dramatic renovation and expansion of the physical spaces of the Harvard Art Museums, curatorial and teaching practice has undergone a similarly dramatic rethinking. This paper will discuss the ways in which curating and teaching with art has been transformed at Harvard through an examination of two recent exhibitions: Everywhen: The Eternal...
How might encounters with works of art in the museum be an opportunity to meaningfully engage with difficult issues surrounding pain and suffering? Such encounters are most often deployed within art museums as part of a program to teach or... Read more about Pain, Suffering, and Empathy in the Art Museum
The history of photography in Japan is coterminous with that of modernity. It was during the Meiji period that photography quickly developed into one of the most important media for artistic expression and documentation in Japan. Since the “visual turn” inspired theoretical debates in the 1990s, scholars in Japanese studies have become...