The Journey of “A Good Type”: From Artistry to Ethnography in Early Japanese Photographs
Description
Tuesday, April 20, 5:30 p.m. EDT
When Japan opened its doors to the West in the 1860s, delicately hand-tinted photographic prints of Japanese people and landscapes were among its earliest and most popular exports. Understood as both images and objects, the prints embody complex issues of history, culture, representation, and exchange. Hundreds of these photographs, collected by travelers from the Boston area, were eventually donated to...
Advance ticket reservations recommended. Seating is first-come, first-served.
Artist Nathan Mabry, whose sculptures in The Sorcerer's Burden combine cultural iconography of non-western origins with Western Minimalist art, speaks with David Odo, Director of Academic and Public Programs, Division Head, and Research Curator at the Harvard Art Museums. The artist and anthropologist discuss the intersection of...
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...