Citation:
Unknown Japan: reconsidering nineteenth-century photographs. 4th ed. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum; 2008 pp. 60.
Abstract:
David Odo has researched a collection of 104 photographs that are very different from Japanese photography as it was in the early 19th century. Photography bought by westerners focused on cliché's like geisha's, sumo wrestlers and Mount Fuji. Tghese photographs were often hand coloured. This collection however, of work by anonymous photographers put together by an unknown German in 1884-1885, contains many uncoloured photographs on rare subjects. These offer a glimpse of a modernising country.