The College Letter

The Bronze Statue of Daibutsu, near Kamakura

Narrated by Eleanor Hight, exhibition curator of Felice Beato: Photographer in Nineteenth-Century Japan.

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Yokohama

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Kango [kago] Bearers

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The Tokaido Road

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Hill Coolie

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Woman Applying Cosmetics

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Samurai

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Mode of Shampooing

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Geisha at a Teahouse

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‹‹ back to Geisha, Samurai, and the Tokaido Road

 

The Bronze Statue of Daibutsu, near Kamakura

About 1867-68

This is the bronze statue of Daibutsu, which was a colossal Buddha that was 44 feet high and it was near Kamakura which was very close to Yokohama, the place where Beato set up his photographic practice in 1863. This is still one of the most famous sites in Japan to go to today. You can see how crystal-clear the photograph is. Over on the right sitting on the stairs is Beato. This is one of his glass-plate negatives—they're all glass-plate negatives and they're incredibly sharp.

Yokohama

Four-part panorama

He set up his practice in Yokohama and one of the photographs in the exhibition is this four-part panorama. This was a type of photograph that was very difficult to make and it was one of Beato's specialties. It involved setting up the camera and turning it in increments so he could get this wide panoramic view. Yokohama was one of the first treaty ports that was opened after Japan opened to the West in 1854. It was set up as a treaty port in 1859 and then Beato arrived in 1863 just as it was developing into a kind of boom-town. This is the place where tourists would arrive from San Francisco or Europe or wherever, and they would come to Yokohama by ship.

Kango [kago] Bearers

About 1867-68

Beato made photographs of views of traveling and also of people. He would put these together in albums, especially after about 1868 or so. He would sell them in albums, often in two parts: one would be travel photographs and the second would be of people. This is interesting because it shows one of the methods of travel. For a lot of their sedan chairs, and this is a kago chair, they would carry people rather than having some kind of wheeled vehicle. So here we have a woman with three men who are carrying her. It is a very laborious way to travel.

The Tokaido Road

About 1867-68

It was very difficult to travel when Beato arrived in Yokohama because foreigners were only allowed to travel something like 24 miles from the various treaty ports. One of the ways he got around this was to travel with diplomats who had special permission to travel further. One of the places he went was following the Tokaido Road which was about 500 miles long that went all the way from Tokyo, or Edo as it was called when he first arrived, all the way down to Kyoto. This is one of the views of the Tokaido Road. There were 53 stations along the road where travelers could stop, and they could change horses and get food. Here you can see the shops that are along the side and people waiting for business. Notice this isn't hand-colored, which is interesting because he didn't hand-color his views, he only hand-colored his photographs of people and Hill Coolie (the next slide) is an example of that.

Hill Coolie

About 1863-68

Some people had hand-colored photographs before, but he was the one who really got it going in Japan and established it as the way to show photographs of people. It seems like his friend, the English painter Charles Wirgman, hand-colored them—or hand-painted them, but they're referred to as hand-colored in photography—hand-painted the photographs, but then later he hired Japanese artists who hand-colored them with thin washes of watercolor. So he photographed people first by finding them, paying them to hold still, and photographing them outside as you see here. Usually you could see what their occupation was and they are usually quite astounding to look at—the weight that he must have been carrying on his back.

Woman Applying Cosmetics

About 1867-68

One of the kinds of subjects that people were very interested in were photographs of women, and they thought all women were geisha: geisha, the entertainers who actually weren't prostitutes but Westerners thought they were very erotic. He would set up these scenes, probably not with geisha, probably with women who worked for him or the cleaning lady or whatever. And he would set them up in scenes such as this where you can see the woman who is putting on her cosmetics. It's interesting, he uses this oval window that's called a vignette. He often uses those in his photographs of people, and we don't know exactly why he did it. Was he just cutting off the edges of the photograph where the corners didn't look as good or did he do it on purpose like this so it is kind of a peep-hole where we look into these people from a different culture?

Samurai

About 1867-68

So, geisha were the erotic women and on the other side we had samurai. Samurai for Westerners epitomized the masculine Japanese man. And I point out for Westerners because he primarily made these photographs for foreigners—for people from Europe and the United States who came to Japan. So here he has a samurai dressed up, he has a helmet on, kind of the casual dress of the samurai. He's holding a spear. Probably these were not samurai in his photographs. They were probably his studio assistants. We think that he had a whole collection of costumes—kimonos for the women, and armor and helmets and spears and everything for the men and he would dress them up.

Mode of Shampooing

About 1867-68

Here's a photograph called Mode of Shampooing which when you first look at it looks very strange. It is an example of the kind of scene that he set up in his studio. You often see the same screens, the same hibachis and stringed instruments and pipes and the tatami mat made out of rice stalks on the floor. We wouldn't really know what this was all about, except that in his albums he had text—printed text—opposite the photographs, and this explains that there was a person called an amma and he was a blind masseuse or shampooer who would go through a town blowing his whistle to get business. He is giving this woman a massage. But it's all kind of erotic looking. There is a pipe lying on the ground. Is that for smoking opium? There's the stringed instrument over on the right that is usually connected with geisha, who Westerners thought were very erotic figures.

Geisha at a Teahouse (Geisha on Charles Longfellow's Veranda)

Tokyo, 1872

This photograph, Geisha at a Teahouse, is interesting because it has a generic title, but it was actually a commission. It was commissioned by Charles Longfellow, who was the son of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the famous poet who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Charlie, as he was known, went to live in Japan from 1871 to 1873. He moved from Yokohama, where most foreigners lived, to Tokyo and bought a house there. He was very proud of his house and hired Beato to come and take photographs of it. So, these women on the veranda of his house were actually not geisha—they're some of the women he had living with him. After Beato had taken it for Longfellow, he then gave it a more generic title and put it in his inventory so people who came to his studio could buy it to put in their albums.