Yokohama shashin

Collection composed of 12 wet collodion photographs printed on albumen paper and hand-colored. The coloring of the photographs uses the traditional technique of distemper painting (natural pigments mixed with glue) applied with a brush. Photographers thus employed painters rather than the watercolorists used for prints.
Album formed of two wooden boards covered with brown fabric showing visible fibers, bound Japanese-style as an accordion. Each fold-out (recto and verso) presents 6 photographs: on the recto (animated scenes) views of landscapes and cities, on the verso, figures. This presentation is traditional for travel albums "views and costume," which the Japanese would later adopt. Each photograph: 8.7x13.2cm. The first 2 photographs have faded, making the red pigments of the paint very visible as a result. For the second panel, the first and 6th photographs have also faded, likewise leaving the red pigments used very visible. The fifth has 2 scratched areas revealing the white of the paper. Foxing in the margins and on some photographs.
The views represent famous sights along the Tokaido route, the Meiji temple twice, a busy street with lanterns, a view of Mount Fuji with the famous wooden bridge... The earliest collections, with Felice Beato, showed only views of old Japan in black and white, and representation and demand evolved. These Japanese views are very close in their staging and framing to the art of printmaking. One finds the Japanese taste, already illustrated by prints, for famous sites.
Furthermore, one sees almost no men in photographs from this period because the photographs were meant to represent contemporary Japan and men were now dressed in Western fashion; there were no more samurai. This is why women are represented in more than 70 percent of photographs from this period, and in this collection one sees only one man, a rickshaw puller. On this subject, it was always geishas who were used for the photographs. All the studios thus had contracts with geisha houses whom they had pose for all scenes: musicians, etc.
The photographs of women: A woman with a fan, 3 women holding hands, 2 women in a carriage, 3 women dancing, the women of a geisha house.
One must note that any attribution to a photographer is difficult due to the very history of photography in Japan, because all the European studios and the first Japanese studios were bought by Japanese and the plates continued to be exploited under the name of the new photographer. Few albums and photographs bear a signature or studio mark. For example, we know that Beato left professional photography in 1872. Baron von Stillfried left Japan definitively in 1881. The same year, Kimbei Kusakabe (1841-1934), student of Beato and Stillfried, opened his own studio in Yokohama. He would buy back part of his two masters' negatives four years later and regularly reprint them.