Japan in Early Photographs: The Aime Humbert Collection at the Museum of Ethnography, Neuchatel

Description

Photographs taken in Japan between the late Edo and early Meiji periods that found their way overseas played a major role in forming Westerners' image of Japan. Among these collections, the pictures gathered by the Swiss diplomat Aime Humbert (1819-1900) in the 1860s were crucial in building lasting representations of the island nation: many of these, mainly collected in 1863/64 during a sojourn in Yokohama and Edo, were used as sources for the well-known and largely distributed engravings of his famous book Le Japon illustre, published in Paris in 1870.

Gregoire Mayor is adjunct curator at the MEN - Museum of Ethnography, Neuchatel (CH), and lecturer in visual anthropology at the Institute of Ethnology, University of Neuchatel. Tani Akyioshi was curator at the Shoji Ueda Museum of Photography, Tottori (JP) until 2000; researcher in the Conservation Laboratory at the Historiographical Institute, University of Tokyo (JP); part-time lecturer in the Department of Photography, Nihon University College of Art (JP); and visiting scholar (2007-2008) at the Center for the History of European Expansion, Leiden University (NL).

Packed with images and key information, Japan in Early Photographs should be an essential acquisition for any authoritative collection strong not just in Japanese arts, but in Japanese history.--Donovan's Literary Services