After Kusakabe Kimbei

[Souvenir photo album of Japan]

[After Kusakabe Kimbei. Souvenir photo album of Japan. Yokohama: late XIXc. Early XXc.]

Folio (13 ¾” x 10 9/16” 268mm x 352mm): 16 boards of compressed card. Photographs pasted to the recto and verso of each board. 32 hand-colored albumen photographs in toto.

Accordion bound in pictorial red lacquered board. Gilt botanical and landscape vignettes to the front board. Card edge-wrapped in pink cloth.

Boards detached. Extremities worn; boards scuffed, scratched, and pitted. 4 interior boards detached. Card foxed, primarily at the margin. Guards foxed, creased, ripped, and occasionally lacking. Graphite cataloging notes to the front pastedown.


During the Edo period, photography was introduced to Japan through the Dutch trading outpost located on Dejima Island in the Nagasaki Bay. Daguerreotype cameras with silver plates were brought over in 1848, and the introduction of wet collodion printing methods allowed for unlimited prints to be made, rivaling the woodblock print in efficient image production.

As photography flourished as a commercial industry in the early Meiji era, so did Western tourism due to  slackening travel restrictions for foreigners. Photographs then acted as souvenirs for Westerners' travels. However, instead of depicting contemporary life, Westerners were more interested in an exoticized image of traditional Japan. This led to studios composing staged photographs that reflected Western imaginings of the East rather than the actualized culture visitors encountered. The manufactured photographs typified three distinct categories of subject matter: customs and types, beautiful women, and famous places and views. 

While romanticizing a Japan of the past, the hand-coloring of these photographs would merge Eastern and Western tradition. With photographs overtaking woodblock prints in the image market, many woodblock print specialists were out of work, leading them to transfer their precise brush skills to photographs. Diluted paints and synthetic dyes, originally imported and used in woodblocks, were used to achieve bright and enticing colors. Italian-British photographer Felice Beato (1832–1909), who set up a studio in Yokohama, is credited with the invention of hand-coloring photos in Japan. While western-born photographers originally dominated the production of photographs, as the technology spread throughout the country, more Japanese photographers began to control the production of these images of their culture, most notably Kusakabe Kimbei (1841–1934), who trained under Beato, and whose style is reflected in the present album.

Studios created their own premier photo albums for purchase, but the creation of composite albums, where customers would select the photos themselves, was a cheaper alternative. Tracking the exact photographers of a certain work is almost impossible, as studios were concerned with the sale of the photographers over preserving artist credits. Many studios bought the stock negatives of outside artists to broaden their catalog of options, adding them to their personal portfolio. In the case of composite albums, they are colored in a variety of ways and often lack proper titles and the credits of multiple individuals.

The souvenir album industry eventually came to a halt with the rise of privately produced postcards and the relaxation of postal laws at the beginning of the 20th-century.

Cataloged Sydney Bilek and Gillian Murdock

Item #GRM0098

Price: $2,500