Constructing a First Impression of Japan: Recreating a Photo Album of Felice Beato

Constructing a First Impression of Japan: Recreating a Photo Album of Felice Beato Julia C. Fischer With the dawning of the Meiji period in the nineteenth century, following the two hundred years of isolation and xenophobia of the Tokugawa era, Japan was opened to foreigners, albeit with extensive restrictions which served to confine their movements to treaty port cities such as Yokohama and Nagasaki. Nevertheless, despite such constraints, westerners arrived at the country in the early 1860s to witness with their own eyes the exoticism and tradition of the Japanese people and landscape and also to cash in on the extreme popularity and allure that Japan held in the west. Commercial photographers established studios, particularly in Yokohama, and began stockpiling images of the Japanese countryside and its people, selling these souvenir travel photographs and albums to tourists as keepsakes of their journeys. By the late 1860s and early 1870s, the production of these photo albums became a prosperous and competitive business, primarily pioneered by the European photographer and entrepreneur Felice Beato, who would leave an indelible impact on future photographers in the country, both western and Japanese. In my paper, I will specifically examine the influential photographer, Felice Beato. A most interesting character and true Renaissance man, Beato traveled the world from India to Japan to Burma as a military and commercial photographer, a real state investor, an antiques dealer, and an importer of purses and rugs, among many other things. In particular, I will investigate Beato’s role as a commercial photographer in Japan in the late 1860s and early 1870s,