Styles / Early processes
Yokohama photography
- Key: the open sky, all around and above, soft.
Daylight studio: a skylight, a glasshouse or a courtyard, with a backdrop behind the sitter. Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.
Schematic, not to scale: worked out from the style’s choices. No set-up of this style has been rendered yet.
Sedan Chair (Japanse vrouw in een draagstoel met twee dragers)
Attributed to Raimund von Stillfried, Sedan Chair, c. 1870–80. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Source: Sedan Chair (Japanse vrouw in een draagstoel met twee dragers) at Rijksmuseum
Jinrikishia (Portret van een riksjarijder met twee vrouwelijke passagiers)
Attributed to Kusakabe Kimbei, Jinrikishia, c. 1870–91. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Source: Jinrikishia (Portret van een riksjarijder met twee vrouwelijke passagiers) at Rijksmuseum
Albumen prints of Japan made for foreign residents and tourists: views of temples, avenues, gardens and Mount Fuji, and studio scenes of 'manners and customs' (a rickshaw ride, a sedan chair, women with parasols or instruments) acted out by hired models before painted backdrops. Japanese colourists washed each print with thin watercolour, so pale pinks, blues and greens lie over a sepia image. Numbers and captions are written into the negative, and the prints were bound in albums with lacquered or inlaid covers.
How the look is made
- Stage scenes in the studio as the Yokohama studios did: one action (carrying, pulling, playing, serving) against a painted backdrop, with a few real props such as bamboo fencing, stones or tufts of grass.
- Hold the models still at middle distance and eye level, the whole tableau sharp and centred.
- Print on warm albumen, then colour by hand with thin, transparent washes so the photograph shows through: pale skin, soft blues and pinks in the clothing, green in foliage.
- Number and caption each negative in small capitals in a lower corner, as items in a catalogue of views and scenes.
- Sequence views and studio scenes together in a bound album, so landscape and genre alternate.
Shoot sheet for your kit
Fill in your camera, lenses and lights, and the sheet says which light plays each part, what to work around and where to start on your camera. Without a kit it starts on a full-frame camera.
Light
Key: the open sky, all around and above, soft.
- Daylight studio: a skylight, a glasshouse or a courtyard, with a backdrop behind the sitter.
- Open shadows: bright surroundings (walls, ground, sky) fill them; no reflector needed.
- Shadow edges
- Shadows that fade gradually from light to dark, cast by a large or diffused light: a window, a softbox, a cloudy sky.
- Shadow depth
- Shadows kept light and full of detail by a reflector, a fill light, bounce or bright surroundings (a low lighting ratio, up to about 3:1: the shadow side at most a stop and a half darker).
How the style is lit
- Even daylight from a studio skylight on models before a painted backdrop.
- Flat or gentle outdoor daylight for views of temples, avenues and gardens, the scene sharp from front to back.
This plan is worked out from the style’s choices, so it is drawn as a schematic. One way to get the light, not a record of how any photograph was lit.
Lens and settings
Start at
On a full-frame camera: the same depth of field and exposure as the style’s own numbers, in the same light. Then meter and adjust.
- The style’s f/16 on 8 × 10 in gives about the depth of field of f/2.1 on full frame.
- Then
- 35–55 mm · f/8–f/32 · 0.5–15 s · ISO 1–20 on 8 × 10 in, inferred from the gear and the look. Inferred: album prints of about 20 × 27 cm contact-printed from roughly 8 × 10 in glass negatives with 10–15 in lenses; wet collodion (about ISO 1) needed seconds, stopped down for views sharp front to back; later gelatin dry plates allowed fractions of a second.
- Focal length
- Roughly the eye’s own perspective; no visible distortion.
- Angle
- The camera at the height of a standing person or of the subject.
- Distance
- Whole figures and their immediate surroundings.
- Balance
- The subject in the middle, the frame balanced around it.
- Duration
- An unmoving scene, exposed slowly and carefully.
Direct
Hold one custom still as a tableau: bearers shoulder a sedan chair or a puller grips a rickshaw's shafts, side-on and mid-step; women sit or kneel with a parasol, fan or instrument, or turn their backs to show the obi. Faces stay composed; seated women often look calmly at the lens, while workers look ahead into the action.
- Turn to the camera
- Seen from the side, the face or the whole body turned 90° from the lens, like a head on a coin.
- Head & gaze
- Looking straight into the camera, so the subject meets the viewer’s eye.
- Arms & hands
- Hands busy with a prop or a tool: flowers, a phone, a cup, a cigarette, an instrument, one’s own work.
- Line & energy
- Rigid and motionless, sometimes braced against a head rest or gripping a chair: held for a long exposure or a solemn occasion.
- Expression
- Unsmiling, composed and blank: the face gives nothing away.
- Without a pose
- No people at all, or people so small or far off that their pose does not read (hands alone are Hands alone).
- The set-up
- A scene staged and directed like a film still or a painting.
Style the set
Models in kimono, or in the work clothes of bearers, pullers and craftsmen, often studio costume worn to play a part. A painted backdrop with bamboo fencing, stones, grass tufts and a real sedan chair or rickshaw, every prop placed by the studio; outdoor views are left as found.
- Clothes
- Period dress, fancy dress, stage costume or someone else’s clothes, worn to play a part rather than as one’s own.
- Set & props
- The stock furniture of a portrait studio, standing in for a setting: a posing chair, a column, a balustrade, a draped table, a potted palm. A painted, cloth, paper or seamless backdrop behind the subject.
- How much is styled
- Clothes, hair, make-up, props and set all chosen and placed by a team to one idea. Nothing dressed, made up, moved or added for the picture.
Finish
- Colour
- Colour painted onto a monochrome print. Pale, light colours.
- Early processes
- Warm-brown prints of the 19th century, made from negatives.
- Post-production
- Marks made by hand on the negative or the print. Words or graphic marks added to the photograph.
- Shown as
- Pictures made and shown as a set.
- Shown in
- Prints for an album, a card or a frame at home.
Stay away from candid & unobserved, snapshot, tilted angle, direct on-camera flash, visible grain, laughing, fast, full-body movement and black shadows.
Before you shoot it
These photographs were made for a foreign gaze: studios chose subjects 'to appeal to foreign taste', staged and contrived 'manners and customs' scenes with hired models, and captioned people as types, shaping an exotic, timeless picture of Japan that later critics have seen as pandering to Western exoticism. Show the originals with that context and with the studios' names (and the colourists', where known). For new work keep the craft (hand-colouring, painted backdrops, the album) and let sitters decide how they are shown; commission and credit Japanese photographers and colourists who work this way.
Photographs that define it
From open collections, shown whole with their credits. Later photographs are linked, not shown, while they are in copyright.
Stenen lantaarns langs een weg in een park in Ueno, Tokyo, Japan (Stone lanterns along a road in Ueno park)
Kusakabe Kimbei, Stone lanterns in Ueno park, Tokyo, c. 1890–1903. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Source: Stenen lantaarns langs een weg in een park in Ueno, Tokyo, Japan (Stone lanterns along a road in Ueno park) at Rijksmuseum
With other styles
Pairs with Carte-de-visite studio portraits. Both are albumen studio pictures built on painted backdrops and props; borrow the Yokohama colourists' thin watercolour washes to tint a carte-style portrait without hiding the photograph underneath.
The opposite: Malian studio portraiture. Bamako's studios photographed their own neighbours as those sitters chose to be seen, while Yokohama's cast hired models as 'types' for strangers; when you stage a backdrop portrait, let the sitter, not the buyer, decide how they appear.
The opposite: FSA/OWI documentary photography. FSA documentary claimed to record life as found, whereas Yokohama's 'customs' were acted out in a studio; never caption a staged scene as a record of how people lived.
Sources
- Adolfo Farsari, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Farsari (hand-coloured albumen prints on album leaves; 19 of 32 employees were colourists in 1891; albums in brocade or lacquer boards inlaid with ivory, mother-of-pearl and gold; customers foreign residents and tourists; subjects 'chosen to appeal to foreign taste'; scenes 'often staged and contrived'; seen as 'pandering to nineteenth-century Western notions of exoticism'; Farsari and Tamamura acquire Stillfried & Andersen in 1885)
- Felice Beato, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felice_Beato (in Yokohama by 1863; Beato & Wirgman 1864–1867; hand-colouring by Japanese watercolourists and woodblock printmakers; views paired with costumes and manners; Native Types and Views of Japan by 1868; stock sold to Stillfried & Andersen, 1877)
- Raimund von Stillfried, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raimund_von_Stillfried (Stillfried & Co. 1871–1875; Stillfried & Andersen or Japan Photographic Association 1875–1885; 'carefully staged genre scenes'; hand-coloured albumen souvenirs for foreign residents and visitors)
- Kusakabe Kimbei, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kusakabe_Kimbei (colourist and assistant to Beato and Stillfried; own Yokohama studio from 1881; negatives of Beato, Stillfried and Uchida acquired; hired geisha to pose; women popular with tourists; accordion albums; retired 1914)
- Tamamura Kozaburo, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamamura_Kozaburo (moved to Yokohama in 1883; a founder of Yokohama shashin; studio still operating in 1909)
- Hand-colouring of photographs, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hand-colouring_of_photographs (Japanese hand-colouring from the 1860s; Beato and Wirgman first; Stillfried, Kimbei, Tamamura, Farsari; watercolour and transparent pigments; continued into the 20th century)
- Langmann Family Photograph collection, Museum of Anthropology at UBC: https://atom.moa.ubc.ca/index.php/langmann-family-photograph-collection (hand-coloured albumen prints of the Meiji period; albums with lacquer covers decorated in makie; subjects echoing ukiyo-e; 'souvenir photography or Yokohama photography')
- Japanse vrouw in een draagstoel met twee dragers ('Sedan Chair'), attributed to Raimund von Stillfried, Rijksmuseum: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/RP-F-F01174-U (studio scene with painted backdrop, hand-coloured albumen print in an album)
- Sedan Chair, attributed to Raimund von Stillfried, Rijksmuseum: https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/collection/RP-F-F01174-U (hand-coloured albumen print, 198 × 267 mm)
- Hommoku, Yokohama, Syracuse University Art Museum: https://onlinecollections.syr.edu/objects/33755/hommoku-yokohama (albumen print, c. 1880, sheet 20.5 × 25.6 cm)
- Wet Collodion and Ambrotype Process (Scully & Osterman), EdinPhoto: https://edinphoto.org.uk/1_early/1_early_photography_-_processes_-_wet_collodion_-_osterman.htm (collodion plates have a rating of about ASA 1, so long exposures are required)
- Collodion process, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collodion_process (wet collodion needed only a few seconds to expose an image in daylight; sensitive only to blue and ultraviolet; gelatin dry plates could be made much more sensitive)