DOI Heft:
No. 66 (September, 1898)
DOI Artikel:Hill-Burton, M. R.: Photography and colour-painting in Japan
DOI Seite / Zitierlink: https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.21969#0283
Photography and Colour-Printing in Japan
VIEW OF FUJI SAN
FROM A JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPH
present day some of the Japanese photographers
are second to none, either in technical skill or in
artistic grasp of subject, and nowhere probably is
the art practised in so lordly a style. One wealthy
amateur boasts the possession of the largest camera
in the world, and employs no fewer than eleven
assistants.
Mr. Ogawa’s studio turns out portraits and very
beautiful landscapes and subject plates, but the
director’s strongest interest is, as it always has
been, in photographic illustration and reproduc-
tion. Some of his half-tone prints, both from
pictures and from photographs direct from nature,
are very successful, and his collotypes, printed in
various delicate neutral tints, are as fine as any-
thing the camera has produced. In his books,
Some Japanese Flcnuers and Scenes from Open-Air
Life, is observable a precision of detail that satisfies
even a botanist. These flower photographs, among
which he includes garden scenes, are in fact very
useful to botanical students and designers.
The two books together give a very complete
picture of Japan. In the book on open-air life we
have the country as it is, in the flower book we
have it as the people wish it to be, and sometimes
246
make it. Their time-honoured habit of making
living, growing pictures is a great boon to the
photographer. The Wistaria arcades of Kameida,
the cherry-blossom festival, are already works of
art which only want to be recorded.
The success of these tone processes is the more
remarkable as they have no prototype in indigenous
art. Whilst the line in Japanese drawing is often
extremely realistic, the light and shade is purely
conventional. I have seen an experimental draw-
ing in European style by a Japanese artist so well
outlined and so grotesquely shaded that one would
have taken it for a line drawing by a master
smudged by a child.
Mr. Ogawa was good enough to show me through
all his studios; but by far the most interesting to
me was the workshop of the Ko-kwa. To get
there we drove in jinrickisha many miles through
the monotonous little streets of Tokyo. At a
little two-storey house we pulled up, and were
received by two Japanese in blue cotton dressing
gowns, and after a few minutes’ parley in a tiny
apartment we climbed up a very steep and narrow
stair. Immediately my head came above the top
of it I was in the presence of, and on a level
VIEW OF FUJI SAN
FROM A JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPH
present day some of the Japanese photographers
are second to none, either in technical skill or in
artistic grasp of subject, and nowhere probably is
the art practised in so lordly a style. One wealthy
amateur boasts the possession of the largest camera
in the world, and employs no fewer than eleven
assistants.
Mr. Ogawa’s studio turns out portraits and very
beautiful landscapes and subject plates, but the
director’s strongest interest is, as it always has
been, in photographic illustration and reproduc-
tion. Some of his half-tone prints, both from
pictures and from photographs direct from nature,
are very successful, and his collotypes, printed in
various delicate neutral tints, are as fine as any-
thing the camera has produced. In his books,
Some Japanese Flcnuers and Scenes from Open-Air
Life, is observable a precision of detail that satisfies
even a botanist. These flower photographs, among
which he includes garden scenes, are in fact very
useful to botanical students and designers.
The two books together give a very complete
picture of Japan. In the book on open-air life we
have the country as it is, in the flower book we
have it as the people wish it to be, and sometimes
246
make it. Their time-honoured habit of making
living, growing pictures is a great boon to the
photographer. The Wistaria arcades of Kameida,
the cherry-blossom festival, are already works of
art which only want to be recorded.
The success of these tone processes is the more
remarkable as they have no prototype in indigenous
art. Whilst the line in Japanese drawing is often
extremely realistic, the light and shade is purely
conventional. I have seen an experimental draw-
ing in European style by a Japanese artist so well
outlined and so grotesquely shaded that one would
have taken it for a line drawing by a master
smudged by a child.
Mr. Ogawa was good enough to show me through
all his studios; but by far the most interesting to
me was the workshop of the Ko-kwa. To get
there we drove in jinrickisha many miles through
the monotonous little streets of Tokyo. At a
little two-storey house we pulled up, and were
received by two Japanese in blue cotton dressing
gowns, and after a few minutes’ parley in a tiny
apartment we climbed up a very steep and narrow
stair. Immediately my head came above the top
of it I was in the presence of, and on a level