769
JAPAN
ducing the thickness of air through which observations
would be made. This observatory, the foundations of
which were fi xed in the snow that covers the summit
to a depth of ten meters, was built in September 1893,
and Janssen, in spite of his sixty-nine years, made the
ascent and spent four days taking observations. On
August 18 1868 of that same year, while observing an
eclipse of the Sun in India, he noticed a bright yellow
line with a wavelength of 587.49 nm in the spectrum
of the chromospheres of the Sun. Janssen was at fi rst
ridiculed since no element had ever been detected in
space before being found on Earth. On October 20 of
the same year, English astronomer Norman Lockyer also
observed the same yellow line in the solar spectrum and
concluded that it was caused by an unknown element
after unsuccessfully testing to see if it were some new
type of hydrogen. Since it was near the Fraunhofer D
line he later named the new line D3, distinguishing it
from the nearby D1 and D2 doublet lines of sodium.
He and English chemist Edward Frankland named the
element after the Greek word for the Sun god, Helios,
and, assuming it was a metal, gave it an -ium ending (a
mistake that was never corrected).
Janssen belonged to this group of photographers for
whom even considering the respect they have for the
medium nd their awareness of tit limits a purely techni-
cal relation is not enough. Janssen created his world for
registration himself, subordinating its images to certain
manual manipulations because of the need to manifest
his own creativity.
In 1874, the French government proposed Janssen
is the director of a new observatory intended for astro-
nomical physics. He accepted the offer and chose the
site of Meudon for observatory and in 1876, he collected
the remarkable series of solar photographs for his great
Atlas de photographies solaires (1904). The fi rst volume
of the Annales de l’observatoire de Meudon was pub-
lished by him in 1896. Astrophotography is a specialized
type of photography that entails making photographs of
astronomical objects in the night sky such as planets,
stars, and deep sky objects such as star clusters and
galaxies. Astrophotography was used to reveal objects
that are too faint to observe with the naked eye, as both
fi lm and digital cameras can accumulate and sun pho-
tons over long periods of time. Astrophotography posed
challenges that were distinct from normal photography,
because most subjects were usually quite faint and often
small in angular size.
Janssen later became director of the observatory on
Mont Blanc. His photographer’s of the mountains has
interested for the way in which it has involved two main
paradigms of historical method, whose results have
come together in a very fruitful and complementary
manner.
I refer on the one hand, to the concept of the pho-
tograph as in effect a container for data from which
evidence may be deduced, a classic approach to pho-
tographic history; and on the other, to a view of the
photograph which owes more to archeology, and pays
attention tot the nature of what is to be found with it,
irrespective of whether or not there is any primarily
photographic connection. However, it depends on each
perceiver’s sensibility and imagination how broad and
interesting the visual world of Janssen might seem.
He died at Meudon by Paris on the 23rd of December
1907.
Johan Swinnen
See also: France; Astronomy; Topographical
Photography; Science.Further Reading
Eder, Josef Maria, History of Photography, New York: Dover
Publications, 1972.
Frizot, Michel (ed.), Nouvelle Histoire de la Photographie, Paris:
Bordas, 1994.
Gernsheim, Helmut and Alison, The origins of photography,
London: Thames and Hudson, 1982.
Heilbrun, Françoise (ed.), L’invention d’un regard (1839–1918),
Paris: Musée d’Orsay/Bibliothèque nationale, 1989.
Launay, Françoise, Dans les champs des étoiles, les photographes
et le ciel 1850–2000, Paris: Musée d’Orsay, 2000.
Le Rider, Georges, Une invention du XIXe siècle, expressionet
technique, la photographie, collection de la société française
de photographie, Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, 1976.
Lemagny Jean-Claude, Sayag, Alain, L’invention d’un art, Paris:
Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989.
Sipley, Louis Walton, Photography’s Great Inventors, Philadel-
phia: American Museum of Photography, 1965.JAPAN
When Daguerre made his historic announcement to the
French Academy of Sciences in 1839, Japan had been
offi cially closed to the outside world for two hundred
years and was not to be opened to foreign trade for
another twenty. News of scientifi c progress in the West
only came to Japan as a result of the exclusive trading
privileges that the Kingdom of the Netherlands enjoyed
with the Shogun’s government, and it is a striking
testimony to the persistence and dedication of con-
temporary Japanese scholars of Western learning—or
rangaku (‘Dutch Learning’)—that the fi rst camera was
imported into Japan in 1843. This was in response to an
order made through the Dutch trading post in Nagasaki
by a local merchant, Ueno Toshinojô, and it is typical
of the numerous false starts that bedeviled the advent
of photography in Japan that the daguerrian apparatus
was unaccountably sent back and Ueno was not to
see his purchase again until it was fi nally returned to