771
fi rst documented use of a camera by a Japanese in 1848
and the election of Ogawa Kazumasa as a Fellow of the
Royal Photographic Society in 1895 were characterized
by the steady closing of the time lag between photo-
graphic innovation in the West and its adoption in Japan.
Many of the fi rst Japanese students of photography in
the 1850s struggled to master the daguerreotype pro-
cess at a time when it was being rendered obsolescent
in Europe and the United States by the collodion wet
plate process. As contact with foreign photographers
became more frequent following the opening of selected
Japanese ports for trade in 1859, up-to-date technical
instruction became available and the wet-collodion
process enjoyed widespread usage in Japan until the
end of the nineteenth century. Even as late as 1896,
ambrotypes, encased in distinctive paulownia wooden
boxes, remained popular as a cheap method of securing
a portrait, and its American equivalent, the tintype, was
never adopted. Similarly, many photographers continued
to use wet-collodion negatives even after dry-plates
began to be imported into Japan in the early 1880s.
Indeed, the arrival of the fi rst dry-plates in Japan proved
to be something of a false start. In March 1879, little
over one year after the British inventor Joseph Swan had
perfected his process of manufacturing pre-sensitized
negatives, free samples from the Mawson and Swan
works were being circulated among selected Japanese
commercial photographers. The new technology did not
catch on, and most photographers, after experimenting
unsuccessfully with the unfamiliar plates, continued as
before. The fi rst successful application of the process
in Japan—by a Japanese photographer at least—did not
occur until May 1883, when the Tokyo photographer
Esaki Reiji photographed the controlled explosion of a
torpedo during a naval review in the Sumida River. This
memorable image served as both an advertisement for
Esaki’s self-claimed status as a hayatori shashinshi, and
an encouragement to other photographers. One imme-
diate benefi t to the Esaki studio was a sudden increase
in demand from parents for portraits of their children,
who could now be photographed with greater ease, and
by his own estimate in the following three years Esaki
produced over 3,000 negatives of infants aged under
15 months old. Nevertheless, Japanese adherence to
the wet-collodion process remained widespread for the
remainder of the 1880s, partly as a result of the irregular
quality of imported dry plates and partly of habit, and for
a time even those photographers who used the new plates
made a habit of taking second exposures with wet-plates
as a form of insurance policy. Eventually, in 1888, the
photographic supplier Konishi began to import Marion
dry-plates on a regular basis and their reliability ensuredJAPAN
Brady, Mathew and
Alexander Gardner. Members
of the First Japanese Mission
to the United States.
The J. Paul Getty Museum,
Los Angeles © The J. Paul
Getty Museum.