titled Documentary Age, surveyed the history of
Japanese documentary photography for 50 years
beginning in the 1930s, focusing on four renowned
Japanese photographers: Yonosuke Natori, Ihee
Kimura, Ken Domon, and Jun Miki. The 2003 exhi-
bition, titledEarly Photography and Pictorial Art—
Samurai: Dandyism in Japan, organized in celebra-
tion of 400 years of Tokyo (Edo) having been the
nation’s capital, examined images of the samurai in
early photographs and traditional pictorial art.
Photographers whose one-person exhibitions were
organized at the museum include Ihee Kimura, Sho-
mei Tomatsu, Jun Miki, Ikko Narahara, Shigeichi
Nagano, and Nobuyoshi Araki as well as Andre ́Ker-
te ́sz, Fosco Maraini, Robert Capa, and W. Eugene
Smith. Among them,Traces—50 Years of Shomei
Tomatsu’s Works (1999) and Japan Through the
Eyes of W. Eugene Smith(1996) are, perhaps, some
of the most comprehensive retrospectives of these
photographers. In particular, the latter focused on
the three bodies of photographs Smith made in
Japan between World War II and the early 1970s,
in Okinawa, Hitachi, and Minamata, respectively,
making a significant contribution to the scholarship
on Smith. The exhibitions organized by the museum
in efforts to promote contemporary photography
includeAsian View—Asia in Transition(1996),Gen-
der beyond Memory: The Works of Contemporary
Women Artists(1996),Kiss in the Dark: Contempor-
ary Japanese Photography(2001), and On Happi-
ness—Contemporary Japanese Photography(2003).
The museum started the Tokyo International Photo-
graphy Biennial in 1995, but it ended in 1999 due to
the museum’s budget constraints.
YasufumiNakamori
Seealso:Photography in JapanTokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. http://www.syabi.
com (accessed May 31, 2005).TONING
The toning of black and white photographic prints
is a chemical method of either applying a colour or
intensity change to the image, or it can sometimes
be used to increase the print’s archival qualities. A
variety of toning solutions can be applied to replace
the print’s conventional colour with various shades
of sepia, or with tones such as red, blue, yellow, or
green. Some toners, such as those using gold and
selenium salts can slightly change the intensity and
contrast of a print often without a marked colour
change, but by coating the silver within the emul-
sion with a more stable metal, it will in turn provide
the print with longer archival permanence.
The use of toners has been common practise
practically since the advent of photography. Gold
chloride was used in the nineteenth century on
albumen prints, to change the colour (or tone) of
the print from a warm, reddish brown to a colder,
purple brown. This resulting, distinctive tone was
seen as preferable (as well as being more perma-
nent), thus toning became a normal part of the
photographic process. When gelatin silver papers
were introduced in the 1890s toning offered a me-
thod of simulating the colours of the papers that
photographers had grown accustomed to. While
today it is considered normal for a monochromatic
image to be seen only in black and white, in the
nineteenth century, browns, reds, and even blues
were all customary colours available from the
photographer’s palette.
The contemporary use of toning, especially the
warm browns of the sepia tone, are often per-
ceived as bringing a feeling of nostalgia towards
the image. Historically this has been used by
numerous photographers with intent to convey a
sense of times past. Edward S. Curtis, from 1900
spent 30 years recording the lives, customs, and
traditions of the remaining tribes of native North
Americans. He used a variety of processes in the
volumes of prints he published, especially plati-
num and photogravure, the latter photo-mechani-
cally reproduced with sepia inks. His silver prints
were toned to replicate the warmth of these ear-
lier processes and to complement and dignify his
subjects. Though his work was intended for edi-
tioned volumes and portfolios, Curtis sold indivi-TOKYO METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHY