Voiceover: Felice Beato in Japan
February 19 to June 12, 2022
In a presentation in the photography room, the Museum Ludwig is showing hand-colored photographs by the Italian-British photographer Felice Beato. His Western, exoticizing view of a bygone Japan, which he recreated in his studio, will be supplemented in the presentation with spoken commentary by Japanese people.
In 1863, the Italian-British photographer Felice Beato (*1832, Venice; †1909, Florence) traveled to Japan, which had only recently started opening up to the West and was undergoing a great social upheaval from the feudal system of the Edo period (1603–1868) to the imperial Meiji era (1868–1912). Despite this, Beato ran a photography studio in the port city of Yokohama until 1884, where he exclusively sold pictures of the old Japanese ways. His genre pictures and landscapes were printed in large numbers and scattered across the globe. Before photography became easier thanks to small-format cameras and roll film in the late nineteenth century, merchants, missionaries, diplomats, military officers, and travelers to Japan bought Beato’s photographs. The hand-colored albumen prints mounted on cardboard could be purchased individually or, on request, bound into albums with explanatory texts at the studio. While Beato’s early photographs of Japan were colored by his partner Charles Wirgman, this was increasingly done by his Japanese studio employees, who were trained in the art of colored woodcuts or calligraphy. In 1872 Beato employed two assistants, four photographers, and four colorists. Despite this commercial production, each photograph is thus unique. And souvenir photography in Yokohama—also known as Yokohama shashin (Yokohama photography or Yokohama School)—became famous for these colorings.
Beato’s pictures convey a Western, exoticizing view of a supposedly timeless country, which continues to shape people’s perception of the island nation to this day. We see people engaged in different activities in the carefully arranged setting of a photography studio, and occasionally outside. The fact that we are not certain of the names of the people in the photographs is also due to the circumstance that Beato usually hired models who were then outfitted with culturally traditional props to portray dancers or musicians, for example.
These are juxtaposed with woodcuts by nineteenth-century Japanese artists that show Western and early Japanese photographers in sometimes humorous scenes. Pre-recorded spoken commentary by Japanese people today, who together examine and question Beato’s photographs, is presented as a voiceover.
All the photographs and lacquered albums on view come from the collection of photojournalist Robert Lebeck, who traveled to Japan for the first time in 1961 for the report “Japan – I see!” in the magazine Kristall in order to photograph the first nuclear power plant there, among other things. His collection of photographs was given to the Museum Ludwig in 1993.
Curators: Miriam Szwast and Meike Deilmann
