〈オールド・ジャパン〉の表象――横浜写真と19世紀後半の視覚文化――

抄録

Yokohama Photographs are images that were produced mainly in Yokohama from the 1860s to the end of the nineteenth century. Mounted on paper and bound as albums, they were sold as souvenirs for tourists from the West or exported to Europe and America. These colorful hand-tinted images represented Japanese natural landscapes, historical monuments, and human figures pictured in an exoticized way. Paying attention to topographical representations, this essay aims to locate Yokohama Photographs in the broader context of Western travel photography and to analyze their function in late nineteenth century visual culture.

Albums of Yokohama Photographs were a sort of compact archive that contained geographical, archeological and anthropological information about an unknown terrain, Japan. Furthermore, by appropriating the pictorial convention of the picturesque, the photographs “naturalized” the unfamiliar things, turning them into a romantic spectacle. In this period, the visualization of the Other was equal to the cultural domination of colonized territories by European imperialist countries. Yokohama Photographs, as well as other travel photographs, constituted a collaboration with other forms of visual culture, namely international expositions and that newly-emerged phenomenon, tourism.