In recent Anglophone cultural and historical geography, attention has been increasingly paid to modern photography’s role in creating geographic knowledge and to its important role in nation-state building and imperialism. It has been pointed out that the mass production and consumption of photographic images tend to mold and reproduce people’s imaginative geographies. This paper focuses on the practice of ‘the production of landscapes’ undertaken by the Kubo Photo
Studio
, a local photo
studio
during the Meiji and Taisho periods in Japan. The production of landscapes here refers to two things: first, the production of landscape photographs as material representations ; second, the production of cognitive landscapes as non-material representations. These two sides of the production of landscapes interact mutually.
The Kubo Photo
Studio
was established in about 1907 by photographer Masao Kubo at Shingu, Wakayama Prefecture. The southern part of the Kii Peninsula, including Shingu, has been called ‘Kumano’ since ancient times, and is blessed with a warm climate and a scenic natural environment of mountains, streams and coasts. Kumano occupies the southern half of the area inscribed on the World Heritage List in 2004 as the ‘Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range’.
Kubo Photo
Studio
, run by Masao Kubo and his son Yoshihiro Kubo, produced and sold a variety of photography books and picture postcards featuring the natural and cultural landscapes of Kumano. In particular, the phrase ‘
Kumano Hyakkei’, meaning ‘one hundred views of Kumano’, was often employed for titles or subtitles for photography books and picture postcards. Being aware that Kumano was a sacred site deeply revered by the imperial family in ancient times, Masao Kubo dedicated
Kumano Hyakkei Shashin-cho (Picture Album of One Hundred Views of Kumano) to the imperial family in 1900. While an earlier production of
Kumano Hyakkei was based on the national value of the landscapes of Kumano as a whole, one also finds a sort of localism in which landscapes in and around Shingu were implicitly privileged by Masao Kubo. Later, under the supervision of Yoshihiro Kubo,
Kumano Hyakkei became the title for travel guidebooks conforming to the tourist view. Nevertheless, such ordinary landscapes as ports, towns, villages, agriculture, and fisheries can be observed throughout a series of
Kumano Hyakkei. Various photographic images, produced by Kubo Photo
Studio
as ‘archives of landscape’, played a vital part in molding the collective view of the landscapes of Kumano, and also in dictating what should be seen and how.
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