Unknown Japan: Reconsidering 19th-century Photographs

David Odo has researched a collection of 104 photographs that are very different from Japanese photography as it was in the early 19th century. Photography bought by westerners focused on cliché's like geisha's, sumo wrestlers and Mount Fuji. Tghese photographs were often hand coloured. This collection however, of work by anonymous photographers put together by an unknown German in 1884-1885, contains many uncoloured photographs on rare subjects. These offer a glimpse of a modernising country. The Manfred & Hanna Heiting Fund enables young researchers to study photography in the archives of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and publish their results in the series Rijksmuseum Studies in Photography.