With the summer holidays upon us it's time to catch up on some reading. This new publication which BPH came across by chance a few weeks ago and purchased is a much needed study of an overlooked subject, from a country which has done so much to influence photography.Highly recommended!
The Japanese passion for photography is almost a cliché, but how did it begin? Although Japanese art photography has been widely studied this book is the first to demonstrate how photography became an everyday activity. Japan's enthusiasm for photography emerged alongside a retail and consumer revolution that marketed products and activities that fit into a modern, tasteful, middle-class lifestyle.
Kerry Ross examines the magazines and merchandise promoted to ordinary Japanese people in the early twentieth century that allowed Japanese consumers to participate in that lifestyle, and gave them a powerful tool to define its contours. Each chapter discusses a different facet of this phenomenon, from the revolution in retail camera shops, to the blizzard of socially constructive how-to manuals, and to the vocabulary of popular aesthetics that developed from enthusiasts sharing photos.
Ross looks at the quotidian activities that went into the entire picture-making process, activities not typically understood as photographic in nature, such as shopping for a camera, reading photography magazines, and even preserving one's pictures in albums. These very activities, promoted and sponsored by the industry, embedded the camera in everyday life as both a consumer object and a technology for understanding modernity, making it the irresistible enterprise that Eastman encountered in his first visit to Japan in 1920 when he remarked that the Japanese people were "almost as addicted to the Kodak habit as ourselves."
Kerry Ross is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at DePaul University.
Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early Twentieth-Century Japan
Kerry Ross
Stanford University Press
288pp 9780804795647 PB £16.99 now only £13.59* when you quote CSL815PHFE when you order from:
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