Hi!
Over the next few days I will try something different. For the past month I have been researching how 19th century Japanese artists mastered the art of hand colored photography.
I intended to spend about three days on a brief introduction. But it is such a fascinating story, touching on so many different aspects of history, and involving so many fascinating people, that I ended up writing for over a month…
To give you an idea of the amount of work I put into it, the essay has 52 footnotes and the selected (!) bibliography counts 31 books, papers and other sources.
The essay is too long for a newsletter, so I cut it up into four parts:
Part 1 describes how photography reached Japan.
Part 2 discusses the intense competition between studios and how this made hand coloring an important competitive tool.
In Part 3 we look at how Japanese colorists worked.
And Part 4 delves into why Japan became the empire of hand colored photography.
They will be send out as individual newsletters over several days.
An important note: the articles have a lot of links. Newsletters with many links are seen as spam by email servers, so I will not put the links in the newsletters.
You can access the links when you read the articles on the Old Photos of Japan site. Each article will feature a link to the article on the site.
If you have any comments, observations, or questions, please let me know—I am always curious! Feel free to comment on the site, or reply to the newsletter.
As always many thanks to everybody supporting my work. If you are not a supporter yet, but would like to help, you can do so at the site. Please only do so if you can afford it.
I hope you will enjoy this essay,
Kjeld