Photography in the Bakumatsu — Silver and Wet Plates Capture the Samurai
The faces of the Bakumatsu activists we picture today are, for the most part, conveyed by a single photograph taken at the time. From an age of painted portraits to one in which a machine captured a person's likeness directly — the arrival of photography was an essential cultural turning point in the story of the Bakumatsu.
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A new technology that arrived around the opening of Japan
Photography itself was a brand-new invention, announced in France in 1839 as the daguerreotype (silver-plate photography). Cameras reached Japan through Nagasaki as early as the late 1840s — before Perry's arrival of the Black Ships. The latest Western technology took root in Japan gradually, through the years around the opening of the country.
The daguerreotype, which fixed an image directly onto a silver plate, produced only one-of-a-kind pictures and was difficult to handle. When wet-plate (collodion) photography, which exposed a glass plate coated with emulsion, spread, it became possible to make multiple paper prints from a single negative, and photography quickly became more accessible.
The pioneers Ueno Hikoma and Shimooka Renjō
Among the most famous Japanese photographers were Ueno Hikoma of Nagasaki and Shimooka Renjō of Yokohama.
Ueno Hikoma, who had studied chemistry, opened a photographic studio in Nagasaki. Many activists and dignitaries who passed through the city are said to have visited it. Shimooka Renjō, for his part, mastered the art after much effort and ran a commercial studio in Yokohama. In west and east respectively, the two pioneers planted the new culture of photography.
Foreign photographers such as Felice Beato also captured many scenes of Bakumatsu Japan, leaving valuable records.
The portraits of the activists are born
The famous portrait of Sakamoto Ryōma, standing with his elbow on a stand, is said to have been taken at Ueno Hikoma's studio in Nagasaki. Because exposures took a long time, sitters had to hold perfectly still — and behind that dignified pose lay such technical realities.
To be photographed must have been a special experience for people of the time. The sense of having one's likeness recorded "as it was," without a painter's brush, was itself something that made the dawn of civilization and enlightenment feel real.
What photography left behind
The photographs taken from the Bakumatsu into the Meiji era are, for us today, primary sources for understanding the age. Expressions, clothing and hairstyles, streetscapes and buildings — details that no text or painting alone could convey are burned into them.
We should not forget, however, that a photograph too is a record composed by the intentions of the one who took it. Reading also for that background — who photographed what, and why — makes the photographs of the Bakumatsu speak all the more richly as testimony of their age.
The lives of the activists who were photographed are explored one by one in Bakumatsu Figures. Other culture of the age is gathered in Bakumatsu Culture.
Related reading
The Black Ships and the Opening of Japan — Four Vessels That Ended Two Centuries of Seclusion
In 1853 the Black Ships under Commodore Perry appeared off Uraga, and Japan turned toward opening its ports. A clear, fact-based account of the arrival of the Black Ships, the end of seclusion, and the dawn of the Bakumatsu.
Rangaku and the Tekijuku — The Window onto the West Opened by the Dutch Language
Rangaku — Dutch learning — brought Western knowledge into secluded Japan. At Ogata Kōan's Tekijuku in Osaka, students like Fukuzawa Yukichi studied. A fact-based look at the scholarship and schools that underpinned Bakumatsu modernization.
Sonnō Jōi — The Ideological Surge That Drove Bakumatsu Politics
The slogan 'revere the emperor, expel the barbarians' drove the activists of the Bakumatsu. A fact-based look at its origins and at how it shifted toward overthrowing the shogunate and opening the country.