Japan (Caught in Time : Great Photographic Archives)

Photography in Japan has a distinctive history. In the early days it was much influenced by the work of certain European photographers who travelled there, established photographic studios, and set about recording every kind of detail of Japanese life. Prints of many such photographs were collected and brought to the West, and are sought after by collectors to this day.
The photographs published here all come from one particular collection - that assembled by the Russian botanist Alexander Vasilyevich Grigoryev, whose travels took him to Japan in 1879. They have been preserved in the archives of the Russian Geographical Society in St Petersburg and have not been published before as a collection. Copies of some, as Terry Bennett explains, have appeared in other books, but many are unique and outstanding examples of early photography in Japan. The photographs are undated but were for the most part taken in the 1870s.
These photographs, which were hand-coloured at the time, provide a unique 'snapshot' of Japan as it was in the early years after the reopening of Japan to the West. Much better and more accurate than either artists' sketchbooks or popular prints of the day, they give a true feel of the way in which the ordinary Japanese in the middle of the 19th century lived.