A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography by Luke Gartlan

Abstract

Reviewed by: A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography by Luke Gartlan Kerry Ross A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Pho tography. By Luke Gartlan. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 384 pages. Hardcover, €103.00/$128.00. In the last decade, several studies have emerged that explore nineteenth-century visual culture in Japan. A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography by Luke Gartlan is a welcome addition to this growing field of research. Despite its seemingly narrow focus on the activities of the Austrian commercial photographer Baron Raimund von Stillfried (1839–1911), who lived and worked intermittently in Japan from the mid-1860s through the early 1880s, the book offers a view into some of the most pivotal political and cultural developments of the tumultuous bakumatsu and early Meiji periods. Stillfried’s photographic activities were based in Yokohama, a critical imperial “contact zone” where vital social, political, and economic exchanges occurred among local officials, entrepreneurs, and the expatriate community. Photography emerged here as a profitable commercial trade and a critical government tool; Stillfried had a hand in both endeavors. Until now, however, his contribution to the culture and commerce of photography in Yokohama has received little serious scholarly attention. Gartlan excavates Austrian and Japanese archival sources to construct what he calls a “new biography” of Stillfried in which heretofore neglected materials are used not to create a unified historical narrative of the photographer’s life, but rather to explore the “fissures and shifts in his identity and practice” that “emphasize the contested nature of visual practice at the site of cross-cultural production” (p. 5). [End Page 107] Gartlan follows Stillfried’s little-known biography and artistic output to demonstrate the complexities and contradictions in the emergence of the commercial photography market in 1860s Yokohama. The exploration of Stillfried’s path prior to his arrival in Japan—his early life and arts education in Austria, service as a military officer from 1859 to 1863, and eager participation in the Austrian volunteer army in Mexico from 1865 until 1867—sets the theoretical backdrop for one of Gartlan’s central arguments: that most historians dealing with agents of Western imperialism have failed to take into account the radical differences in experience between those from Western European countries with substantial East Asian empires and those from other powers, like the Austro-Hungarian empire, with largely unfulfilled imperial aspirations. The ambivalent status of the Austrian empire, according to Gartlan, informed Stillfried’s conflicted status as an imperial photographer and a cultural intermediary while in Japan. Gartlan traces the changing market demands and domestic pressures that influenced Stillfried’s photographic practice in Japan, offering a nuanced view into the inner workings of treaty-port photography at the time. He shows that Stillfried was both an artist and an entrepreneur and explores the deeply interwoven aesthetic and commercial aspects of his photographic production. He also argues that the rise of Japan’s domestic photographic industry was critical in shaping changes in Stillfried’s aesthetic approach. Stillfried’s early work included landscapes that captured processes of modernization within Japan, challenging narratives about the supposedly untouched nature of the country that were already circulating in Europe and the United States and that often aligned classical Western civilization with a (fundamentally flawed) image of mid-nineteenth-century Japanese society as not yet tinged by modernization. Shortly thereafter, Japanese photographers (some of whom, like Usui Shūzaburō, were likely trained by Stillfried) began to create those desired views of Japan; since they also charged less money than Stillfried, this constituted a significant threat to his dominance in the globetrotter and expatriate market. In response, Stillfried’s work changed: as Gartlan explains, in the late 1860s he turned to carefully staged studio work that eschewed the references to modernization featured in his earlier landscapes. Gartlan, moreover, describes Stillfried’s shift toward experimentation with watercolors and overpainted photos, which the photographer termed “photocrayons” (p. 237), as a result of both his wish to expand his aesthetic repertoire and a series of legal cases in the consular courts that curtailed his control over his pictorial inventory. Stillfried did not limit...