Reviewed by: A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography by Luke Gartlan Katherine Arens Luke Gartlan, A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfr ied and Early Yokohama Photography. Photography in Asia 1. Leiden: Brill, 2016. 384 pp. Luke Gartlan's A Career of Japan is that rare book that combines erudition, style, a compelling story, impeccable research, and commitment to innovative historical and cultural studies. Those in postcolonial studies and studies of images and media will find here new ways of thinking about the margins between East and West, colonized and colonizer, and art and commerce as well as about the overly simple assumptions about the production, circulation, and consumption of images within hegemonic discourses. It is also a showpiece of a beautifully produced book, with impressive reproductions (both black-and-white and color) and a fantastic layout. Gartlan, a senior lecturer at the School of Art History, St. Andrews University, Scotland, and editor of the journal History of Photography, here tells [End Page 91] the story of Baron Raimund von Stillfried-Ratenicz (1839–1911), an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat born in what today is the Czech Republic. Like many of his class, his first profession was the military, with studies at the Imperial Marine Academy in Trieste and then the Imperial Military Engineering School in Tulln, Austria. That career lasted until 1863, when he took his love of painting into a new role as world traveler (including South America and China), ending up in Japan by 1864. There he took various positions in trade and diplomacy (for various countries), until he joined the Mexican army supporting Emperor Maximilian I until that monarch's 1867 assassination. after that, he was employed as secretary for the Prussian diplomatic corps. Stillfried's real story starts when he apprentices in a photographic studio and then opens his own in Yokohama in 1871; for the next decade he worked as a commercial photographer documenting Japan for both tourists and government ethnographic projects. He returned to Vienna for the 1873 World's Fair and left Japan permanently in 1881; he died in Vienna. Stillfried's legacy has been known but neither completely catalogued, appreciated, nor even fully identified. Gartlan has scoured archives worldwide to locate a few intact tourist albums and a larger number of photographs, including hand-colored ones, scattered in archives dedicated to other purposes. Gartlan's first achievement is not just cataloguing; he also reconstructs the life and significance of commercial photography in an emerging market where East met West and stood in conscious dialogue—Stillfried's story is also a chapter in Japan's history of photography. Gartlan models for his readers how to understand images in the culture of everyday life at sites of cultural contact: He tracks what a commercial photographer did, what kinds of images were sold and in what form (individual, in albums, some pre-sold, some colored, some with a second life as etchings), and the economics and politics of photography as a factor in various kinds of identity politics. Gartlan's second achievement is his reconstruction of the contexts in which these photos lived and Stillfried's various successes and failures occurred. That was the early years of Yokohama photography, which was central to the art's evolution in Japan. Stillfried was first and foremost a man seeking to learn a craft and earn a living. Some of his work originated when he was a journeyman, establishing his own portfolio by varying what successful photographers did (Felice Beato and Wilhelm Burger were the best established; Stillfried apprenticed in their shops). Some of his works stray far from touristic expectations (Stillfried would include Japanese subjects wearing modern dress, for example); some were taken under contract to the [End Page 92] Austrian and Japanese governments, each for their individual needs; others, later in his career, fall into the western-ethnographic mode of orientalism (with "standard" representations of costumes—often staged in the studios—and sites that were popularly purchased for tourists' memory-book albums). And still later, he acquired popular photo archives and assembled albums that included heavily colored works called "photo-crayons." Gartlan's third overwhelming achievement is rendering this diversity...