Selling Albums, Making Japan: The Legacy of 19th-Century Japanese Souvenir Photography

In the mid-to-late-nineteenth century, souvenir photograph albums were a must-buy for American and European tourists visiting Japan. Studios in the port cities of Nagasaki and Yokohama allowed customers to select prints for their album from a collection of hand-colored prints that featured empty Japanese landscapes and scenes of Japanese men and women in a variety of poses with traditional clothes and props. The albums that were produced were personalized versions of the same pastoral Japan, an image increasingly out of sync with the modernizing city the tourists bought them in. When they were brought home and shared, these albums reinforced the image of Japan in the West as an object of fetishization--a beautiful, feminized, exotic haven from the modern world.

This paper explores the history of the circulation of Japanese souvenir photograph albums, first as souvenirs, scattered to homes throughout Europe, America and Australia and, eventually, as historical artifacts in archives and digital databases. Souvenir albums allowed tourists to create their own narrative of Japan, while reinforcing the exotic, pastoral image of Japan that many Western tourists had brought with them to the country. They remained in circulation even as they were archived as popular subjects of exhibitions, research and digitized databases. As much of this research was facilitated by a single database--the Nagasaki University Metadata Database of Old Photographs from the Bakumatsu and Meiji Eras--this paper will also explore how digital databases can both preserve and destabilize the experience of viewing a souvenir photograph album in person.