The Japanese passion for photography is almost a cliché, but how did it begin? Although Japanese art photography has been widely studied this book is the first to demonstrate how photography became an everyday activity. Japan’s enthusiasm for photography emerged alongside a retail and consumer revolution that marketed products and activities that fit into a modern, tasteful, middle-class lifestyle. Kerry Ross examines the magazines and merchandise promoted to ordinary Japanese people in the early twentieth century that allowed Japanese consumers to participate in that lifestyle, and gave them a powerful tool to define its contours. Each chapter discusses a different facet of this phenomenon, from the revolution in retail camera shops, to the blizzard of socially constructive how-to manuals, and to the vocabulary of popular aesthetics that developed from enthusiasts sharing photos. Ross looks at the quotidian activities that went into the entire picture-making process, activities not typically understood as photographic in nature, such as shopping for a camera, reading photography magazines, and even preserving one’s pictures in albums. These very activities, promoted and sponsored by the industry, embedded the camera in everyday life as both a consumer object and a technology for understanding modernity, making it the irresistible enterprise that Eastman encountered in his first visit to Japan in 1920 when he remarked that the Japanese people were ‚almost as addicted to the Kodak habit as ourselves.‘
Inhaltsverzeichnis
Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Introduction
chapter abstract
The Introduction familiarizes readers with the topics of the early twentieth-century photography market and amateur practices in Japan by situating the project historiographically in relation to three fields of scholarship: the history of photography; the history of retailing, consumption, and gender; and the history of middle-class culture.
1
A Retail Revolution: Male Shoppers and the Creation of the Modern Shop
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 argues that the camera industry, alongside department stores, was at the forefront of a retail revolution focusing on male shoppers from the turn of the twentieth century. It offers a cultural history of retail practices in urban Japan, focusing on Konishi Roku (today’s Konica Minolta), Japan’s leading camera producer, whose headquarters and main shop were located in Nihonbashi, Tokyo.
2
Chapter 2. Photography for Everyone: Women, Hobbyists, and Marketing Photography
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 explores the camera market’s segmentation into two distinctly gendered consumer markets, the casual photography market and the amateur photography market, and the innovative ways that the camera industry marketed its products to these very different consumer groups. In the drive for profit, the camera industry cultivated a casual photography market that promised photography was for everyone. In reality, sales in this market were based on an assumed female consumer, one who lacked photographic knowledge and simply consumed film by taking pictures willy-nilly. However, in fostering the amateur or hobby market, the camera industry focused on the male consumer, addressed as a knowledgeable man, or at least one seeking to become a knowledgeable man, invested in honing his skills in the art and technology of photography.
3
Instructions for Life: How-to Literature and Hobby Photography
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 investigates the role of how-to books in popularizing photography, both in terms of their explicit, stated purpose to teach photographers how to take and make photographs and the ways in which they suggested to readers the appropriate place of photography in their leisure time and in their homes.
4
Democratizing Leisure: Camera Clubs and the Popularization of Photography
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 explores the role of camera clubs in the spread of photography, in particular, the ways in which participation offered members the opportunity to socialize with their peers and to congregate around a shared leisure-time activity. They also served as a venue to rehearse the democratic principles of participatory governance, such as voting for officers, opportunities denied to most in the public realm of politics.
5
Making Middlebrow Photography: The Aesthetics and Craft of Amateur Photography
chapter abstract
Chapter 5 considers the actual pictures that amateurs took with an aim to understand popular aesthetics of the time. Amateur photography, not only as final product but also as a total process, provided hobbyists with an aesthetic language that matched their middle-class ideals: an active place in the world of consumerism befitting their newfound incomes and an absorbing activity that placed value on craftsmanship.
Epilogue: Epilogue
chapter abstract
The Epilogue offers a concise account of the wartime restrictions on consumption and photographic practice and the rapid rebuilding of the photography industry immediately after the war.
Über den Autor
Kerry Ross is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at De Paul University.Ebooks vom selben Autor / Herausgeber
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