Tamamura, Kozaburo (c.1856 - 1923 )
Kozaburo Tamamura was a pioneer of Japanese photography during the Meiji Period. Born in Edo in 1856, Tamamura began to study photography under Genzo Kanamaru in 1868. Tamamura opened his first photography studio in Asakusa, Tokyo in 1874. In 1883, he moved business to Yokohama, where he continued operations until 1909. The studio enjoyed great success, in part due to Tamamura’s creation of Yokohama shashin, staged-scenes intended for foreign tourists. Beginning in 1897, the Boston-based publisher J.B. Millet commissioned Tamamura’s studio to produce staged scenes of the Japanese landscape and traditional customs. These hand-painted photographs were wildly popular among foreign audiences. Tamamura’s photographs were compiled with the writing of Okakura Tenshin and collotype plates of Kazumasa Ogawa in an album titled Japan. Tamamura’s death is often given as 1923, though there is some uncertainty about this date.
Meiji Photography
Following the Meiji Restoration, photographs became almost as popular as woodblock prints. By the 1890s, there were well over 800 professional photography studios in Japan, primarily situated in the port towns of Yokohama and Nagasaki, but also rapidly expanding to the major urban center of Tokyo. Photographers of this period often echoed traditional pictorial subjects from painting and ukiyo-e, but were also inventive and artistic. Subjects ranged from studio photography of beautiful women and urban scenes of shopkeepers, rickshaws, and peddlers, to natural wonders such as Mt. Fuji in the mist, cherry blossoms and temples. Ronin Gallery is pleased to open up a portal into the real and imagined world of modern Japan with our collection of Meiji-period photography. These images of traditional Japan still hold the same magic as they did when the world first saw them more than a century before.
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