WALKING TO T. ENAMI'S PHOTO STUDIO IN YOKOHAMA -- A Trip to the Photographer Over 100 Years Ago
Originally uploaded by Okinawa Soba
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INFORMATION ABOUT THE IMAGE BY OKINAWA
WALKING TO T. ENAMI'S PHOTO STUDIO IN YOKOHAMA -- A Trip to the Photographer Over 100 Years Ago
You are looking Northwest on Benten Street in Yokohama. We have just passed the studio of Kozaburo Tamamura, and the sign T. ENAMI PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDIO (I have inserted a red arrow that points to it) is beginning the emerge from behind another sign that blocks it from view. The red ball hanging in the air just beyond the red arrow is a sign for an Ivory Carvings shop. A little further on is where Kimbei Kusakabe opened his first studio. Many other Studios would come and go on this street over the years, making it the "Photographers Row" of Japan.
Although Enami's place seems insignificant from where we stand, from it flowed what would become the largest stereographic record of Japan to come from a single studio. Enami's beautiful 3-D images surpassed in sheer numbers and quality the work of any other identified Japanese photographer during Japan's first 100 years of photographic history. Enami would also produce some of the best lantern-slide images that are now found in many photographic Archives and Institutions of the world.
Of course, he started out like the rest of his more famous contemporaries by taking portraits of tourists, and producing over 1000 large albumen photograph titles. These large, hand-colored images were hand printed under the sun in multiple copies for many years to meet world-wide demand. Today, these images are usually found mounted on cardboard pages from the Souvenir Albums of the 1890s
More about Enami at www.t-enami.org/
Here are some other BENTEN STREET images on my stream, with additional caption commentary : www.flickr.com/search/?w=24443965@N08&q=Benten+Street...
Uploaded by Okinawa Soba on 10 Apr 08,
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