Untitled album

[Note: The label below refers to two photographs in this album: "Ikao [Ikaho]" from a distance" and "Ikao [Ikaho]"]
Situated on the dormant volcano Mt. Haruna, Ikaho is a hot spring spa famous for centuries with the Japanese as well as an important tourist destination, especially during the end of the 1800s. The city of Ikaho itself, built against the mountainside, has a picturesque main street consisting of hundreds of steps. Not only photographers but also other visual artists—including the California painter Theodore Wores (1859–1939)—have depicted these steps. A view Wores created in 1890 is in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, has one painted in 1895. It is tantalizing to wonder if Wores and Mrs. J.H. Strobridge (who had this album made and is seen in the photograph on this label) met up in Japan, since they were there at the same time and the American community would have been close knit. After apprenticing with Kamamaro Genzo, a pioneer Japanese photographer, Tamamura Kozaburo opened his own business in Tokyo in 1874. In 1883 he moved to Yokohama and opened a studio, where he prospered, making him a competitor of Kusakabe Kimbei, who is represented by another album in the exhibition. Kozaburo specialized in albums made to be souvenirs. He was at the height of his production in the 1880s and 1890s, and was extremely successful in marketing his work. Topographical views of mountains and picturesque scenery were popular in that era, as they gave viewers a sense of the full setting—as in the street in the town of Ikaho seen here. This album also offers the usual mix of architecture and studio portraits of people at various activities.