Untitled

This photograph of three young men comes from a moment when Japanese photographers captured the vibrancy and curiosity of the newly modern nation, soon after the Meiji Restoration. Unlike European photographers who had set up commercial studios in Japan in the 1860s and created staged photographs of Japanese “types” (the samurai, the geisha, the peasant laborer, the tattooed man, and so forth), this unknown studio photographer portrayed the young men in traditional Japanese clothing but with surprisingly modern hairstyles and appearance. This type of photograph was popular in 1870s Japan: an ambrotype (a collodion image on glass) presented in a kiri (paulownia) wood case.