Japonaise sous l'orage
Kusakabe
Kimbei
About this photograph :
Japonaise sous l'orage
Japan, about 1875.
If colour photography was first viewed on a grand-scale after 1905, Japanese photographers, as this astonishing image shows, had already requested talented painters to watercolor each of their albumen prints. In addition, Kimbei here invents ingenious studio "special effects": he imitates the rain and the wind by directly striating the negative and by tensing the threads moving the material of the kimono of this beautiful Japanese woman, who is at the mercy of a reconstructed storm.
About the artist :
Kusakabe
Kimbei
Kusakabe Kimbei, one of the most accomplished Japanese photographers of his time, operated a studio in Yokohama from the early 1880s until 1913. Kusakabe Kimbei worked with Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried as a photographic colourist and assistant before opening his own workshop in Yokohama in 1881 in the Bentendori quarter, and from 1889 operating in the Honmachi quarter. He also opened a branch in the Ginza quarter of Tokyo. As the protégé of von Stillfried, Kusakabe Kimbei continued the tradition of the psychological studio portrait and recorded scenic views of the country while he developed his own Japanese sense of photography. Like postcards today, his work was collected by tourists and exported for sale as curiosities to those who could not visit Japan. He stopped working as a photographer in 1912-1913.
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See section on Kusakabe Kimbei - 7 photograph(s)