Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. xv, 234 pp. (Tables, illustrations, B&W photos) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8047-9564-7.
The history of photography has attracted interest from numerous disciplinary perspectives, eliciting thought-provoking discussions of scientific versus artistic applications, how photographers participate in global modes of expression, the power of photographic propaganda, and the medium as an index of shifting modern subjectivities, to name but a few. Kerry Ross’s Photography for Everyone: The Cultural Lives of Cameras and Consumers in Early Twentieth-Century Japan is a welcome addition to an increasingly rich literature on the subject of photography in Japan. By focusing on amateur photography in the 1920s and 1930s, Ross seeks to redress an imbalance in the discourse about Japanese photography, which to date has privileged work by professional photographers and artists. Ross makes this disciplinary intervention using a wealth of archival journals and advertisements, and in the process, reveals how commercial interests promoted the development of a (gendered) amateur-photography practice during decades marked by major social, cultural, and political changes.
Ross argues that camera companies like Konishi Roku played a formative role as “arbiters of middle-class taste” (5). Indeed, Ross’s five chapters each grapple with the intersection of commercial interests, developing middle-class cultural values, and leisure activities. The first chapter looks at innovations in retail spaces that supplied middle-class hobby photographers with cameras and equipment. Of particular interest in this chapter is Ross’s discussion of camera shops as gendered spaces, where photography is promoted as a masculine activity “defined within particular parameters of masculine identity—rationality, knowledge, and disassociation” (15). Ross delves further into the gendering of middle-class photography in the second chapter by addressing how marketing differentiated masculine and feminine practices as, respectively, “making” photographs (taking the picture and developing the film) and “taking” photographs (pointing the camera and pressing the button) (45). Ross shows how marketing campaigns reflected these expectations of gendered practices by advertising some equipment as “easy to use,” while others catered to more complicated techniques. The third chapter discusses how-to literature for amateur photographers. Ross addresses these publications via the gendered expectations of practice explored in previous chapters and the broader how-to literature consumed by the middle class.
As an art historian, I found the fourth and fifth chapters to be especially interesting. Chapter 4 examines how camera clubs functioned as “venues of aesthetic socializing” (101) and as sites for the expression of democratic ideals, where members not only made photographs but at times participated in their judging as well. The fifth chapter, an exploration of the “aesthetics and craft of amateur photography,” addresses differing definitions of geijutsu shashin (art photography). Here, Ross identifies two primary, competing camps: pictorialism, a style privileging soft-focus, painterly aesthetics, as preferred by amateurs; and modernist aesthetics, associated with “realism, montage, and constructivism” (130) and, as Ross argues, the favoured style of making among “elite” practitioners participating in “exclusive journals” and “small one-man exhibitions” (130).
Ross’s discussion of the preference of pictorialism by many amateur photographers provides insight into the negotiation of diverse photographic discourses during the 1920s and 1930s; it also reveals a limitation of Photography for Everyone. On one hand, Ross provides compelling evidence for the satirical pushback in popular amateur photography magazines against modernist practices like extreme angled shots and montages (160–166). Moreover, Ross’s examination of the influence of cultural luminaries such as Fukuhara Shinzō, who was known for his use of soft focus and atmospheric effects in his own photographs and wielded cultural capital as founder of the Japan Photographic Society, underscores how many amateur photographers came to understand geijutsu shashin in pictorialist terms (131; 139–140). However, by focusing almost solely on pictorialism, Ross does not examine how other modes of expression like realism and constructivism entered into amateur photography or how such practices complemented (or contradicted) middle-class, masculine ideals. For example, to what extent did renowned photographers like Kimura Ihei, who rejected pictorialism in favour of candid snapshots and served on the judges’ panel for the photography magazine Kōga (138), and modernist critics like Itagaki Takaho, who was a judge along with Kimura for the “urban beauty” and “urban ugliness” photography contest in 1936 (150), complicate amateur production? Where do amateur modernist camera clubs like the Ashiya Camera Club (founded in 1930) or the Tampei Photography Club (1930–1941) fit into this schema? Ross acknowledges the emergence of “high-modernist clubs in the 1920s” but states that she wants to “shift our attention to the more common meanings of photographic practice and associational life for ordinary Japanese people” (104). By examining middle-class, amateur photographic practices without acknowledging different forms of expression beyond pictorialism, however, Ross’s goal of attending to the work of “ordinary Japanese people” is not fully realized.
An additional area that Ross might have explored in more detail is how Japanese amateur photographers living outside the archipelago participated in these amateur conversations. Ross provides tantalizing but all-too-brief mention of the Qingdao Photography Club (116), Shandong Photography Research Society (117, 124), and the Dalian Photography Association (117, 124), deploying these glimpses into Japanese amateur photography beyond the metropole only in the service of a larger discussion of camera clubs as sites of Japanese “sociality” and “regulatory agency.” It would have been helpful to contextualize these groups, as well as pivotal, professional actors like Fuchikami Hakuyō, whose work Ross holds up as both a representative of bromoil printing processes embraced by amateurs (155) and, later, as an exemplar of “Manchurian modernism” (161) lampooned in popular photography magazines. Of course, examining the stakes and styles of amateur practice beyond the Japanese archipelago is a substantial task in itself, perhaps too large for the scope of this book.
These points aside, Photography for Everyone provides thought-provoking analysis of the commercial and cultural forces that shaped amateur photography, adding much to our understanding of complex and sometimes competing photographic practices that developed in Japan in the 1920s and 1930s.
Kari Shepherdson-Scott
Macalester College, St. Paul, USA