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Kusakabe Kimbei, one of the most accomplished Japanese photographers
of his time, operated a studio in Yokohama from the early 1880s
until 1913.
He learned photography as an apprentice to Baron von Stillfried,
an Austrian who worked in Japan from 1872 to 1883.
After von Stillfried left Japan, Kimbei acquired many of the
glass plate negatives of his teacher along with some of the
plates of well-known photographer Felice Beato. Kimbei reprinted
the work of Beato and von Stillfried along with his own work
and included them in his albums.
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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.
Kimbei's photographs were produced using an albumen printing
process that utilized egg whites as a suspension medium for
the light-sensitive photographic emulsion. The Japanese perfected
the art of hand-coloring photographs, a process that did not
gain the acceptance of photographers and critics in the West
at that time.
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