The History of Japanese Photography at the Cleveland Museum of Art presents the first comprehensive collection of early photographed images from Nineteenth Century daguerreotype portraiture to contemporary Japanese iconography. Earliest forms of daguerreotype portraiture, though imitated from the West, became the catalyst for Japanese art intersecting with modernity. In Japan, early photographers recognized this new medium as the way to "see" themselves by projecting their recognition of self via camera lens, lending its own growth to their culture. Primarily used as a vehicle for documentation, photography was a different lens for examining not only the self, but also the country, as landscape photographs gained popularity and became a cornerstone to 19th Century American photography's preoccupation with landmarks in nature (e.g. photos of Yellowstone).

Of the entire exhibit, these natural images share within its compressed space an unexpected strength in sparseness; captured images of black and white vast landscapes' mountainous declivity are visually and symbolically powerful. The thematic development of cultivating relationships between ourselves and land is evident, and accidental sensualness pervades the obscured subject matter, bringing attention to the frame and drawing the viewer in for closer observation. Viewers receive a strong feeling of the transcendental; human figures, when included within these landscape images, arrive into the frame in a way suggesting that their placement is secondary: humans are merely deposited and marginalized within nature's overwhelming regions. The Japanese subtly employ their own startling, psychological recognitions here: aesthetic focus migrates away from self-oriented, human protraiture into self-discovery by nobly abandoning the self within the encompassing landscape portraiture.

The real diversion is the treatment of landscapes' context: photographed to appear painterly, one senses comparable dichotomies parallel to that of French Nineteenth Century Neo-Classicist portrait/landscape painters Jacques Louis David and Dominic Ingres; just as these painters would strive to make painted canvas look photographic in the mastering of every detail, the Japanese would strive to make their photography look painted by reducing images' detail. Manipulating the lens to create blurred textures and soft hazing utilizes reductive methods to achieve convincing "non-photographed" effects which tips the aesthetic balance. Its effectual techniques leave a silent, historical imprint substantiated without Western art's methodic, academic formula. The result propels the modest camera lens into its own distinctive realm of art expressionism.

 (:divend:)