By Tisha Nemeth-Loomis

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 a way to "see" themselves by projecting their recognition of self via camera lens, lending its own growth to their arts 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 nineteenth century American photography's preoccupation with landmarks in nature.

Of the entire exhibit, these natural images share within its compressed space an unexpected strength in sparseness; the captured images of black and white vast landscapes' mountainous declivity are visually and symbolically powerful. The thematic development of cultivating relationships between oneself 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 - merely deposited and marginalized within nature's overwhelming regions. The Japanese subtly employ their own startling, psychological recognitions. Aesthetic focus migrates away from self-oriented, human portraiture into self-discovery by nobly abandoning the self within the encompassing landscape portraiture.

Visual treatment of the landscapes' context is surprising, as the images are photographed to appear painterly, and one senses comparable dichotomies parallel to that of French nineteenth century Neo-Classicist portrait painters Jacques Louis David and Dominic Ingres. These painters created painted canvases that mimicked photography, while the Japanese worked their photography so that it looked painted by reducing images' detail. They manipulated the lens to create blurred textures and soft hazing, which utilized reductive methods to achieve convincing, non-photographed effects. This effectual technique 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. from Cool Cleveland senior editor Tisha Nemeth-Loomis (:divend:)