Adolfo Farsari

Largely due to Farsari's exacting technical standards and his entrepreneurial abilities, it had a significant influence on the development of photography in Japan.

Farsari's images were widely distributed, presented or mentioned in books and periodicals, and sometimes recreated by artists in other media; they shaped foreign perceptions of the people and places of Japan, and to some degree affected how the Japanese saw themselves and their country.

As a fervent abolitionist,[1] Farsari served with the Union Army as a New York State Volunteer Cavalry trooper until the end of the American Civil War.

Their firm, Sargent, Farsari & Co., dealt in smokers' supplies, stationery, visiting cards, newspapers, magazines and novels, Japanese and English conversation books, dictionaries, guidebooks, maps, and photographic views of Japan.

The creator of these photographs remains unknown, but Farsari was the maker of at least some of the maps, notably of Miyanoshita (in the Hakone resort area) and Yokohama.

[11] Following the innovations of Felice Beato and Baron Raimund von Stillfried, Farsari further developed the trade in photograph albums.

These pages were often hand decorated and bound between covers of silk brocade or lacquer boards inlaid with ivory, mother-of-pearl and gold.

Accordingly, his work was expensive yet popular and often praised by clients and visitors to Japan, even receiving a glowing reference from Rudyard Kipling following his 1889 visit to Yokohama.

On the other hand, Farsari complained in a letter to his sister that, to motivate his employees, he had to rage, swear and beat them, which he did according to a fixed schedule.

In 1904 Tonokura left the business to start his own studio and another of Farsari's former employees, Watanabe Tokutarō, became the new owner, only to be succeeded by the former secretary, Fukagawa Itomaro.

The business was finally registered as a Japanese company in 1906 and it continued to operate until at least 1917 and possibly as late as 1923, the year in which Yokohama was largely destroyed by the Great Kantō earthquake.

Farsari and its other practitioners – notably Beato, Stillfried, Tamamura, Kusakabe Kimbei, Ogawa Kazumasa, and Uchida Kuichi – produced works that in their subject matter, composition and colouring present a striking combination of the conventions and techniques of Western photography with those of Japanese artistic traditions, particularly ukiyo-e.[22] These photographers also provided the key images by which Meiji-era Japan and the Japanese were known to people in other countries.

[25] Farsari and other 19th-century commercial photographers generally concentrated on two types of subject matter: the scenery of Japan and the "manners and customs" of its inhabitants.

Such subjects, and the ways in which they were literally and figuratively framed, were chosen to appeal to foreign taste; and the reason for this, apart from the photographer's individual aesthetics, vision and preconceptions, had much to do with economics.

[34] A case in point is the photograph of an Officer's Daughter, variously attributed to Farsari, Stillfried, Kusakabe or even Suzuki Shin'ichi.

[37] In the same year, an admiring review of Farsari's work appeared in the journal Photographic Times and American Photographer, describing it as "technically almost perfect" and showing "artistic proportion" in the selection of subjects, depicting Japanese life and providing images of the natural beauty of a country that was admittedly unfamiliar to Americans.

In a 1988 article, art and photography historian Ellen Handy described A. Farsari & Co. as having become "well-known for issuing albums of landscape views in great quantity, but without regard for print quality and delicacy of hand-colouring".

[40] For historian Sebastian Dobson, the artistic and historical significance of the work of Farsari (and other Yokohama photographers of his era, particularly Kusakabe and Tamamura) is rightly undergoing re-evaluation after many years in which it was dismissed as tourist kitsch and "perceived by some as pandering to nineteenth-century Western notions of exoticism".