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Paper short abstract:

This presentation explores the approaches to "portrait" in the works of Yokoyama Matsusaburo (1838-1884). It begins by destabilizing the category of "portrait" historically and demonstrates properties of looking he explores in multiple media, arguing for more self-reflexive approach in visual arts.

Paper long abstract:

In Waeigorin shūsei, a Japanese-English dictionary first published in 1867, there is no entry for the English word "portrait," suggesting that the word was not useful or pertinent for its intended audiences. Five years later, in the second printing of the same dictionary, an added entry of portrait appears. Here, "portrait" is defined in Japanese as eizo, nigao. Eizo in contemporary Japanese would be translated as pictures, while nigao would be likeness of a person or caricature. We can infer from this particular example that by 1872, portrait practice must have become more common than 1867, enough to be added to English-Japanese interactions. In my sampling of other English/Japanese dictionaries from early Meiji, it is fifteen years later, in 1887, that we find an entry where the English word portrait is equated with contemporary and more familiar Japanese word, shōzō. What this simple exercise signals is the fact that shōzō and competing terms continued to vie for currency throughout the first two decades of Meiji.

This presentation situates few key works that we might today consider "portrait" by Yokoyama Matsusaburo (1838-1884) within this unstable context. Considering his works in stereoscopic photography, lithography, and oil painting, I explore his work on two levels: 1) Yokoyama's manner of representation, his manners of showing, and 2) modes of displaying his works, his chosen manners for seeing. My contention is that the process of consolidating the genre of portrait in Meiji is intimately related to establishing and practicing a particular mode of looking and a kind of interaction with picture of an individual. In this light, the intended purposes of these works, such as official governmental documentation, private commission, notes, and experimentation, play just important part as the representations themselves. We begin to see the process through which the intension, the gesture, and the purpose of looking emerged as ways of navigating and understanding the changes in the world that seemed both uncertain and unfamiliar in early Meiji Japan. Conversely, his works demands us, historians of visual culture, to re-calibrate the assumptions we take for granted in exploring the unstable visual field.