Yokohama-skolen. Fotografiet i Japan 1860-1910: Rejsekunst mellem dokumentation og tradition

The monograph translates the text of the Italian volume published by Giunti in 2015 (hd: 11383/2028068), updating and expanding it with the iconographic set of 64 works (pp. 169-227) each having a philological commentary of about 1,500 characters. The translation and the Foreword (Oversætterens forord) of the book (pp. 6-10) are of Carsten Juhl, former director of the Institute of Art Theory of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Copenhagen and director of the series "Figura" in which the volume is published. The English translation of the danish title is "The School of Yokohama. Photography in Japan. 1860-1910. Art and Journey, between Documentation and Tradition". It is the first organic study on the photography of the School of Yokohama, considered both from the point of view of art history and criticism, and from the perspective of art anthropology and cultural history. On the market there is no similar work, neither in Italian, nor in any other language. Among the main new topics presented by the volume there are: - a special focus on the materials and techniques, linking them with the style and themes of the photographs; - the role of nostalgia, autoexoticism and removal of memory in the formation of the figurative horizon of Japanese photography; - the presence of an implicit tendency to compose the image within what Fosco Maraini has called “ideographic space”, i.e. to create a connection between ideogram shapes and the modes of composition of the images filtered by the human eye; - the anthropological classification of subjects in an overview that brings together the so-called "Beato Model", the traditional genres of Japanese art, and the themes derived from the systematic examination and comparison of thousands of photographs. The last chapter of the book presents an updated biography – artistic and intellectual – of the leading masters of the genre.