Recently, there has been a flurry of excellent scholarly books on nineteenth-century photography in Japan, including those by Mio Wakita on Kusakabe Kimbei and David Odo on the collection at Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. A welcome addition to this lot is Luke Gartlan’s new book, A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography. Long recognized as the authority on Stillfried, Gartlan has pulled together his extensive research in this thorough and engaging study. The result is an almost entirely new view of this seminal photographer and his impact on how foreigners, as well as the Japanese themselves, visualized and understood the culture, politics, and people of Japan. And who knew that the baron’s photographic practice and exploits were not just influential, but in addition, so colorful!

During the 1870s, Baron Raimund von Stillfried-Ratenicz (1839–1911) was the leading foreign photographer in Yokohama, a primary port for trade and tourism. The aristocrat Stillfried was born in Komotau, Austro-Hungary (today Chomutov, in the Czech Republic) and, like his father, embarked on a military career. While studying at the Imperial Marine Academy in Trieste, and then the Imperial Military Engineering School in Tulln, Austria, he began to pursue painting. Although his military career with the Austro-Hungarian Empire was short-lived, lasting only from 1859 to 1863, the lure of the seas and far-flung places inspired by his naval education and his Orientalist painting teachers led him to South America, China, and then Japan, which he reached in 1864.

Once Stillfried arrived in Japan, he rejected the expectations of his aristocratic background and quickly demonstrated his characteristic resiliency. First, he worked for a Dutch silk merchant in Nagasaki, and the following year he obtained a position at the French consulate in Hakodate. Still restless, he went on an ill-fated tour with the Mexican military in support of Maximilian I, the Austrian who became emperor of Mexico from 1864 until his assassination in 1867. Unable to find a suitable commission with the Austrian government, Stillfried returned to Japan in 1868 and found a position as secretary to the Prussian delegation in Tokyo. Then, in a dramatic career change, Stillfried opened his own photographic studio in Yokohama in 1871. Over the following decade, he became a successful commercial photographer catering to foreign residents and travelers. Stillfried’s photographs of Japan, many of which are hand colored, are some of the most sophisticated and artful from this period. He left the country permanently in 1881 and returned to Vienna, where he died in 1911.

This general outline of Stillfried’s career is widely known, but now we discover that lacunae in his career have hindered a complete understanding of his importance to photography in Japan during this period. Gartlan maintains that these lapses are due to the fact that he was from German-speaking Europe and, therefore, many reports about him can be found in the literature in German, rather than in the predominant narrative of British and French travel photography. One of the many strengths of Gartlan’s book is in how he provides interesting details, many of which were previously unknown, to fill in the gaps. In the process, Gartlan clarifies the fortuitous confluence of events that contributed to the great photographer’s rise and fall. Stillfried came to Japan just as it was opening to trade, tourism, and Western influences. And with the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate, the new imperial government was figuring out how best to represent itself as a modern nation through photography, and Stillfried was well positioned to assist.

Stillfried didn’t arrive in Japan already a photographer, so how did he develop his superlative skills in the medium? An important influence was his compatriot, the photographer Wilhelm Burger, who in 1869 came to Japan as part of the Austro-Hungarian expedition for which Stillfried served as helper and guide. Soon after, Stillfried took up photography himself by working for the British-Italian photographer Felice Beato, who had established the model for the subjects, formats, and business practices adopted by subsequent photographers in Japan. Beato created sequences of views along popular travel routes and hand-colored “costume” photographs of people, often staged in his studio, that he sold in two-volume albums.

Gartlan rejects the notion that Stillfried’s photographs adhere strictly to the “salvage paradigm”: that he created them in order to capture “Old Japan” before it was irrevocably changed under Western influence. He argues that Stillfried’s practice instead evolved over the 1870s as he ingeniously responded to a number of factors, such as an increasing number of tourists. Stillfried’s first photographic series, views of frequented travel routes, built on Beato’s repertoire, and he often photographed the same sites from similar vantage points. These Stillfried made for the long-term foreign residents in Yokohama and Tokyo, as Beato had been doing before him. But unlike Beato, Gartlan points out, Stillfried at first didn’t excise all signs of foreign influence, such as Western clothing and gas streetlights. Then, in response to the growing “globetrotter” market, Stillfried removed evidence of cultural infringement and cropped out titles, thus making his images more generic. He also began to concentrate his practice on photographs staged in his studio. Despite Gartlan’s contention, these adjustments to his practice indicate that his aims often do fit the salvage paradigm in this second phase of his career when he was responding to his clients’ demand for photographs of “Old Japan.” Nevertheless, it is fair to say that the salvage paradigm cannot be employed as a blanket categorization for all photography during this period, as the photographers’ clientele varied and the market was constantly changing, from the first Yokohama studios in 1860s, including Beato’s, to new ones in the 1870s and 1880s.

Often inflaming the wrath of the authorities, Stillfried had important interactions with the Japanese government that also had an impact on his work. He got into a scuffle early on over photographs he took of a sensitive subject—the Mikado, as the emperor of Japan was called at the time. Long relegated to seclusion in Kyoto, the Mikado returned to power in 1868 upon the collapse of the Tokugawa shogunate. He was rarely seen in public, and no photographs of him yet existed or were allowed to be taken. Nevertheless, when the Mikado appeared at the opening ceremony of the Imperial Arsenal at Yokosuka on January 1, 1872, Stillfried managed to board a British ship on an opposite pier. He then surreptitiously photographed the Mikado from behind a sail! Afterward, he peddled the photograph in the press, so the government ordered him to hand over the negative and all prints. Although the subject of photographs of the emperor has been covered before, most notably by Mikiko Hirayama in her article “The Emperor’s New Clothes: Japanese Visibility and Imperial Portrait Photography” (2009), Gartlan stresses that it was Stillfried’s transgression that motivated the government, just a few weeks later, to commission an official portrait of the emperor from the native photographer Uchida Kuichi. The Mikado scandal wasn’t over, however, for Stillfried somehow obtained one of Uchida’s photographs (its commercial sale was forbidden), made a negative of it, and then sold prints of the Mikado from the copy negative under his own studio name.

After such insubordination, one would think that the Japanese government would have nothing to do with Stillfried. Not so! Within five months, it hired Stillfried to take official photographs of Hokkaido, the northernmost island of Japan. At the time, the government hired a number of photographers in preparation for its nationalistic display at the Vienna World Exposition in 1873. As a prominent photographer who had been to Hokkaido, Stillfried was perfect for the job. He took photographs of government modernization projects, such as the building of roads, and of the Ainu, the non-Asian, indigenous people of Japan whom the government was trying to incorporate into the nation. Thus, Stillfried was at the center of this process of visualizing Japan’s nation-building agenda. Many of his Hokkaido photographs then entered his commercial inventory. Stillfried’s photographs of the Ainu, who were seen at the time by Europeans as representative of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “noble savage,” were widely collected, and whether or not they were attributed to him, many of them were used for images of the Ainu printed in travelogues and ethnographic publications for decades after he made them.

Stillfried was quite visible at the Vienna World Exposition: his Hokkaido photographs could be seen in the Japanese government's section; other photographs he took in Japan appeared in the Austrian section. However, Gartlan reveals that Stillfried’s more sensational contribution to the fair was his importation of a complete Japanese teahouse, which he staffed with three women and two men he brought with him from Japan. Was Stillfried’s teahouse an ethnographic display, an illicit establishment, or just another ingenuous moneymaking scheme? It was probably all of these. As Austrians thought a teahouse was an unsavory place (in fact, the young women he brought with him may have been prostitutes), the Japanese government made him set it up in the entertainment area across from the main fairgrounds. Somewhat concealed among trees and open at night, the teahouse served tea, tobacco, and sake, and sold Japanese wares and who knows what else.

More shocking is a document Gartlan has found that records the accusations of a certain Genkichi, a Japanese carpenter he brought with him to Vienna. Genkichi maintained that Stillfried assaulted both the Japanese women and himself, withheld their promised wages, and kept them in poor living conditions. Stillfried, he said, even ordered him to start a fire in the teahouse (which he refused to do), presumably so that the photographer could collect the insurance money. Gartlan asks the pertinent question: Can we look at Stillfried’s artful, hand-colored photographs of geisha and teahouses the same way now? This is, of course, the problem we have when looking at Gauguin’s paintings of young Tahitian women. In Stillfried’s case, the teahouse affair points out the kind of treatment many girls and young women probably endured when hired as models by foreign photographers in Japan, as has been noted elsewhere in the literature on the period. However shady this project might have been in Vienna, it shows the entrepreneurial Stillfried working hard to build an international reputation. In less problematic efforts to this end, he also exhibited his photographs in Berlin, London, Paris, Amsterdam, and Philadelphia; toured German-speaking Europe lecturing on Japan; and joined international photographic societies so that his work would appear in their journals and exhibitions.

Stillfried returned to Yokohama in February 1874, having lost almost everything in the disastrous teahouse affair. Needing to rebuild his finances, he undertook an impressive range of commercial activities: he made documentary photographs for Austrian scientists, copied maps for the Japanese government, trained Japanese photographers, and sold photographic equipment and Japanese curios, all while he built up his photographic inventory. On the other hand, his ability to run his photographic studio was hindered for two reasons: increasing competition from Japanese photographers and litigation brought against him by his former business partner. Many Japanese photographers, some of whom had been trained by Stillfried, opened their own studios in Yokohama and Tokyo. As an example, Gartlan looks to his former employee, Usui Shuzaburo, whose connections to Stillfried until now have not been closely examined. Usui set up his own studio in 1875, and in an ad from 1880, Usui offered his photographs at “a significant discount to his competitors,” no doubt in an attempt to undermine Stillfried’s business. Gartlan also investigates Stillfried’s legal problems in a chapter cleverly titled “The Trials of Stillfried.” He was constantly in court fighting over the “Stillfried” brand, especially with his former partner, the Prussian Hermann Andersen. With the dissolution of that partnership, Stillfried was not allowed to produce or export photographs for ten years.

How, then, could Stillfried have supported himself once he was no longer in control of the studio that was now owned by Andersen but still bore his name? Ever resourceful, Stillfried reinvented himself as “Professor of Photography and Director of the Photography Department of the Japanese State Printing Bureau.” As such, he helped the bureau to incorporate photography and photo-based printing processes into its production of official printed materials as part of the government’s modernization effort. In addition, he taught photographic techniques to some Japanese men, who after a six-month period, in a sad twist of fate, essentially took over his duties. Another plan was to have his brother, Baron Franz Stillfried, come to Japan to live with him and run his studio, as the court had ruled that he couldn’t sell his own photographs. Like his brother, Franz had been in the military, but then it seems that he lost his inheritance gambling in Monte Carlo before becoming a clothing merchant in Philadelphia. There is no indication that Franz had worked in photography before he moved to Yokohama in 1879, but he soon began taking photographs as well.

Through his discussion of Stillfried’s legal battles, Gartlan expertly unravels two very convoluted issues: the attribution of Stillfried’s photographs and what to make of the dizzying number of studio names associated with him. Stillfried’s photographs appeared under the studio imprints of Stillfried & Co. (at two different addresses), Willmann & Co., Japan Photographic Association, Stillfried and Andersen, and Baron Stillfried’s Studio. (The last one was Raimund's poorly disguised attempt to have Franz run his studio under the family name.) It is now clear that there were at least three stages in Stillfried’s work, as well as photographs taken by Andersen and Franz sold under the Stillfried name. The first was from 1871 to 1873, a period during which Stillfried made the negatives himself and was also responsible for the production of some superb albums. These boasted beautiful covers, high-quality images, and a careful sequencing of images along travel routes and according to costume types. A second stage, from 1874 until the studio acquired Beato’s in 1877, shows Stillfried building up his inventory. Then, after Andersen bought out Stillfried in 1878, Andersen began to take his own photographs, which were interspersed in albums produced under the Stillfried & Andersen name. By separating the work of Beato, Andersen, and then Franz from Raimund Stillfried’s, Gartlan argues effectively for the greater pictorial unity and higher aesthetics of Raimund’s photographic output.

A final group of works Gartlan discusses was a novel experiment that Stillfried perhaps hoped would simultaneously fulfill several needs when he was unable to openly practice photography. During his “trials,” Stillfried turned increasingly back to painting, especially watercolors, and he often used his photographs as models, or even the base, for his paintings. These latter works he referred to as “photo-crayons.” In a Stillfried album at the Musée Guimet in Paris, there are forty of the photo-crayons, dating from 1879 to 1880. Stillfried used different kinds of paint application—from thin washes to thicker, sketchy brushstrokes—over various areas of the photographs. A second album, also at the Musée Guimet, has many of the same photographs but unpainted, which enabled Gartlan to compare the efficacy of each. Other nineteenth-century artists, such as the American landscape painter Frederic Church, painted over photographs to create wonderful art; some, such as the American John La Farge and Stillfried, who both painted over photographs of Japan, weren’t as successful, the result of their awkward handling of the paint.

Gartlan has included relevant and previously unknown documents in the book’s appendices: the report on the complaints against Stillfried over his illegal photographs of the emperor, the transcription of the disturbing interview with the carpenter Genkichi in Vienna, a timeline of Stillfried’s life and his various studios and business partners, and an inventory of the sale of his photographs to his brother Franz in 1879. In addition, there is a glossary of Japanese characters. The impressive format of the book (7½ by 10 inches) makes it possible to have large reproductions; these are all beautifully printed in color, so one can appreciate the aesthetics of Stillfried’s hand-colored albumen prints.

Today, we value Stillfried’s photographs of Japan for both their documentary and artistic values, and throughout the book Gartlan provides many perceptive analyses of these striking works. We can also now see how Stillfried helped to establish an international image of Japan through the photographs he made for foreign residents and travelers, the Japanese government, and the export trade. These photographs ended up in collections located around the world and were further disseminated through exhibitions, journals, and books. Gartlan's book, A Career of Japan, is the first volume in the publisher Brill’s new series called Photography in Asia, and based on the high quality of this one, we eagerly look forward to the next installments. However, Gartlan’s important and fascinating book will certainly be a hard act to follow.

Eleanor M. Hight is Professor Emerita of Art History and the Humanities, University of New Hampshire. Her research focuses on colonialism, travel, and the globalization of visual culture, especially in relation to nineteenth-century Japan. Email: ehight@unh.edu