Japan in travel photographs.

The first camera is recorded as having arrived in Japan in 1848--just shy of a decade after the invention of photography was announced in France and England. It was a Westerner--Eliphalet Brown Jr.--who took the first photograph in Japan while in the company of Matthew Calbraith Perry on his second voyage to Japan in 1854. As was the case elsewhere, the earliest photographic subjects were chiefly portraits, but by the 1870s tourists and armchair travelers created a demand for scenes of traditional Japanese customs and landscapes, giving rise to an industry that produced hand-colored photographs in enormous quantities, particularly in Yokohama (one of five ports open to Westerners), not far from Tokyo (one of two cities open to Westerners).

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An exhibition on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, until January 3, 2005, entitled Art and Artifice: Meiji-Era Travel Photography includes some thirty-five works drawn from a collection of more than thirteen hundred photographs assembled by Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf and donated to the museum four years ago. The examples on exhibit range from views of places in and around Yokohama and noteworthy monuments to staged portraits of kimono-clad women.

A British photographer named Felice Beato who worked in Yokohama from 1863 until 1884 set what became the standards for the industry. He created albums of fifty or one hundred photographs elegantly bound in leather, later supplanted by brilliantly colored lacquer covers. The ...