Williams College Museum of Art
October 1, 2021 – March 20, 2022
TECHNOLOGIES OF POPULAR
VISUAL CULTURE
REPRO
JAPAN
TECHNOLOGIES OF POPULAR
VISUAL CULTURE
Williams College Museum of Art
October 1, 2021–March 20, 2022
Christopher Bolton
Cover:
Nishimura Satoshi and Shimazaki Nanako, directors
Animation cel from Fighting Spirit TV series
2000
Utagawa Kunisada
Sumo Match between Shiranui Mitsuemon and Jimmaku Hisagoro
1859
Inside Cover:
Eron Rauch
Centered Single Woman, Sci-Fi
from The Neo-Japonisme Project
2012
Contents
Making Japanese Popular Visual Culture 1
Christopher Bolton
Textiles and Fabric Stencils 9
Panalee Maskati and Christopher Bolton
Cosplay 13
Diana Tolin
Early Photography 14
Wei Maggie Wu
Contemporary Photography 17
Eron Rauch
Exhibition Design 21
David Gürçay-Morris
1
Making Japanese
Popular Visual Culture
by Christopher Bolton, Professor of Comparative
and Japanese Literature, Williams College
What Makes Japanese Popular Culture?
Let’s start with this idea of making, by
asking what it is that makes Japanese
popular visual culture. That is, what are the
material technologies and socioeconomic
processes that have enabled the production
of popular visual media in Japan?
The answers to that question take
us back to Japan’s Edo period (1603–1868),
where the exhibition begins. To make mass
media, you first need a mass audience, and
in Japan that came with the growth of large
urban centers during this time. The period
is named for the new capital city of Edo
(later Tokyo), which featured new arts and
entertainments catering to the merchants
and commoners who populated this growing
metropolis. And these new arts—from
kabuki theater to landscape prints—came
hand in hand with new media technologies
developed to produce and reproduce them.
Many of these new visual media
technologies were printing technologies,
and several of these are highlighted in
the smaller of the two exhibition galleries.
During the Edo period, color woodblock
printing allowed the mass production of
illustrated books and artwork for a broad
audience, while fabric-printing technology
using paper stencils fostered new popular
fashions. Later, printing would evolve
through photography, motion pictures,
and animation or anime, where sequential
images were painted on plastic cels and
transferred to film to produce moving
images for the even larger audiences
created by cinema and television.
The essays in this publication
by Panalee Maskati and Wei (Maggie) Wu
describe some of these media as well as
the links between them. And as we move
into the main gallery, we can see the most
Repro Japan is about making Japanese popular culture.
We might frame this topic, and the exhibition, with a series
of questions that highlight each of these four ideas in turn:
making, popularity, culture, and Japan.
2
Kawase Hasui
Spring Evening at Kintai Bridge
1947–57
Kusakabe Kimbei
View of Kintai Bashi Bridge at Iwakuni
Late 19th century
Utagawa Hiroshige II
Kintai Bridge at Iwakuni in Suo Province
from the series One Hundred Famous
Views in the Various Provinces
1859
important of these connections: the ways
these media technologies reproduce or
re-mediate one another. As an example,
Edo-period textile patterns and clothing
fashions were portrayed in woodblock
prints of the time, then those prints
were imitated by nineteenth-century
photographers, and now contemporary
photographers adopt and transform the
very same tropes. Elsewhere in the gallery
we see how characters migrate from one
medium to another, for example from a
video game to a manga or print comic, and
from there to self-published spin-off manga
called dōjinshi—a huge and hugely popular
media world of its own.
So while we started by asking
what makes Japanese popular visual
culture, this layering of technologies and
reproductions blurs the line between
production and reproduction, or making
culture and remaking it.
What Makes This Japanese Culture Popular?
Another approach to understanding
the making of Japanese popular visual
culture would be to shift our focus from
technologies of making to investigate
this notion of popularity. Technology may
enable the production of these media,
but what is it about them that has made
them so popular—in their time and today,
▶
▶
3
in Japan and around the world? Repro
Japan highlights some visual similarities
between different media as a way of
identifying certain themes and motifs that
have generated interest across generations.
For example, the fascination with feminine
beauty and the voyeuristic desires of
media consumers are represented by the
woman’s face in a mirror, a trope we can
trace through many different eras and
media starting with Edo-period woodblock
prints and continuing in early photography,
in anime, and beyond. Maskati and Wu
curated the sections of the exhibit on cel
art and early photography, respectively,
combing through thousands of woodblock
print images, anime cels, and photographs
to identify and illustrate the striking
parallels we see in the gallery.
4
Here one might point out that
these visual parallels are driven in part
by the powers and limits of specifi c
technologies: for example, the mirror
motif allowed the viewer to see the female
subject from multiple angles at once,
investing a two-dimensional woodblock
print (or photograph, or animation) with a
third dimension, multiplying the aggressive
visual access that constituted the promise,
the appeal (and the threat) of these media.
Another trope, the tightly juxtaposed faces
of warriors or sumo wrestlers, gave a sense
of dynamic tension to static woodblock
prints, conveying the sense that a still
image might explode into motion. A century
later, anime directors trying to generate
the maximum sense of energy with the
minimum number of drawings use similar
scenes and a similar rhythm of movement
and stillness to create the same kind of
dynamic tension.
What Makes This Popular Culture Japanese?
These themes of voyeurism and violent
action are certainly familiar in Western
popular culture too, so here we might shift
focus yet again, from the process of making
and the source of popularity to a new
question of cultural and national borders:
what makes these artworks specifi cally
Japanese? The answer is not always
straightforward. Many works in the show
are produced by artists outside Japan,
including fans who adopt and adapt
Japanese cultural products in a process
that is equal parts exoticizing and intimate,
fashion and self-fashioning. The cosplay
costumes in the show were created by
U.S. fans based on characters in Japanese
manga or comics, including one manga
set in Victorian London. As Diana Tolin
describes in her essay, these costumes
were then worn at the World Cosplay
Summit in competition with teams from
Japan and around the world, making the
cultural origins (and destinations) of these
creations intriguingly complex.
After Kitagawa Utamaro
From the series Seven Women Applying Make-up Using a Mirror
20th-century[?] reprint of 1792–93 design
4
Here one might point out that
these visual parallels are driven in part
by the powers and limits of specific
technologies: for example, the mirror
motif allowed the viewer to see the female
subject from multiple angles at once,
investing a two-dimensional woodblock
print (or photograph, or animation) with a
third dimension, multiplying the aggressive
visual access that constituted the promise,
the appeal (and the threat) of these media.
Another trope, the tightly juxtaposed faces
of warriors or sumo wrestlers, gave a sense
of dynamic tension to static woodblock
prints, conveying the sense that a still
image might explode into motion. A century
later, anime directors trying to generate
the maximum sense of energy with the
minimum number of drawings use similar
scenes and a similar rhythm of movement
and stillness to create the same kind of
dynamic tension.
What Makes This Popular Culture Japanese?
These themes of voyeurism and violent
action are certainly familiar in Western
popular culture too, so here we might shift
focus yet again, from the process of making
and the source of popularity to a new
question of cultural and national borders:
what makes these artworks specifically
Japanese? The answer is not always
straightforward. Many works in the show
are produced by artists outside Japan,
including fans who adopt and adapt
Japanese cultural products in a process
that is equal parts exoticizing and intimate,
fashion and self-fashioning. The cosplay
costumes in the show were created by
U.S. fans based on characters in Japanese
manga or comics, including one manga
set in Victorian London. As Diana Tolin
describes in her essay, these costumes
were then worn at the World Cosplay
Summit in competition with teams from
Japan and around the world, making the
cultural origins (and destinations) of these
creations intriguingly complex.
After Kitagawa Utamaro
From the series Seven Women Applying Make-up Using a Mirror
20th-century[?] reprint of 1792–93 design
3
in Japan and around the world? Repro
Japan highlights some visual similarities
between different media as a way of
identifying certain themes and motifs that
have generated interest across generations.
For example, the fascination with feminine
beauty and the voyeuristic desires of
media consumers are represented by the
woman’s face in a mirror, a trope we can
trace through many different eras and
media starting with Edo-period woodblock
prints and continuing in early photography,
in anime, and beyond. Maskati and Wu
curated the sections of the exhibit on cel
art and early photography, respectively,
combing through thousands of woodblock
print images, anime cels, and photographs
to identify and illustrate the striking
parallels we see in the gallery.
5
6
Animation cel from a Fighting Spirit series
Date unknown
Utagawa Kunisada
Sumo Match between Shiranui Mitsuemon and Jimmaku Hisagoro
1859
Just past the costumes in the
main gallery, we come to one of Repro
Japan’s most layered examples of cultural
crossing and remixing—a Lolita dress
commissioned from Argentine fashion
designer Triana Martinez Dufour. Lolita is
a Japanese fashion subculture that draws
on European Baroque style to produce a
look something like a Western china doll.
(Even its name has a complex genealogy: a
borrowed English literary trope associated
with the objectification of young women,
it has been reappropriated by Japanese
women for a subcultural style associated
Okajima Kunitoshi, director
Animation cel from Sakura Diaries OVA
1997
with personal choice and reinvention.)
This appropriation of Western style is a
subculture that originated in Japan, but one
that has been adopted and interpreted by
subcultural fashion designers around the
world. Dufour’s Wa Lolita dress is a Lolita
variant that layers kimono design elements
back over the Japanese Victorian aesthetic.
Executed in fabric printed with woodblock
and stencil designs drawn from other works
in the gallery, it links together many of
the different periods, cultures, styles, and
media featured in the exhibit.
6
Animation cel from a Fighting Spirit series
Date unknown
Utagawa Kunisada
Sumo Match between Shiranui Mitsuemon and Jimmaku Hisagoro
1859
5
Just past the costumes in the
main gallery, we come to one of Repro
Japan’s most layered examples of cultural
crossing and remixing—a Lolita dress
commissioned from Argentine fashion
designer Triana Martinez Dufour. Lolita is
a Japanese fashion subculture that draws
on European Baroque style to produce a
look something like a Western china doll.
(Even its name has a complex genealogy: a
borrowed English literary trope associated
with the objectifi cation of young women,
it has been reappropriated by Japanese
women for a subcultural style associated
Okajima Kunitoshi, director
Animation cel from Sakura Diaries OVA
1997
with personal choice and reinvention.)
This appropriation of Western style is a
subculture that originated in Japan, but one
that has been adopted and interpreted by
subcultural fashion designers around the
world. Dufour’s Wa Lolita dress is a Lolita
variant that layers kimono design elements
back over the Japanese Victorian aesthetic.
Executed in fabric printed with woodblock
and stencil designs drawn from other works
in the gallery, it links together many of
the different periods, cultures, styles, and
media featured in the exhibit.
7
Yasmin Saaka (pen name Sakai Minami)
Detail from Ren’ai Funare Joshi no LOVE GAME
2018
Is It Popular Culture That Makes Japan?
Global activities like cosplay and subcultural
fashion make clear that while we might
be tempted to think of Japanese culture
as something monolithic that is “made in
Japan,” in a real sense it is multiple and
global. As fans around the world consume
and produce Japanese popular visual
culture, they are creating their own images
of Japan. And as Japan sees itself reflected
in the mirror of global art culture, global
museum culture, and global fan culture, its
image of itself may change as well. Whereas
we started by asking how Japan makes
popular culture, it is also interesting and
important to consider how popular culture
constructs our notions of and about Japan.
A complex example of this
dynamic is the cosplay photography in
the final part of the exhibit. Photographic
documentation is an inherent part of
cosplay culture, but depending on the
photographer, the costume, and the
model, the photos may be images of
Japanese culture; images of a fictional
world only glancingly related to Japan;
images of fandom as its own unique
subculture; or self-reflexive inquiries into
the processes of image making and cultural
construction themselves. The curator for
this part of the exhibit is photographer
and critic Eron Rauch, who teases apart
these layers in a provocative essay on
cosplay photography and the photographic
arts, taking up these categories and
simultaneously taking them apart.
8
7
Yasmin Saaka (pen name Sakai Minami)
Detail from Ren’ai Funare Joshi no LOVE GAME
2018
Is It Popular Culture That Makes Japan?
Global activities like cosplay and subcultural
fashion make clear that while we might
be tempted to think of Japanese culture
as something monolithic that is “made in
Japan,” in a real sense it is multiple and
global. As fans around the world consume
and produce Japanese popular visual
culture, they are creating their own images
of Japan. And as Japan sees itself refl ected
in the mirror of global art culture, global
museum culture, and global fan culture, its
image of itself may change as well. Whereas
we started by asking how Japan makes
popular culture, it is also interesting and
important to consider how popular culture
constructs our notions of and about Japan.
A complex example of this
dynamic is the cosplay photography in
the fi nal part of the exhibit. Photographic
documentation is an inherent part of
cosplay culture, but depending on the
photographer, the costume, and the
model, the photos may be images of
Japanese culture; images of a fi ctional
world only glancingly related to Japan;
images of fandom as its own unique
subculture; or self-refl exive inquiries into
the processes of image making and cultural
construction themselves. The curator for
this part of the exhibit is photographer
and critic Eron Rauch, who teases apart
these layers in a provocative essay on
cosplay photography and the photographic
arts, taking up these categories and
simultaneously taking them apart.
Making Repro Japan
The range and reach of Japanese popular
visual culture, and the multiplicity of
its creative and critical practices, are
expressed not only in the wide array of
media featured in Repro Japan, but also in
the variety of institutions and individuals
that contributed work for the show: eight
different museums and over a dozen
individual artists. It is also evident in the
diversity of the exhibition’s curatorial team,
which includes graduate and undergraduate
researchers as well as professional curators
and critics. Lisa Dorin and I had the privilege
of supervising this group, each member
of which has their own uniquely creative
relationship to the material. This emerges
clearly in their essays for this publication,
each with its own voice and approach, but
all interconnecting in interesting ways.
The final essay by exhibition
designer David Gürçay-Morris describes
how the gallery layout is intended to
recognize this diversity and interconnection:
inspired by the sequential structure of a
manga or comic book, Gürçay-Morris’s
design highlights one set of works at a
time, but encourages visual and conceptual
connections that can be glimpsed across
the gallery through strategic gaps between
panels and walls.
As you view each part of the
show and read each of the essays that
follow, I invite you to take over the critical
process the curators have begun: to read
our interpretations but to draw your own
conclusions; to see the links the exhibition
makes between different works, but also
make new connections of your own; to learn
something about Japan through its popular
visual culture, but also to consider and
reconsider how popular culture informs
our understanding of Japan.
Iwata Sentarō
Cool Breeze
1976
9
Left:
Mie prefecture, Japan
Fabric stencil with kasuri (ikat dyed) well curb pattern
19th century
Right:
Itō Shinsui
Woman in a Chignon
1924
While its origins go back more than five
hundred years, the practice of stencil
dyeing textiles expanded dramatically in
the Edo period (1603–1868) to become a
central fixture of Japanese material culture.
Stencils wed function and beauty:
these material units of analog printing
were also masterfully crafted art objects
in and of themselves. The term for textile
stencils (katagami) translates as “pattern
paper,” and the dyeing method (katazome)
to “pattern dyeing.” As the emphasis on
patterns indicates, the principal function
of stenciling is reproducibility. The stencils
are made from layers of mulberry paper,
the delicate paper latices often supported
with a grid of silk threads. A dye-resistant
paste made from rice flour was applied to
fabric through the stencil to create areas
that would remain undyed. Stencils could be
Textiles and
Fabric Stencils
by Panalee Maskati ’20
and Christopher Bolton
10
used to produce new kinds of designs, but
also to simulate patterns produced by much
more expensive, time-intensive dyeing
techniques, so that that these patterns
could be mass manufactured by and for
a new fashion-conscious urban merchant
class.
In this way, the technology of
fabric stencils resembles the woodblock
printing technology being used to mass
produce artwork for the same audience,
and popular fashions were an important
subject for these prints. Repro Japan traces
the connection between these two media
by juxtaposing Edo-period stencils with
woodblock prints that feature the same
textile designs. These parallels show a love
of pattern common to both media: the prints
capitalize on the geometric quality of these
designs, portraying printed fabric garments
but also carrying textile designs into other
objects and even the backgrounds.
Consider Itō Shinsui’s twentieth-
century print Woman in a Chignon 1924.
The subject wears a kimono with a
traditional igeta pattern created using the
kasuri technique, where individual threads
are dyed before weaving. She also has
a hair ornament with a shiborizome or
tie-dyed design, created by meticulously
wrapping tiny areas of the fabric by hand.
The igeta and shiborizome stencils in the
exhibit simulate the look of these more
expensive techniques, making an elite style
available for mercantile consumption. Itō’s
artwork makes the fashion consumable
in a different way, allowing its depiction,
reproduction, and circulation as a print.
When Japan’s self-isolation ended
at the close of the Edo period, Japanese
stencils, textiles, and prints flooded
Europe, and the aesthetics of Edo-era
popular culture permeated Western art. At
the same time, Western technology and
aesthetics influenced Japanese arts in
profound ways. Itō’s print seems to float
somewhere between the twentieth century
and the nineteenth. Its draftsmanship and
exquisite detail borrow from Edo woodblock
techniques and compositions but also
Akita region, Japan
Nishinomai Bon Odori Costume
Late Edo period
(early to mid-19th century)
9
Left:
Mie prefecture, Japan
Fabric stencil with kasuri (ikat dyed) well curb pattern
19th century
Right:
Itō Shinsui
Woman in a Chignon
1924
While its origins go back more than fi ve
hundred years, the practice of stencil
dyeing textiles expanded dramatically in
the Edo period (1603–1868) to become a
central fi xture of Japanese material culture.
Stencils wed function and beauty:
these material units of analog printing
were also masterfully crafted art objects
in and of themselves. The term for textile
stencils (katagami) translates as “pattern
paper,” and the dyeing method (katazome)
to “pattern dyeing.” As the emphasis on
patterns indicates, the principal function
of stenciling is reproducibility. The stencils
are made from layers of mulberry paper,
the delicate paper latices often supported
with a grid of silk threads. A dye-resistant
paste made from rice fl our was applied to
fabric through the stencil to create areas
that would remain undyed. Stencils could be
Textiles and
Fabric Stencils
by Panalee Maskati ’20
and Christopher Bolton
11
12
CLAMP
xxxHolic
2008
art and culture within the temporal and
cultural tableau of the Edo period. Instead,
the comparisons in Repro Japan turn
toward the places where Japan’s cultural
landscape folds over itself, where certain
motifs and formal elements resurface,
transmute, and are recomposed upon the
dynamic terrain that lies within certain
horizons—the horizons of the idiom we call
“Japanese.”
update them. Its subject seems intended
to be a twentieth-century woman wearing
a traditional, Edo-period design; but she
might also be interpreted as a beauty
from the Edo era portrayed in a more
contemporary style.
As these complex interchanges
across time and place suggest, we should
be wary of essentializing Japanese cultural
production by circumscribing all Japanese
Alexandra Weber
Ichihara Yūko from xxxHolic
2011
12
CLAMP
xxxHolic
2008
13
Cosplay—the word itself is a kind of reverse
import, a Japanese term derived from the
English “costume play”—is the practice of
dressing up as characters from popular
culture, particularly at fan conventions
and events devoted to these media. As
American comics, Japanese anime and
manga, and video games have gained
mainstream popularity over the last thirty
years, cosplay has grown from a subculture
within a subculture into a widespread
phenomenon. While many cosplayers
and costumers enjoy just wearing these
costumes, attending events, and taking
photos, there is another stream, competitive
cosplay, where people compete in contests
of craftsmanship and performance.
At the pinnacle of these
competitions is the World Cosplay Summit
held annually in Nagoya, Japan. WCS
started in 2003 as an invitational cultural
event with four countries attending. In
2019, forty countries across six continents
sent teams of two representatives each to
determine who has the best craftsmanship
and performances in the world. As the
archivist and curator of the World Cosplay
Summit USA Alumni Retrospective, it is my
pleasure to share two examples from the
competition for this exhibit.
The costumes displayed
represented the United States in 2011
and 2017: Alexandra Weber’s Ichihara
Yūko costume, based on a character
from xxxHolic, and Megan Tubridy’s Ciel
Phantomhive costume drawn from
Black Butler. The two look very different,
but both show the combination of Japanese
and Western influences that characterizes
the anime and manga from which they are
drawn. Yūko has a traditional kimono with a
bold motif that recalls the printed patterns
from the first part of the exhibit, but
combined with an art deco sensibility we
can see in the style of the original manga—
all topped by a Western buckle and lace-up
bodice. Ciel features Victorian elements
in the style of Gothic Lolita, a stream of
subcultural Japanese street fashion that
playfully reinterprets 18th- and 19th-century
European clothing. (For another example
of Lolita fashion, see the Wa Lolita dress
designed by Triana Martinez Dufour, at
the center of the exhibit.) These pieces
beautifully showcase how current Japanese
popular culture draws from traditional
roots while incorporating and re-imagining
Western influences, and also how pop
culture itself is taken up and reinterpreted
by fans in other cultures around the world.
Cosplay
by Diana Tolin, World Cosplay
Summit Alumna and Coordinator
14
In the nineteenth century, colonialist
expansion and early forms of globalization
initiated by European countries and
America forced other nations to connect
with the West. Newly accessible countries
like Japan inspired wide interest, and
touristic photographic albums—celebrated
for their supposed accuracy and vividness—
became popular commercial goods. The
traveling photographer emerged as a
profession.
A British subject born in Italy in
1832, Felice Beato was a well-traveled
commercial photographer whose itinerary
included India, China, and Egypt. In 1863
he opened a commercial studio in the treaty
port of Yokohama, Japan, selling tourist
photographs and albums primarily to foreign
customers. Beato influenced a generation
of photographers working in Japan,
including the Japanese photographer
Kusakabe Kimbei. This exhibit features
work from Beato’s Views of Japan, the first
commercial photo album of Japan, as well
as later works linked to Kimbei’s studio.
Views of Japan was published
in 1868, the same year that the Edo
period ended and the Meiji Restoration
jumpstarted Japan’s total modernization,
i.e. Westernization. But while Beato worked
at a time when Japan was undergoing
these transformations, under his camera
Early
Photography
by Wei Maggie Wu, MA ’19
15
the country showed no sign of domestic
turbulence or foreign influence. Borrowing
from Edo-period popular media like
woodblock prints, Beato constructed his
own imaginary Japan unaffected by time.
This essentialist view of a culture
is problematic, and many scholars have
argued that Beato’s lens perpetuates a
colonial bias.
1
We could make an ethical
judgment of Beato’s work and cast
it aside as representing an outdated
ideology, but there is in fact a visible and
material presence there that questions
Beato’s colonialist agenda. As though the
photographs were not meaningful enough
by themselves, Beato had them hand-
colored. This choice was hardly radical
at the time. When photography was first
invented in 1839, its inability to
render color was disappointing
to many. As an obvious solution,
hand-coloring appeared as early as
1840 and enjoyed immediate public
success.
2
By the 1860s, when
Beato started working in Japan,
European hand-colorists were using
powdered watercolor pigments
with a high level of translucency,
pigments made specifically for
their trade. Yet Beato was not
satisfied with any available method,
and he hired Japanese artists
to use Japanese ink, a material
Felice Beato
Woman Using Cosmetic
from the album Views of Japan
1870–1879
Utagawa Hiroshige I
Night View of Saruwaka-machi
from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
1856
Untitled Street Scene
Late 19th century
16
never applied to photographs before. The
Japanese pigment contributed a distinctive
visual effect, which combined with the
Japanese models and subjects to create an
even stronger sense of a “Japanese reality.”
But Beato’s efforts might have
gone too far for the purposes of realism. In
Woman Using Cosmetic, the blue pigment
on the porcelain teapot in the lower-right
corner disrupts the fading vignette effect,
distracting the viewer from being immersed
in a voyeuristic fantasy. In the foreground,
primary colors pop out from the tray instead
of blending into a subtle poetic atmosphere.
Their opacity makes it impossible to
discern what these blobs of blue, yellow,
red, and green represent. This is because
the Japanese ink was applied wet, and as
water diffused from the center, it carried
the pigment and occasionally exceeded
the boundary delineated by the underlying
photograph, creating a small halo that looks
almost like a stain.
If Beato’s colonialist perspective,
which assumes non-Western culture to
be frozen in time, saw a Japanese past
fixed for his appropriation, the Japanese
ink proves its mobility and resilience as it
refuses to be contained in a designated
spot or fulfill its assigned task of enhancing
a poetic effect. Its presence almost invites
one to scratch the paper to see if it can
be removed. That desire to touch the
photograph immediately turns it from
a distant dream to an immediate fact,
something which can no longer serve as
a transparent portal into another world.
Instead of sustaining the illusion of
reality, the colors reveal the artificial and
superficial process of construction.
In Japanese woodblock prints, it
was an accepted practice to apply colors
independently of reality or the intended
design of the artist. For instance, both
editions of Utagawa Hiroshige I’s Night View
of Saruwaka-machi (1856, 1892) depict
people wearing only the color blue, which
not only made printing easier but which also
creates a unified pictorial effect. When the
1892 edition omits the warm yellow light
and dark blue sky and recolors the black
1
Eleanor M. Hight, “The Many Lives of Beato’s ‘Beauties,’” in Colonialist
Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place, ed. Eleanor Hight and Gary
Sampson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 126–158. See also Anne Lacoste,
Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road (Los Angeles: J. Paul
Getty Museum, 2010), 19.
2
Alice Swan, “Coloriage des Epreuves: French Methods and Materials
for Coloring Daguerreotypes,” Appendix II in French Daguerreotypes, by
Janet E. Buerger (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1989), 150.
Swan describes the gilding treatment developed to make silver-mercury
particles hard enough to be layered on with a brush.
building white, it makes the atmosphere
look cooler and almost seems to depict
a midday scene. This independence
of Japanese color thus competes with
Beato’s intention and challenges the
colonialist desire to document, to know,
and thereby to control. It is by interrogating
their agency as material artworks that
we transform these nineteenth-century
photographs from deficient documentary
by a British photographer to creative, even
interventional art by the Japanese artists
he hired.
17
I’m removing my pants in a hotel room while
a crying stranger works a sewing machine
next to me. My hair is sprayed bright blue.
A woman stuffs her bra on the bed while a
man with his hair under pantyhose lies on
the divan doing elaborate makeup. I take a
photo, which ends up in an expensive frame
in a gallery exhibition 2,000 miles away.
Let me start again.
I am at Anime Central, a fan convention in
a suburban mega-hotel outside Chicago.
An old friend from my anime club grabs
me as an emergency substitute to join
their group cosplaying as characters from
Left:
Elena Dorfman
Tree (Tokyo Babylon) from Fandomania: Characters & Cosplay
2007
Right:
Joseph Chi Lin
FFXIV Storyteller Bard by Malindachan (Malinda Mathis)
2019
A Cosplay
Photography
De-Primer
by Eron Rauch, Artist and Critic
18
Paradise Kiss. They are already late and are
disqualified from winning a prize. Everyone
is crushed, but we still finish dressing out
of pride. While we are getting ready, I shoot
some photos that everyone will cherish
for depicting the hidden labor behind their
passion.
“Cosplay photography” seems
so easy to define that, at first glance,
it looks like a tautology. A photograph
of someone in a costume depicting an
anime, manga, or video game character is
a cosplay photograph. Case closed. But
under scrutiny, a single “simple” photo
fractures into shards that reflect different
modes of making and different cultural
contexts. Reading a cosplay photograph
means following all the numerous strands
that connect it to other nodes in its wider
communication network.
For example, is a photo of
someone in a punk outfit a cosplay
photograph? What about a photo of the
same person dressed as the infamous punk,
Sid Vicious? What if they were wearing a
recreation of the outfit Gary Oldman wore
to portray Sid Vicious in the movie Sid and
Nancy? Where, precisely, is the delineation
between that and a photo of someone
dressed as Nagase Arashi, the Japanese
fashion-student character who features in
Paradise Kiss, whose outfit and look are a
paean to Vivienne Westwood and that same
historical punk aesthetic?
These questions investigate only
a single photograph and its subject. But
as art critic Taco Hidde Bakker points out
in The Photograph That Took the Place
of the Mountain, photography is but one
part of a broader system of imaging and
reproduction technologies, including those
featured throughout this exhibit, and as
such always has to be read in a context
of its production and circulation.
1
For an
example of how these subtle complexities
influence our reading of an image, let’s take
two photographs, one by Joseph Chi Lin
and another by Elena Dorfman, that seem
materially similar at a first glance but are
functionally and affectively quite different.
Joseph Chi Lin is a professional
photographer whose photographs of
cosplay are colorful and clear, with the
subject framed to be seen. Lin has deep
connections to the cosplay world, and this
type of image circulates primarily amongst
cosplayers and fans. Lin’s use of wrapping
natural light, subtle camera techniques,
and naturalistic backgrounds collaborate
with the cosplayer’s performance. Together
they craft a fictional world for the character
depicted and simultaneously showcase the
workmanship of the costume itself.
Elena Dorfman is also a
professional photographer, and her image
in the exhibit is richly colored, clearly
rendered, and framed to emphasize the
cosplayer. Her work is displayed in a fine
art gallery context, with her other projects
ranging from a series of rock quarry
landscapes to portraits of men who have
relationships with realistic sex dolls. In
19
Dorfman’s photographs, the cosplay subject
is isolated on a dark backdrop, strobes
cast sharp light from the sides, and the
poses are restrained. These photographs
are not building fictional worlds with the
cosplayer (like Lin’s images), but instead
leverage similar photographic technologies
and techniques to introduce dissonance
between character and cosplayer, drawing
attention to details that highlight the abject
boundary between reality and fiction.
Frequently the context for
photographs, especially photographs of
cosplay, involves multilayered cultural
exchanges. Wei (Maggie) Wu’s essay on
nineteenth-century touristic photography
elsewhere in this publication describes
how Japanese subjects, often women,
were captured in images by foreign male
photographers. It is hard to talk about
cosplay photography without touching
on these same complexities: the cross-
cultural gazes and subject positions (often
Orientalist and gendered) inherited in
this genre of image-making. But as Henry
Jenkins has discussed in his classic essay,
“Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten,”
fandoms are also capable of queering and
critiquing the traditions they engage and
play with.
2
Japanese conceptual photog-
rapher Morimura Yasumasa has built his
oeuvre on reversing and relinking flows
of Western-centric valuation and gaze by
inhabiting characters depicted in canoni-
cal Western artworks. In Daughter of Art
History (Princess A) (1990) he has isolated
a single child from Diego Velázquez’s visu-
ally and rhetorically dazzling Las Meninas
(1656). Velázquez’s painting is, itself, a
reflection on the role of the artist in crafting
history and identity, with clothing leveraged
as one of the markers of the subject’s cul-
tural status. Whether we know the subject
of the Morimura reperformance as Princess
Margarita, “The Infanta,” or the anime-char-
acter-sounding “Princess A,” the clothing
and the stylization of oil painting suggest
Eron Rauch
Paradise Kiss Cosplayers Preparing (Anime Central 2004, Rosemont, IL) from Bridges of Desire
2004
20
to us that this is someone noble, important,
history-worthy. By aggressively cropping in,
Morimura’s restaging radically foregrounds
the way that, even more than three hundred
years later, both the specific clothing and
artistic style are still serviceable as markers
of identity and valuation. Yet, the restaging
refuses to settle on an erasure of Morimura,
stranding us in an uneasy vantage where we
have to grapple with the representational
tropes that construe certain people and art
as historically valuable and certain people
and art as “other.”
These questions of cultural
exchange and gaze are not academic by
any means. Returning to our question of
what is or isn’t a cosplay photograph, how
does it affect our decision and subsequent
reading if the hypothetical dressed-up Sid
Vicious subject is identified as Japanese
or as British? In Tokyo or just outside
Yasumasa Morimura
Daughter of Art History (Princess A)
1990
Chicago? If he (or she) is photographed
on the street or at an anime convention?
What if it is an image of Arashi (the punk
character from Paradise Kiss) cosplaying
as Sid Vicious?
Whichever of these images we
identify as “cosplay photography,” all of
their multilayered visual performances
and contexts resonate through the
vast structure of visual communication
attached to cosplay photography. This
includes our role as viewers. Whether your
hair is sprayed blue, whether you hold a
worn camera, whether you are looking
at images of cosplayers in a museum or
on your phone, cosplay photography—
maybe “cosplay photographies” is a better
term—destabilizes our usual perspectives,
letting us glimpse our active, intertwined
relationships with the images that haunt
our media-saturated lives.
1
Taco Hidde Baker, The Photograph That Took the Place of
the Mountain: Essays and Other Writings on Photography
and Art (Amsterdam: Fw:Books, 2018).
2
Henry Jenkins, “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan
Writing as Textual Poaching,” Critical Studies in Mass
Communication 5, no. 2 (1988): 85–107.
21
Comics scholars in Japan and America
speak about the importance of “the
gutter”—the blank space between two
panels in a manga or comic book; and
“closure”—our ability to perceive a whole
from an incomplete collection of parts. In
Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
writes:
Despite its unceremonious title,
the gutter plays host to much of
the magic and mystery that are
at the very heart of comics! Here
in the limbo of the gutter, human
imagination takes two separate
images and transforms them into
a single idea....Comics panels
fracture both time and space,
offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of
unconnected moments. But closure
allows us to connect these moments
and mentally construct a continuous,
unified reality.
I thought a lot about the gutter
when designing Repro Japan’s gallery
space, which is divided into different areas
and panels that foreground one set of works
at a time, but with spaces piercing the
walls to fleetingly reveal other parts of the
David Gürçay-Morris
Gallery Design for Repro Japan: Technologies of Popular Visual Culture
2021
Exhibition
Design
by David Gürçay-Morris, Professor
of Theatre, Williams College
22
exhibition. I was drawn to this design both
because I am an avid fan of manga, anime,
and Japanese video games, and because
it is such an apt description of what I love
most about these artistic media. Each
depends upon the viewer’s participation
in the completion of the artwork, whether
through the phenomenon of closure when
reading a manga; the optical illusions
known as “persistence of vision” and “beta
movement” that contribute to our seeing
rapidly changing still images as the smooth,
continuous action of animation; or the
necessity of player action and choice to the
narrative of a video game. In other words,
they all situate a gap or gutter at their
center, as does the exhibition design itself.
As a designer for both theater and
museums, my task is to arrange “things”
(artworks, walls, actors, scenery) in space
(theaters, galleries) experienced over time
(acts of a play, the time spent traversing
a room or reading a page of manga). You,
the visitor, follow a sequence of works
that is then interrupted—seemingly by
happenstance?—by a glimpse through a
gap in the wall of an object on the other
side of the room. Your awareness of the
accident of this visual adjacency draws you
into the moment, granting you ownership
of it: “I saw this, I happened to notice.” The
boundedness of the gap, its artificiality
and intentionality, might subconsciously
encourage you to speculate about what
that juxtaposition could mean; “I must
be on to something; that gap was there
for a reason. Someone wanted me to
see.” It is important that the design not
only provide multiple routes through the
exhibition, but also create opportunities
for inferring connections between the
artworks—and telling a story about the
making of Japanese pop culture—which
the curators had not imagined. Each of
us is simultaneously the detective piecing
together clues and the writer of the
detective story.
1
Natsume Fusanosuke, “Komatopia,” in Mechademia 3: Limits of the
Human, ed. Frenchy Lunning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2008), 65–72.
2
Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art (New York:
William Morrow, 1993), 66–67.
23
Cover:
Nishimura Satoshi (b. Japan, 1964) and Shimazaki Nanako, directors
Animation cel for Fighting Spirit TV series, Episode 13
2000
Paint and toner on acetate
Museum purchase, Williams College Museum of Art
A.69.12.4
Utagawa Kunisada
b. Edo (present-day Tokyo), Japan 1786
d. Edo (present-day Tokyo), Japan 1865
Sumo Match between Shiranui Mitsuemon and Jimmaku Hisagoro
1859
Woodblock print
Museum purchase, Williams College Museum of Art
Inside Cover:
Eron Rauch
b. Los Angeles, California, United States, 1981
Centered Single Woman, Sci-Fi
from The Neo-Japonisme Project
2012
Collaged magazine images
Courtesy of Eron Rauch
Pg 2:
Kawase Hasui
b. Tokyo, Japan 1883
d. Tokyo, Japan 1957
Spring Evening at Kintai Bridge
1947 design. Edition from 1947–57
Woodblock print
Museum purchase, Williams College Museum of Art
Pg 3:
top:
Kusakabe Kimbei
b. Kōfu, Kai (present-day Yamanashi), Japan 1841
d. Ashiya, Hyōgo, Japan 1934
View of Kintai Bashi Bridge at Iwakuni
Late 19th century
Albumin aquatint
Museum purchase, Williams College Museum of Art
bottom:
Utagawa Hiroshige II
b. Edo (present-day Tokyo), Japan 1826
d. Yokohama, Japan 1869
Kintai Bridge at Iwakuni in Suo Province
from the series One Hundred Famous Views in the Various Provinces
1859
Woodblock print
Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of the Friends
of Arthur B. Duel
1933.4.250
Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College
Pg 4:
Maker(s) not known to WCMA, after Kitagawa Utamaro
from the series Seven Women Applying Make-up Using a Mirror
20th-century[?] reprint of 1792–93 design
Woodblock print
Museum purchase, Williams College Museum of Art
Pg 5:
Okajima Kunitoshi, director
Animation cel from Sakura Diaries OVA
1997
Paint and toner on acetate. (Background reproduced by WCMA)
Museum purchase, Williams College Museum of Art
Pg 6:
top:
Maker(s) not known to WCMA
Animation cel from a Fighting Spirit series
Date unknown
Paint and toner on acetate
Museum purchase, Williams College Museum of Art
bottom:
Utagawa Kunisada
b. Edo (present-day Tokyo), Japan 1786
d. Edo (present-day Tokyo), Japan 1865
Sumo Match between Shiranui Mitsuemon and Jimmaku Hisagoro
1859
Woodblock print triptych
Museum purchase, Williams College Museum of Art
Pg 7:
Yasmin Saaka (pen name Sakai Minami)
b.1987, Oberlin, Ohio, United States
Detail from Ren’ai Funare Joshi no LOVE GAME
2018
Manga
Courtesy of Yasmin Saaka ‘09
Pg 8:
Iwata Sentarō
b. Tokyo, Japan 1901
d. 1974
Cool Breeze
1976
Woodblock print
Museum purchase, Williams College Museum of Art
Pg 9:
top:
Maker(s) not known to WCMA
Mie prefecture, Japan
Fabric stencil with kasuri (ikat dyed) well curb pattern
19th century
Astringent treated paper
MAK–Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna, OR 3925 818
Photo: © MAK/Georg Mayer
right:
Itō Shinsui
b. Tokyo, Japan, 1898
d. Tokyo, Japan, 1972
Woman in a Chignon
1924
Woodblock print
Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Libertson
2011.236.3
Pg 10:
Maker(s) not known to WCMA
Akita region, Japan
Nishinomai Bon Odori Costume
Late Edo period (early to mid-19th century)
Silk crepe with stenciled designs
Museum purchase, Williams College Museum of Art
Images List
24
Pg 11:
Alexandra Weber
b.1985 United States
Ichihara Yūko from xxxHolic
2011
Cosplay costume
Courtesy of Diana Tolin and Alexandra Weber
Pg 12:
CLAMP (Ōkawa Nanase, b. Osaka, Japan, 1967; Igarashi Satsuki, b.
Kyoto, Japan, 1969; Mokona, b. Kyoto, Japan, 1968; Nekoi Tsubaki, b.
Kyoto, Japan, 1969)
xxxHolic
2008
Manga cover
Courtesy of Diana Tolin
Pg 14:
Felice Beato
b. Venice, Italy 1832 (naturalized British citizen)
d. Florence, Italy, 1909
Woman Using Cosmetic
from the album Views of Japan
1870–1879
Albumen print
Photography Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints
and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden
Foundations, b13951740
Pg 15:
top:
Utagawa Hiroshige I
b. Edo (present-day Tokyo), Japan 1797
d. Edo (present-day Tokyo), Japan 1858
Night View of Saruwaka-machi
from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo
1856
Woodblock print
Harvard Art Museums/Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Gift of the Friends
of Arthur B. Duel
1933.4.154
Photo: © President and Fellows of Harvard College
bottom:
Maker(s) not known to WCMA
Untitled Street Scene
Late 19th century
Albumin aquatint mounted on double-sided album page
Museum purchase, Williams College Museum of Art
Pg 17:
left:
Elena Dorfman
b. Boston, Massachusetts, United States, 1965
Tree (Tokyo Babylon) from Fandomania: Characters & Cosplay
2007
Chromogenic print
Cosplayer: Bennett Cousins ‘06
Courtesy of Elena Dorfman
right:
Joseph Chi Lin
b. New York City, New York, United States, 1981
FFXIV Storyteller Bard by Malindachan (Malinda Mathis)
2019
Photograph
Courtesy of Joseph Chi Lin
Curators
Christopher Bolton, Professor of Comparative and Japanese Literature,
Williams College
Textile Patterns and Anime Cels:
Panalee Maskati ’20
Cosplay:
Diana Tolin, World Cosplay Summit Alumna and Coordinator
Early Photography:
Wei (Maggie) Wu, MA ’19
Contemporary Photography:
Eron Rauch, Artist and Critic
Lisa Dorin, Deputy Director for Curatorial Aairs and Curator of
Contemporary Art, WCMA
Gallery Design:
David Gürçay-Morris, Professor of Theatre, Williams College
Publication Design:
Christopher Swift
Special thanks to Izaki Metropoulos ’22 and Oliver Ruhl, MA ’21 for
research assistance.
Pg 19:
Eron Rauch
b. Los Angeles, California, United States, 1981
Paradise Kiss Cosplayers Preparing (Anime Central 2004, Rosemont, IL)
from Bridges of Desire
2004
Photograph
Courtesy of Eron Rauch
Pg 20:
Yasumasa Morimura
b. Osaka, Japan, 1951
Daughter of Art History (Princess A), 1990
Color photograph, transparent medium
© Yasumasa Morimura; Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine,
New York.
Pg 21:
David Gürçay-Morris
b. Evanston, Illinois, United States, 1979
Gallery Design for Repro Japan
2021
Rendering of 3D model
Pg 25 and back cover:
Nishimura Satoshi (b. Japan, 1964) and Shimazaki Nanako, directors
Pencil sketch for Fighting Spirit TV series, Episode 13
2000
Pencil on paper
Museum purchase, Williams College Museum of Art
A.69.12.4
Nishimura Satoshi and Shimazaki Nanako, directors
Pencil sketch for Fighting Spirit TV series
2000