Untitled (Woman Playing the Koto)
題名不詳（琴を弾く女）
- Birth Year
- 1823
- Death Year
- 1914
- Date
- 1863–76
- Technique, Material, Format
- albumen paper
- Dimension
- 8.8 x 5.6 cm
- Category
- Photograph or Moving Image by JapanesePhotographer/Artist
- Inventory Number
- 91-PHJ-131
Shimooka Renjo was a photographer at the dawn of the medium in Japan. It was while he was aspiring to be a painter that he first encountered and then studied the medium. In 1862, he moved to Noge, Yokohama, and the following year to Bentendori, where he opened a photographic studio. Around the same time, the English photographer Felice Beato came to Japan and set up a studio in Yokohama’s foreign settlement, where he photographed Japanese landscapes and people. This photograph shows stereotypical Japanese imagery: the woman playing a koto, a folding screen with cranes. Renjo took many photographs for foreign clients, emphasizing such exotic motifs.
(Otsuka Mayumi)