Beautiful vintage Japanese photographs by Kusakabe Kimbei
One of my favourite albums of vintage photographs is a large lacquerware-covered book of hand-coloured images from Japan. The photographs are pasted down onto the thick pages and, between the photos themselves and the lovely album, the labour and effort involved in the creation of the album is very apparent. The lacquerware cover of the album. Such albums, I have learned, were produced in a range of sizes and qualities, primarily for tourists visiting Japan. Bear in mind that Japan was a closed country as far as the industrial-capitalist West was concerned until the United States…