With the elegance, discrimination and knowledge that distinguished his two recent and brilliantly received albums of nineteenth-century photographs of Asian life, The Last Empire and Imperial China, the photo-historian Clark Worswick now gives us this landmark photographic album of Japan from 1854-1905. The beauty and fierceness of that country's almost medieval nineteenth-century society is revealed in 120 extraordinary photographs by the remarkable European and Japanese photographers of the day. In this book—which includes 16 pages in full color reproducing the artfully hand-tinted photographs the Victorians loved—we see the splendor that marked the final years of the Tokugawa shogunate and the first, often curious, images of Westernization that heralded Japan's transformation from an insular, feudal country to a modern world power. Here are the faces, the costumes, the manners, the professions of that time, the landscapes, the countryside, the city streets, the interiors rich and poor. The development of a Japanese vision in photography can be attributed to a heterogeneous mix of talents—European as well as Japanese. Among those represented here: Felix Beato, an Italian military photographer who was the first, and the most important, European photographer in Japan and who extensively documented the last years of the old regime; Baron von Stillfried, an Austrian nobleman who later bought out Beato's firm and whose dramatic studio portraits were characterized by a grave beauty and a singular intensity; and, in an astonishing modern mode, the two leading Japanese photographers of the time, both of them trained by and in many ways surpassing Beato and Stillfried. One of them, Kusakabe Kimbei, the protégé of Stillfried, perfected the art of the psychological portrait and became the great Japanese photographer of the nineteenth century; the other, Ogawa Isshin, the most successful society photographer of nineteenth-century Japan, whose exquisite portraits are best considered in the context of a renaissance of traditional, spiritual Japanese art. Clark Worswick has selected the photographs from hundreds of albums of the day and has written an accompanying text. The book is published in conjunction with a major exhibition organized by the Japan Society, opening in New York in December 1979 and scheduled to travel across America throughout the following year.