Adolfo Farsari - Evaluations of His Work

Evaluations of His Work

In its time, the work of A. Farsari & Co. was highly regarded and popular. Besides Kipling's endorsement, photographer and prolific photography writer W. K. Burton published an appraisal in an 1887 article: "I have seen no better work in the way of coloured photographs anywhere than some of Farsari's productions". In the same year, an admiring review of Farsari's work appeared in the journal Photographic Times and American Photographer, describing it as "technically almost perfect" and showing "artistic proportion" in the selection of subjects, depicting Japanese life and providing images of the natural beauty of a country that was admittedly unfamiliar to Americans.

Later opinions have been divided. In a 1988 article, art and photography historian Ellen Handy described A. Farsari & Co. as having become "well-known for issuing albums of landscape views in great quantity, but without regard for print quality and delicacy of hand-colouring". Terry Bennett, a specialist in the early photography of Asia, refers to Farsari's work as "inconsistent and lacking the quality found in the photography of Beato, Stillfried or Kusakabe." But Bennett also notes that Farsari employed excellent artists, used the best paper and produced some "stunningly coloured photographs". For historian Sebastian Dobson, the artistic and historical significance of the work of Farsari (and other Yokohama photographers of his era, particularly Kusakabe and Tamamura) is rightly undergoing re-evaluation after many years in which it was dismissed as tourist kitsch and "perceived by some as pandering to nineteenth-century Western notions of exoticism". Farsari's photographs and albums are included in numerous museums and private collections around the world, and a selection of his works was exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 2004.