Farsari and Yokohama Shashin
Farsari expressed his view of photography in a letter to his sister, writing, "taking pictures is just a mechanical thing." In describing his development as a photographer, he wrote, "I have had no real teachers, I have learned everything from books. I bought all the necessary equipment and with no help from anyone, I printed, took photographs and so on. Then I taught others."
Of course, Farsari did not work in isolation. The works (particularly those that were hand-coloured) and practices of the many foreign and Japanese commercial photographers who operated in Yokohama from the 1860s to the 1880s have been termed Yokohama shashin (literally, "Yokohama photographs" or "photography"). Farsari and its other practitioners – notably Beato, Stillfried, Tamamura, Kusakabe Kimbei, Ogawa Kazumasa, and Uchida Kuichi – produced works that in their subject matter, composition and colouring present a striking combination of the conventions and techniques of Western photography with those of Japanese artistic traditions, particularly ukiyo-e. These photographers also provided the key images by which Meiji-era Japan and the Japanese were known to people in other countries. Interestingly, their images also changed the ways in which Japanese saw their own country. Through their images, foreign photographers publicised sites that interested them, sometimes drawing Japanese attention to hitherto neglected locations. One was the now-important "Daibutsu" (great Buddha) at Kōtoku-in, Kamakura. In a similar vein, Farsari's and others' photographs of the mausoleums of Tōshō-gū made the once restricted site familiar to a wider audience.
Farsari and other 19th-century commercial photographers generally concentrated on two types of subject matter: the scenery of Japan and the "manners and customs" of its inhabitants. Such subjects, and the ways in which they were literally and figuratively framed, were chosen to appeal to foreign taste; and the reason for this, apart from the photographer's individual aesthetics, vision and preconceptions, had much to do with economics. Photographs were expensive to make and accordingly expensive to buy. In 1870s Japan, a portrait photograph usually cost half a ryō "per head", about a month's pay for an artisan. Given such pricing, few Japanese could afford photographs and a photographer's clientele was largely drawn from the foreign residents of the European and American enclaves: colonial administrators, missionaries, merchants and the military. By the early 1870s, tourists had joined their number. To appeal to this clientele, photographers often staged and contrived the scenes they photographed, particularly the portraits depicting "manners and customs".
In 1885, Charles J. S. Makin used some of Farsari's views to illustrate his travel account Land of the Rising Sun, Being a Short Account of Japan and the Japanese. As photomechanical printing was still in its infancy, it was common for artists and illustrators to create works derived from photographs. For example, Charles Wirgman's numerous engravings for the Illustrated London News were made from views by Wirgman's friend and sometime partner Felice Beato. Occasionally the link between a work of art and its photographic source material was less overt: Louis-Jules Dumoulin's 1888 oil painting Boys' Festival from the Bluff, Yokohama (now called Carp Banners in Kyoto) draws heavily from Farsari's photograph Gionmachi, Kioto (now often called View of Shijō-dōri, Kyoto); although the painted image strongly resembles the photographic source, the location of the subject has been changed in the title.
During the era of the collodion process, before the arrival of less demanding photographic technology (the gelatin silver process, photographic film, and smaller cameras) and the consequent rise of amateur photography, commercial photographers like Farsari had a particular importance for recording events and views. In Japan before 1899 such photographers were even more significant because the government required foreigners to obtain passes to journey to the interior, and commercial photographers based in Japan could more easily gain access and provide rare images of restricted areas. By 1889, however, Farsari estimated that about half of all visitors to Yokohama were amateur photographers; even if this was an exaggeration, the presence of increasing numbers of amateur photographers was obviously having an impact on the commercial photography business. To encourage amateur photographers to visit his studio and possibly buy his merchandise, Farsari provided free use of a darkroom.
Attribution is often difficult with Farsari's photographs because 19th-century photographers frequently acquired each others' images and sold them under their own names. This may be due to the commonplace exchange of stock and negatives between various commercial photographers, or due to the number of freelance amateurs who sold their work to more than one studio. Thus a photograph identified as by Farsari might actually be by Beato, Stillfried & Andersen or Kusakabe. A case in point is the photograph of an Officer's Daughter, variously attributed to Farsari, Stillfried, Kusakabe or even Suzuki Shin'ichi.
The lifetime of A. Farsari & Co. spanned the transition of Japanese photography from the early involvement and influence of foreign photographers to the emergence of an independent, native Japanese photographic identity. Coming after the first generation of photographers, the firm made significant contributions to the development of commercial photography in Japan by emphasising the excellence of materials, refining the practice of presenting photographs in albums (which became art objects in themselves), and making effective use of Farsari's own tourist-oriented publications to promote his photographic studio's work – an early, minor example of vertical integration.
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