Ueno Hikoma - Career

Career

After his time working for the Tsu clan in Edo, Ueno returned to Nagasaki, but finding that Pompe van Meerdervoort had left the country, he gave up rangaku, or the study of Western science. He decided to make a career as a photographer.

In the autumn of 1862 Ueno opened a commercial photographic studio by the Nakashima River in Nagasaki and he also began importing cameras. At first the business was unsuccessful, but it gradually grew, allowing the studio to move to a large and well-lit building in 1882, becoming popular with Japanese and foreign notables and receiving mention in guidebooks, in Edmond Cotteau's Un touriste dans l'Extrême-Orient (1884) and in Pierre Loti's novel, Madame Chrysanthème (1887). The patronage of foreigners in turn greatly increased Ueno's income, which allowed him to use more expensive materials and to expand his studios. Still in the early days of this imported technology, Ueno overcame the reticence of many Japanese to be photographed and took portraits of such figures as Sakamoto Ryōma, Itō Shunsuke, Takasugi Shinsaku, and Katsu Kaishū. During their visits to Japan Ueno photographed Ulysses S. Grant in 1879 and the Russian crown prince (later Tsar Nicholas II) in 1891. With the help of such patronage, Ueno's studio operated until the end of the century.

Ueno had an important and close working relationship with Felice Beato. When visiting Nagasaki, Beato used Ueno's studio and photographed his younger sister and acquaintances, amongst other residents of the city. Beato also photographed Ueno himself at the Daikōji temple and the two photographers apparently exchanged photographs. Ueno probably refined his technique during his contact with the experienced Beato. Two other foreign visitors to Japan who influenced Ueno were the Dutch photographer Konrad Walter Gratama, who added to Ueno's knowledge of chemistry in 1866, and the Austrian photographer Wilhelm Burger who seems to have taught photographic techniques to Ueno while also making use of Ueno's studio to take some stereographs during his visit to the country in 1869-1870.

Ueno himself taught many important nineteenth-century photographers, including Uchida Kuichi (1844–1875), Tomishige Rihei, Kameya Tokujirō, (1837–1922), Nakajima Shinzō, Nagai Nagayoshi, Noguchi Jōichi, Nakajima Seimin, Tanaka, Morita Raizō, Kikizu Maturoku, and Ueno Yoshima. Ueno maintained a close relationship with Uchida, and following the latter's trip to Nagasaki in 1872 while photographing for the Emperor Meiji their albums include several identical images that they presumably exchanged. Eventually, Ueno opened branches of his photographic studio in Vladivostok in 1890 and in Shanghai and Hong Kong in 1891.

In addition to portraits, Ueno produced many images of Nagasaki and its surroundings. He also photographed the transit of Venus across the sun in 1874 for an American astronomical observation mission. In 1877, the governor of Nagasaki prefecture, Kitajima Hidetomo, commissioned him to take battlefield photographs in southwest Japan during the Satsuma Rebellion. For this commission Ueno was paid ¥330 for 420 prints. He was accompanied on this job by Setsu Shinichi and Noguchi Jōichi.

He exhibited photographs in at least two World Expositions, the Vienna World Exposition of 1873 and the World Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago, at which he won an award for “Good Taste and Artistic Finish”.

At first Ueno practiced wet-plate photography, but by about 1877 he began using imported Belgian dry plates. In spite of the contemporary popularity of hand-coloured photographs, Ueno's photographs are usually uncoloured. Some of Ueno's negatives were probably purchased at some point by the photographer Kusakabe Kimbei, as these images appear in the latter's albums. Though he apparently did not regularly offer photograph albums, he seems to have made some albums by special request for foreign customers. Ueno considered French and American photographic techniques and materials (for example, paper and lenses) to be superior to those of the British, whose products he also complained were overpriced, noting that albumen paper sold (c. 1868) for 100 ryō per box.

Eight of Ueno's photographs can be found online from the Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery Archives.