Photo 1164

Photograph album measuring 310 x 400 mm, with lacquer boards decorated with a floral motif. A photographic view in gold, produced by a patented process, is inset into the upper board. The album contains 52 hand-coloured albumen print views of Japanese scenery and types, mounted one to a page (recto and verso) on thick card leaves, with decorative watercolour vignettes of Japanese scenes painted on the bottom right and upper left margins of each page. The album is generally in excellent condition, apart from the leather spine piece, which has become detached. The album is accompanied by a rectangle of cloth, which presumably once formed part of a protective wrapper for the volume. This cloth is stamped with a decorative design incorporating the studio name of K. Tamamura. The attribution of the photographs to Tamamura is confirmed by a number of photographs in the album which also appear, credited to Tamamura, on the Nagasaki University Library Collection of Photographs website (at http://oldphoto.lb.Nagasaki-u.ac.jp/en/index.html). The majority of the photographs in this album have numbers and captions printed along the bottom edge of the negative, the uniform style indicating a common origin. Some of the uncaptioned negatives are also attributed to Tamamura in the Nagasaki catalogue. One exception is print 40, attributed to Kusakabe Kimbei by Nagasaki University Library.