The premise of fidelity : science, visuality, and representing the real in nineteenth-century Japan / Maki Fukuoka.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Fukuoka, Maki, 1972- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Art and science--Japan--History--19th century.

Art and science.

Botanical illustration--Japan--History--19th century.

Botanical illustration.

Plant prints--Japan--History--19th century.

Plant prints.

Photography--Japan--History--19th century.

Photography.

Realism in art--Japan--History--19th century.

Realism in art.

Natural history illustration--Japan--History--19th century.

Natural history illustration.

History.

Japan.

Physical Description:

xi, 272 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2012.

Summary:

The Premise of Fidelity puts forward a new history of Japanese visuality through an examination of the discourses and a practices surrounding the transposition of "the real" in the decades before photography was introduced. This intellectual history is informed by a careful examination of a network of local scholars-including physicians, farmers, bureaucrats, and others-known as Shohyaku-sha. In their archival materials, they used the term shashin (which would later come to signify "photography" in Japanese) in a variety of medical, botanical, and pictorial practices. These scholars pursued questions of the relationship between what they observed and what they believed they knew, in the process investigating scientific ideas and practices by obsessively naming and classifying, and then rendering, through highly accurate illustration, the objects of their study.

An exploration of the process by which the Shohyaku-sha shaped the concept of shashin, this book disrupts the dominant narratives of photography, art, and science in Japan, providing a prehistory of Japanese photography that requires the accepted history of the discipline to be rewritten. Book jacket.

Contents:

The eye of the Shōhyaku-sha : between seeing and knowing

Ways of conceptualizing the real : scripts, names, and Materia medica

Modes of observation and the real : exhibition practices of the Shōhyaku-sha

Picturing the real : questions of fidelity and processes of pictorial representation

Shashin in the capital : the last stage of metamorphosis.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [243]-253) and index.

ISBN:

9780804777902

080477790X

OCLC:

764364218