The Premise of Fidelity: Science, Visuality, and Representing the Real in Nineteenth-Century Japan

Description

The Premise of Fidelity puts forward a new history of Japanese visuality through an examination of the discourses and practices surrounding the nineteenth century 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—from physicians to farmers to bureaucrats—known as Shohyaku-sha. In their archival materials, these scholars used the term shashin (which would, years later, come to signify "photography" in Japanese) in a wide 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. This book is an exploration of the process by which the Shohyaku-sha shaped the concept of shashin. As such, it 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. Contents......Page 6 List of Figures......Page 8 Acknowledgments......Page 10 Note on Names......Page 14 Introduction......Page 18 1. The Eye of the Shōhyaku-sha: Between Seeing and Knowing......Page 32 2. Ways of Conceptualizing the Real: Scripts, Names, and Materia Medica......Page 70 3. Modes of Observation and the Real: Exhibition Practices of the Shōhyaku-sha......Page 96 4. Picturing the Real: Questions of Fidelity and Processes of Pictorial Representation......Page 134 5. Shashin in the Capital: The Last Stage of Metamorphosis......Page 184 Appendix: Takahashi Yuichi, “Yōgakyoku tekigen” (1865)......Page 226 Notes......Page 228 Glossary......Page 270 Works Cited......Page 272 Index......Page 284