Early photographs of Japan are shown large in Leiden, but not as originals
Editors ·
At Leiden’s Japan Museum SieboldHuis, Light over Deshima traces how Dutch and Japanese researchers brought photography to Japan. Large exhibition prints stand in for fragile nineteenth-century photographs.
Photography and Japan met on Deshima in the mid-nineteenth century, where Dutch and Japanese doctors and researchers experimented with the new technique. The exhibition Light over Deshima follows that early exchange and has been on view at Japan Museum SieboldHuis since 25 September.
The focus is on photographs made before 1870. The originals are not on the walls: because early photographs are fragile, the museum displays high-quality new exhibition prints and enlargements. Visitors can see the images at exhibition scale while the vintage prints are preserved.
Photography entered Japan through the Dutch trading post, along with the first cameras, techniques and instruction books. The exhibition was developed with Leiden University Libraries, Nagasaki University Library and several museums and photographic collections in the Netherlands and Japan.
A book of the same title accompanies the exhibition. Akiyoshi Tani of the University of Tokyo and Maartje van den Heuvel, photography curator at Leiden University and guest curator, compiled it. The book is published in Dutch, Japanese and English.
On Sunday 18 October, artist Caroline Stroeks leads a separate sumi-e workshop. The museum describes sumi-e as “ink painting”: participants paint with ink on rice paper, where a line cannot be corrected. Sessions run from 10.30 to 11.30 am and 1.30 to 2.30 pm; materials are included and no experience is needed. The workshop costs €19.50, excluding museum admission.
Light over Deshima runs through 28 February 2027. The museum is open Tuesday to Sunday, 10 am to 5 pm; adult admission is €12. The Wikimedia Commons photographs shown here are historical images by Ueno Hikoma, but have not been identified as works in the exhibition.