Felice Beato en Japón

Felice Beato (Corfu, 1833 or 1834, Florence, 1909), apart from taking a great amount of photographs of places such as India, Crimea, China, Japan, Korea, Sudan, Burma, The Mediterranean, United Kingdom and Egypt during the second half of 19th century; apart from having developed innovating photographic techniques like hand-colouring and the use of wet colodion at a time that photography was just at its beginnings; and, apart from having been one of the first photojournalists ; presents unexplored and exotic worlds to European society.

His work in Japan developa at a point in time in which this society has just started a change to modernising that involved the death of Feudalism and its corresponding culture and besides, Europe was opening to poorly known regions which where only considered as exotic and potentially or actually subordinated to the imperialism of European powers.

For artists like Beato, just as it had been for Delacroix, Ingres or Gérome with Muslim world or later for Matisse or Van Gogh, there were two posible ways to follow: keeping an imperialistic visión or trying to rescue the Japanese national values. Beato decides to ride on both options: on the one hand, he is interested in Japanese own values, on the other hand, he shows the Japanese society to Europe through an imagery that feeds the exotic and picturesque perception already existing in Europe.

When looking at his images it’s necessary to bear in mind that, at that time, photography required long exposures, thus, portraits were necessarily done in posed sessions and it would not be fair to consider them as lacking reality for that. On the contrary, Beato creates very intense images, very straight-forward, sometimes even challenging and showing self-confident models. They stand for people who do not play the game of Western superiority, which is embodied at that momento in the act of photographing. Both geishas and samurais are subjects who declare the own identity with no insecurities. This is an endorsement of Japanese values however it ignores that Japanese society is leaving them behind and changing into ways of life far from Feudalism.

The knowledge of Japanese traditions that he gained helped him innovate in the photographic technique of hand colouring. He hired local draughtsmen to give color to his black and white photographs, this way, he achieved a nice progress in photography history.

Beato's life is rich in all kind of experiences, apart from being a photographer, he was a trader, a small entrepenaur, financial speculator, inventor, but mostly, traveller. About him, it has been written a lot and it still can be written a lot more, a complex character that cannot be described with a simple description. This work, presented here is just a little part of what he did in Japan, which is only one of the places where he took photographs, being photography just one of his multiple activities. It's not easy at all to comprise his work in a text, even more difficult to do it with his person.