Japan on Glass: How Yokohama Photographs by Herbert Geddes Captured Everyday Life 1908 to 1918
- Daniel Holland
- 1 hour ago
- 6 min read
It is easy to forget that colour photography existed long before colour film. In the first decades of the twentieth century, visitors to Japan could already carry home luminous images that seemed to glow with life, projected through glass and light rather than printed on paper. Long before holiday snaps and mass postcards, these images offered foreign viewers a carefully framed encounter with a country in the midst of profound transformation.
These particular glass plate transparencies were gathered in Yokohama between 1908 and 1918 by Herbert Geddes, a Canadian working as a manager for an import export firm. Today they are preserved at the University of Victoria, but they began life as part of a thriving visual trade aimed at outsiders. Known collectively as Yokohama Photographs, such images were sold to travellers from roughly 1869 to 1912, a period when personal cameras were rare and photographic postcards had not yet saturated the market. For many visitors, these plates were not souvenirs in the casual sense. They were the primary visual record of a journey that few people at home would ever make.
Yokohama and the foreign gaze
Yokohama occupies a particular place in the history of Japanese photography. Opened to foreign trade in 1859 following centuries of limited contact with the West, the port city became a point of encounter between cultures, commerce, and technology. Photographers, both Japanese and foreign, quickly realised that there was a market for images that translated everyday Japanese life into something legible and desirable for outsiders.
Felice Beato, one of the earliest and most influential figures working in Japan, set the tone in the 1860s with staged scenes, hand colouring, and carefully composed views of temples, landscapes, and people at work. By the time Herbert Geddes was acquiring his plates decades later, this tradition was well established. Studios in Yokohama produced images in volume, often anonymously, with photographers, colourists, and printers contributing to a collaborative process rather than a single signed work.
The University of Victoria notes that these photographs were typically sold to foreign tourists before cameras and postcards became widely accessible. That context matters. These images were not casual documents. They were curated impressions of Japan, shaped by what sellers believed foreigners wanted to see, and by what could be made visually striking when projected through glass.
What the camera lingered on
The subjects in the Geddes collection move between the familiar and the unexpectedly intimate. There are temples framed by trees, arched bridges crossing still water, and busy urban streets that echo the visual language of travel illustration. These scenes would not have surprised a European or North American buyer. They confirmed expectations of a Japan that was picturesque, historic, and gently exotic.
Alongside these, however, are images that feel far less ornamental. Workers in silk factories bend over reels and spindles. Farmers wade through flooded rice fields, trousers hitched up, hands sunk into the mud. Blacksmiths pause mid strike, muscles taut, faces turned toward the lens. Women and girls appear repeatedly with babies tied securely to their backs, an everyday practice rendered with quiet normality rather than sentiment.
Taken together, these photographs offer something closer to an ethnographic record than a romantic fantasy. They show labour as it was actually performed, and family life as it unfolded in public spaces. While the presence of the camera inevitably shaped behaviour, the resulting images retain a sense of routine rather than spectacle.
A British visitor writing in 1909 remarked that Japanese street scenes seemed endlessly busy yet oddly composed, noting that even work appeared to follow an aesthetic order. Photographs like these suggest why. The camera captured patterns and rhythms that daily familiarity might otherwise obscure.
Glass as a modern medium
The technical form of these images is central to their effect. Positive glass transparencies were produced directly from glass negatives, which were the standard photographic support before flexible film took over in the early twentieth century. When a glass negative was contact printed onto another glass plate to produce a positive image, there was no loss of detail caused by paper fibres or chemical absorption.
Photography historian Kim Timby explains the advantage clearly. “When a glass negative was contact printed to create a glass positive, none of the transparency and precision provided by the glass support were lost. No paper fibres absorbed solutions at any stage or left their trace during printing.” The result was an image of remarkable sharpness, with fine details rendered cleanly from edge to edge.
These transparencies were often intended for projection using magic lanterns, an early form of slide projector. In a darkened room, a single plate could be enlarged to fill a wall, allowing viewers to experience distant places at a scale that felt immersive and authoritative. For audiences accustomed to engravings or small photographic prints, this must have been striking.
There was also a cultural resonance to glass itself. As Timby observes, the material evoked modernity. “It called to mind the exactness of lenses and prisms, the science of vision, the light and transparency of greenhouses, and the covered arcades and shop windows of modern urban life.” In other words, glass photography aligned Japan visually with progress and precision at the very moment the country was presenting itself as a modern nation.
Colouring the modern image
One of the most arresting features of Yokohama Photographs is their colour. Although the base image was monochrome, many glass transparencies were carefully hand coloured, often with water based pigments applied in thin washes. During the Meiji period from 1868 to 1912, this practice became more widespread in Japan than in Europe or the United States.
The reasons were partly economic and partly cultural. As photography replaced ukiyo e woodblock prints as a popular visual medium, many skilled printmakers found themselves without steady work. Rather than abandoning their craft, they adapted. The same steady hands that had once carved and coloured prints were now applied to photographic images, enhancing them rather than competing with them.
A contemporary observer noted that Japanese colourists possessed “an instinctive understanding of restraint”, avoiding the heavy handed effects sometimes seen in European hand coloured photographs. The goal was not to overwhelm the image, but to heighten it. Skin tones were warmed, textiles given depth, foliage softened with layers of green and brown.
On glass, this colouring takes on a particular luminosity. Light passes through pigment rather than reflecting off it, creating an effect closer to stained glass than to printed illustration. In the Geddes collection, this is especially evident in scenes with strong depth of field. Foreground figures appear almost sculptural, while backgrounds recede gently, creating an illusion of space that feels unexpectedly contemporary.
Between documentation and performance
It is important to recognise that these images are not neutral records. They sit somewhere between documentation and performance. Subjects were often posed, and scenes sometimes arranged to align with foreign expectations. Labour could be tidied, streets cleared, gestures held a moment longer than usual.
Yet within these constraints, something genuine emerges. The repetition of certain themes, such as women carrying children or workers pausing during tasks, suggests not a single staged moment but a pattern observed over time. These were not rare sights. They were part of the fabric of daily life.
The anonymity of the photographers adds another layer of complexity. Unlike modern photographic archives centred on named artists, Yokohama Photographs were often produced by studios where individual credit mattered less than output. The images survive without a single authorial voice, shaped instead by commercial demand, technical possibility, and cultural exchange.
A world in transition
The period from 1908 to 1918 was one of rapid change in Japan. Industrialisation was accelerating, cities were expanding, and traditional forms of labour were beginning to coexist uneasily with mechanised production. The silk industry, prominently featured in these photographs, was both ancient and modern at once, relying on skilled manual work while feeding an export economy that linked Japan to global markets.
Seen in this light, the Geddes transparencies capture a threshold moment. They show practices that would persist for decades alongside others that would soon disappear. The prevalence of hand labour, the visibility of children in working environments, and the integration of domestic life into public space all reflect a social structure that industrial modernity would gradually reshape.
For foreign viewers at the time, these images may have appeared timeless. For contemporary viewers, they are anything but. They reveal a society negotiating its place between continuity and change, tradition and innovation.
Why these images still matter
More than a century later, the appeal of these glass plates endures. Part of that appeal lies in their clarity. Freed from the grain and wear of paper prints, they offer a visual sharpness that feels almost cinematic. Part lies in their colour, which resists the sepia distance often associated with historical photography.
Most of all, they matter because they complicate our understanding of early photography. They remind us that colour, projection, and mass visual culture did not suddenly arrive in the mid twentieth century. They were already present, sophisticated, and widely consumed.
As historian Alan Trachtenberg once wrote of early photographs, they are “not windows onto the past, but objects in the present that ask us to think about how the past was seen.” The Yokohama glass transparencies do exactly that. They show us Japan as it was presented, consumed, and remembered by those who encountered it through light on glass.
