The seasonal rains held off as members and visitors gathered at Seisen University for the last meeting before the summer break. Our President, Dr. Berendt, began by announcing the special anniversary programme to be held in Kyoto in July and the lectures lined up for the autumn season. He then introduced our speaker, Prof. Charles Shull of Lynchburg College, Virginia. Prof. Shull spoke on "Images of Japan: Comments on the Stereographs Imported into American Popular Culture 1860-1910". In a happy marriage of old and new techniques, he illustrated his presentation with photographs taken from the original stereographic prints and projected onto the big screen via a laptop computer. Some of the later pictures were printed on slightly convex cards, and since he had been unwilling to spoil them by flattening them out in order to photograph them for the slides, the photographs shown on screen had inevitably lost some of their sharpness; nevertheless the audience got a fair impression of the photographs.

Stereographic photographs were the first genre of visual mass media to appear in American society, said Prof. Shull, and this form of photography met with a greater response than fine art photography. Half of the households in America had these pictures, which served an educational purpose of teaching geography and history. as well as furnishing home entertainment that expanded the viewer's world. The pictures were sold mounted on cards in pairs, for viewing through a stereoscope, an instrument with a separate lens for each eye. Two pictures were taken of the same subject from slightly different angles, replicating the alignment of the human eyes. In the stereoscope, each eye sees only one of the two pictures, and the effect is to create the impression of a three-dimensional image.

Production of the cards was a big business in the period 1860-1900, and in the United States there were 12,000 people so employed. Working manually, a worker might turn out 60 pictures in a day, and when the Kilburn Company mechanized the process in 1860, its 52 employees could turn out 3,000 stereographs a day. Many of the pictures cannot be assigned to a photographer or a time. Companies came and went, and when one went bankrupt another would buy up its stock. Consequently the date when the photographs were sold bears no relation to the date at which the pictures were taken. The photographers, too, were not professionals working in studios but simply persons hired for the purpose by the companies dealing in stereographs; they had no rights to their pictures.

There is no way of dating the pictures taken in Japan except by judging from the subject, but they seem to have been largely taken in the 1860s and 1870s, and printed in the 1890s. One of those active in Yokohama in the early 1860s was Francis Hall. What is remarkable is that at this point photography seems to have been taken very much for granted, although only about 25 years had elapsed since its invention (the process invented by Daguerre dates back to 1838). Some of the photographers in Yokohama seem to have been eccentric characters, as they were caricatured in the local English-language newspapers.

Prof. Shull then proceeded to show pictures of stereographs taken in Japan, out of his own collection which consisted largely of birthday presents given to him by friends. He divided them into two main categories: places, and people at work and play. The first pair of pictures he showed was of the Customs House at Yokohama, evidently taken in the early days of the port, although the print bore the label "C. H. Graves, 1902". His second illustration was a "View of Kiryu" which exemplified the technique of framing the scene in a foreground of tree branches to give it depth. The third was "View above the clouds from Fujiyama". This had been cheaply printed and then coloured by hand, a practice that was superseded in 1898 when multicoloured printing was developed. The next was of the "Cemetery at Kurodani Monastery", with a wide stone stairway leading to the top. Then we saw a "Ferry Sampan on the Kawasaki River" at Yokohama, again a late coloured print. Another pair of 1902 Graves pictures showed a "Bridge at Yumoto near Miyanoshita", followed by a "Bamboo Avenue" in Kyoto. This latter featured a rickshaw, which was invented in Japan and used no earlier than 1869, thus giving this photograph an 'earliest possible date' (epd) of that year. Then came a pair of coloured pictures of "Lake Biwa Canal", in which there seemed to have been some mistake made in the photography, and this was followed by coloured pictures of a "Rural Ferry" at Yokohama. "Ten minutes for refreshments" (another pair by Graves, 1902), were followed by a gaudily-coloured Kinkakuji -- the bright yellow was probably an attraction to the American market! The last pair of pictures showing a view were of the honden at the Kiyomizu-dera, again coloured.

The first pair of pictures Prof. Shull showed us of people at work depicted a woman reeling silk from cocoons. This was obviously a posed picture, as the woman was dressed in all her finery, hardly the appropriate garb for reeling silk! But the lighting is good, with the central figure well brought out. The next pictures were titled "Rural Travelling", and were hand-coloured. They showed a group of people posed on an ishidatami path, with the ladies in hammock-like litters slung from poles carried by bearers. The next pair, put out by B.L. Lingley in 1901, showed a typical farmer in a straw raincoat and hat. Very many Americans in those days were used to farm life and would have related well to such a picture, though they would not have been familiar with the style of dress! The next two scenes, too, showed the kind of labour-intensive farming with which Americans would have been familiar. The first was of a woman fertilizing the soil from "honey buckets", and the second was of the transplanting of rice. There followed a scene showing Shinto priests in Tokyo, which also included a rickshaw. The next shots showed a girl spinning silk, which was a more honest picture, truer to life, than that of the dolled-up lady reeling silk. Further pictures from Yokohama showed rice fields, a vegetable peddler displaying his stock, and a shoemaker mending rain shoes, all of these tinted. The next picture was a kind of inversion: it showed Japanese boys colouring pictures and using a stereoscope. This aptly demonstrated the educational value of the stereoscope in Japan -- though the educational value in America would have been marred somewhat, in this and other pictures, by the tinting of the kimonos in bright solid colours (many of the men were shown in vivid red).

The next picture was perhaps a bridge between work and play. It showed the firemen's dezomeshiki, the New year's display of athletics on ladders, which was (and indeed still is) a favourite subject for photographers. Next came pictures of a flower show in Yokohama (when did such shows begin?) and the Horikiri Iris Garden in Katsushika-ku, by the Arakawa. A playful picture of children with kites and sunshades in Yokohama came next, and then two pictures of cherry blossoms. The first was of a picnic in what was captioned as the "Omuro Gosho" in Kyoto, but was perhaps the Omiya Gosho; the second was in Ueno Park. The last was of a matsuri in Yokohama, showing a high platform with musicians and dancers such as can still be seen today at the larger bon odori events.

The demise of the stereograph came early in the 20th century, with the advent of more easily available forms of pictorial amusement. Photographs began to replace artists' drawings in newspapers and magazines. Kodak produced a box camera which came loaded with film -- an early form of disposable camera. Then came moving pictures, developed in France as the cinematographe. Compared with all these, the stereoscope was cumbersome, and could be used by only one person at a time. A form of stereoscope called the "Viewmaster" persisted until 1939, and was used to amuse children. Otherwise the stereograph faded into obscurity, and the surviving pictures are now to be found in university collections.

After his presentation Prof. Shull answered a number of questions, and the bulk of his answers have been incorporated into this summary of his talk. The meeting closed with a vote of thanks proposed by Dr. Robert Eldridge, who had himself graduated from Lynchburg College.