Baron Raimund von Stillfried's studio photographs of Japanese models, tastefully composed and colored, illustrate many books on Meiji Japan, japonisme, and nineteenth-century travel photography. Luke Gartlan's A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography is a long-overdue monograph on this prolific yet understudied photographer. Insightfully synthesizing his extensive archival research, Gartlan's luxuriously illustrated volume presents a perceptive account of Stillfried's career during his residency in Japan between 1864 and 1881, significantly expanding our understanding of Stillfried's life and work.
Of particular interest to readers of this journal, Gartlan emphasizes Stillfried's specifically Austrian trajectory through a history of Orientalism dominated, then as now, by Anglophone and Francophone voices. The first chapter situates Stillfried's youth and maturation in the context of Austrian imperialism, highlighting his military service in Mexico from 1865 to 1867 for the ill-fated Emperor Maximilian I, former Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria.
Stillfried's disillusionment with imperial Austrian identity, Gartlan argues, derived from this experience of a failed imperialist project. Departing for Japan soon after his unwelcomed homecoming in Austria, Stillfried's expatriation was a form of self-exile that set him apart from his French and British contemporaries.
Outlining with new specificity Stillfried's work in Japan, Gartlan also reveals the overlooked variety of his photographic output. Chapter two analyzes Stillfried's long-neglected early landscape photographs and challenges common presentations of him as primarily a studio photographer. Gartlan's careful examination of these albums also shows how Stillfried adjusted to changing markets and contexts of production in Japan during the early 1870s. These photographs, Gartlan observes, originally followed local precedents in Yokohama, admitting the visual evidence of modernity into images of Japan. But as the tourist market grew, Stillfried adjusted by editing these scenes into more picturesque images of a timeless Japan.
In the following two chapters, Gartlan further emphasizes how Stillfried's photographic production was shaped by the changing circumstances of Meiji Japan. Chapter three describes the diplomatic crisis caused by Stillfried's clandestine photographing of the Meiji Emperor in 1872. Gartlan argues convincingly that while Japanese officials condemned Stillfried's behavior, the incident provoked the government to employ imperial photographic portraits as a strategy to present Japan as a modern nation-state. Stillfried's relationship to the Meiji state as a professional photographer was more complicated than simply antagonistic, however. Soon after the scandal, the government hired Stillfried to photograph Hokkaido and the Ainu for displays at the Vienna World Exposition in 1873 that projected Japan's own status as a colonial power. While the photographer allied himself to the government of his adopted country by accepting the commission, he also contrived ways to circumvent official limitations on commercial use of his images.
Chapter five moves away from photography to describe Stillfried's ambitious enterprise of bringing a Japanese teahouse, staffed by five Japanese, to the Vienna World Exposition. Demonstrating Stillfried's engagement in forms of cross-cultural exchange other than photography, this episode also reveals the most exploitative aspects of Stillfried's interactions with the Japanese. Tainted by the stigma of Stillfried's paparazzo-like stalking of the emperor and the salacious prejudice against Japanese women serving at teahouses, the project was thwarted at every stage by Japanese government officials, Western diplomatic missions, and the exposition managers. When the teahouse finally opened in a dark corner of a park adjacent to the exposition grounds, it was a financial disaster for Stillfried, who, in frustration, mistreated and abused his Japanese employees so egregiously that an official complaint was filed with the Japanese legation in Vienna.
Back in Yokohama following this fiasco, Gartlan shows, Stillfried scrambled to recover through diverse commissions, projects, and often-fractious partnerships that have left a confusing trail of business names and professional affiliations. Chapter seven examines Stillfried's studio-based costume photographs produced during these years. These photographs gained a huge success in the international market, contributing to a romanticized vision of premodern Japan. Their success reestablished Stillfried's authority as a photographer, which attracted rivals—including his own brother, who set up a business in Yokohama to capitalize on the family name. Gartlan's final chapters trace the complicated collaborations and legal battles of Stillfried's last years in Japan, concluding that certain images often attributed to him—most notably an image of a Japanese man in an oversized Western suit that has been widely reproduced as evidence of Western condescension—were the work of other photographers. Lastly, uncovering Stillfried's involvement in political bureaus as a photographic expert, Gartlan underlines the photographer's role as an intercultural mediator, here disseminating not only photographic devices and techniques but also ideas about the political utility of photographic technology.
Gartlan's command of an immense number of primary sources effectively grounds his multilayered analysis of Stillfried's varied life and work. The source materials range from Stillfried's globally scattered—and, as Gartlan shows in the last chapter, often inflated—photographic oeuvre to personal and diplomatic correspondence, newspaper articles, advertisements, and contemporaneous ethnographic scholarships. This rich archive will render this sumptuously illustrated book interesting to a diverse readership, including scholars grateful for the unearthing of so many recondite sources. Perhaps the most striking example is the transcript of the consular interview with Genkichi, the architect of the Vienna exposition teahouse, who details Stillfried's abuse of his Japanese employees. The details are shocking, and substantiate broad allusions to the sexual, psychological, and physical violence faced by Japanese in their everyday interactions with Westerners—even an apparently refined and gentlemanly baron, whose alienation from a specifically Austrian imperial history seems not to have exempted him from pernicious forms of racist abuse. In light of this appalling episode, we wondered why the archival trail concerning Stillfried's Japanese wife and daughters petered out without comment. Other documents from Gartlan's impressive archival work, including the transcript of Genkichi's interview, and a summary of the Stillfried studio's complex business affiliations, appear as appendices, enhancing the book's scholarly value.
