The Result of the “2nd Professor Josef Kreiner Hosei University Award for International Japanese Studies”

The Hosei University Research Center for International Japanese Studies (HIJAS) is pleased to announce the winner of the “2nd Professor Josef Kreiner Hosei University Award for International Japanese Studies” (Kreiner Award).

The 2nd Kreiner Award is awarded to Dr. Luke Gartlan of the university of St Andrews and his book entitled A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography (Brill, 2016).

Dr. Luke Gartlan is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Art History, the University of St Andrews. He is the editor of the peer-reviewed international quarterly History of Photography, and co-editor, with Ali Behdad, of Photography’s Orientalism: New Essays on Colonial Representation (Getty Research Institute, 2013). His research concerns photography and cultural exchange in the nineteenth century, especially with reference to the camera’s role in colonial-era visual culture, histories of travel and exploration, and non-Western responses to photography.

A Career of Japan is the first study of one of the major photographers and personalities of nineteenth-century Japan. Baron Raimund von Stillfried was the most important foreign-born photographer of the Meiji era and one of the first globally active photographers of his generation. He played a key role in the international image of Japan and the adoption of photography within Japanese society itself. Yet, the lack of a thorough study of his activities, travels, and work has been a fundamental gap in both Japanese- and Western-language scholarship. Based on extensive new primary sources and unpublished documents from archives around the world, this book examines von Stillfried’s significance as a cultural mediator between Japan and Central Europe. It highlights the tensions and fierce competition that underpinned the globalising photographic industry at a site of cultural contact and exchange – treaty-port Yokohama. In the process, it raises key questions for Japanese visual culture, Habsburg studies, and cross-cultural histories of photography and globalisation.

◆Report for the Award Ceremony and the Lecture on 17th January 2017.