Today we almost cannot think about traveling somewhere without taking photos, with more or less sophisticated cameras or at least with the mobile phone…
A hundred years ago however, when the first westerners started visiting Japan, only a handful of people had the necessary equipment for taking photos, so the visitors were buying photos taken by local photographers.
One of the local photographers was T. Enami, on his real name Enami Nobukuni, whose studio was located in Yokohama, on one of the best known commercial venues of the time, Benten-dori.
For the westerner tourist of the time, Japan meant Mount Fuji, sakura, rickshaws, girls in kimono and Geisha. But… that also true for most of the today’s tourists… :)
Anyway, that’s why the huge majority of Japanese vintage photos are centered around these themes.
From the great collection of T. Enami vintage photos available on Flickr, I picked a selection of 40 great Geisha photos. I hope you’ll like them:
- More great vintage photos at Okinawa Soba’s Flickr photostream
