The premise of fidelity
Subtitle: science, visuality, and representing the real in nineteenth-century Japan
By: Maki Fukuoka
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Stanford, California
Language: eng
Number of pages: 272
ISBN-13: 9780804777902
Subjects: History; Plant prints; Art and science; Photography; Realism in art; Botanical illustration
Description: The Premise of Fidelity puts forward a new history of Japanese visuality through an examination of the discourses and practices surrounding the nineteenth century transposition of "the real" in the decades before photography was introduced. This intellectual history is informed by a careful examination of a network of local scholars--from physicians to farmers to bureaucrats--known as Shohyaku-sha. In their archival materials, these scholars used the term shashin (which would, years later, come to signify "photography" in Japanese) in a wide variety of medical, botanical, and pictorial practices.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The eye of the Shohyaku-sha : between seeing and knowing; title: Ways of conceptualizing the real : scripts, names, and materia medica; title: Modes of observation and the real : exhibition practices of the Shohyaku-sha; title: Picturing the real : questions of fidelity and processes of pictorial representation; title: Shashin in the capital : the last stage of metamorphosis.