Prints

A photograph can move across a screen in a second and disappear with the next gesture. A book asks for a different kind of attention. Remembering Giraffes, published October 12 as the eleventh title in the Remembering Wildlife series, brings wildlife images together in a physical object intended to support conservation. The project makes the relationship between photography and … [Read more...] about Remembering Giraffes Turns Wildlife Photography Into a Book With a Conservation Purpose

FUJIFILM North America Corporation is leaning hard into something that already feels obvious once you see it—people don’t just want photography anymore, they want moments they can physically walk away with. The new instax SPOT™ photobooth and print station is essentially a rethinking of the old mall photobooth, but tuned for a world where your camera roll is endless and … [Read more...] about FUJIFILM instax SPOT™ Brings Instant Prints to Every Experience

Japanese woodblock prints are among the most accessible areas of serious art collecting. Fine examples of classical ukiyo-e and shin-hanga come up at auction regularly, and while great rarities command extraordinary prices, much of the tradition is available to collectors of modest means who are willing to do the work of looking and learning. Here is a practical … [Read more...] about Collecting Japanese Prints: What to Look For and Where to Start

By the early twentieth century, the classical ukiyo-e tradition had largely collapsed. The Meiji Restoration had modernized Japan with ferocious speed, and the social world that had produced the floating world — the Edo entertainment districts, the kabuki theaters, the great post roads — had been transformed beyond recognition. Photography was replacing the portrait print. … [Read more...] about Shin-Hanga: The Modernist Revival of the Japanese Print

When Commodore Perry's black ships forced Japan's ports open in 1853, ending two centuries of near-total isolation, one of the stranger consequences was a flood of cheap woodblock prints into European markets. They arrived first as packing material — used to wrap export porcelain, which is how some of the earliest prints reached French collectors. By the 1860s, a dedicated … [Read more...] about Japonisme: How Japanese Prints Rewrote Western Art

The ukiyo-e woodblock print was a collective industrial process masquerading as an artwork by a single named artist. Understanding how these prints were actually made — the sequence of hands and skills required — changes how you look at them. It began with the publisher (hanmoto), who functioned more like a film producer than a patron in the modern sense. The publisher … [Read more...] about How a Japanese Woodblock Print Was Made: From Sketch to Impression

Tōshūsai Sharaku appeared in May 1794, produced a hundred and forty-some prints of kabuki actors over ten months, and then vanished without a trace. No one knows who he was. His publisher, Tsutaya Jūzaburō, listed him as a Noh actor from the province of Awa — which may have been a fiction designed to protect his identity or to lend him an air of refined mystery. Despite … [Read more...] about Sharaku’s Actors: The Face Behind the Role

Kitagawa Utamaro invented something new in the history of portraiture. Around 1790, he began producing a series of prints he called ōkubi-e — "large head pictures" — in which the subject's face filled most of the composition, cropped at the shoulders, the background reduced to a flat mica-dusted ground. The effect was startling then and remains startling now: these are not the … [Read more...] about Utamaro’s Women: Beauty, Power, and the Close-Up