Portret van Curt Ritzhaupt before 1894

This is ‘Portret van Curt Ritzhaupt’, a photograph by Kōzaburō Tamamura, made sometime between 1880 and 1920. Tamamura, based in Yokohama, specialized in souvenir photography for foreign tourists. His work offers a fascinating window into the cultural exchanges of the Meiji era, a time when Japan was rapidly modernizing and opening up to the West. Here, we see Curt Ritzhaupt, likely a European visitor, rendered in a soft, almost ethereal light. The photograph is part of an album, with a handwritten dedication in German on the facing page. This personal touch speaks to the intimate nature of portraiture, but also to the commercial context in which Tamamura was working. What does it mean to have one’s image captured and circulated in a foreign land? How did Tamamura navigate the expectations and desires of his clientele, while also expressing his own artistic vision? Consider the gaze of the sitter, the photographer, and the viewer, and how these gazes intersect and diverge across time and space.