The photographic appointments #28 : Shimooka Renjō

Before you start with this little Rendez-Vous that I like more and more, I will share this conviction : the pioneers of photography can be an infinite source of inspiration.
When I think that some people who think only through the photographic equipment and the sharpness of their lens, should humbly look closely at what our ancestors produced with lenses with maximum aperture of F16 ....

Shimooka Renjō, real name Sakurada Hisanosuke (1823 - 1914) is the great pioneer of photography in Japan.

Shimooka is the son of the chef of the port city of Tokugawa shogunate. He traveled to Tokyo at the age of 13 to receive artistic training. Kanō Tōsen Nakanobu teaches her traditional Japanese painting. In the 1850s, he served in the Shimoda battery security department. It is there, or because it is sent by mistake to the daimyō of the province of Satsuma, that he sees for the first time a daguerreotype whose admiration for the realism and the richness of the details. As it is explained to him that this is created with the aid of a machine, he concludes that such perfection can not be achieved with brushes and wants to learn this technique.
John Wilson, an American photographer based in Yokohama, taught photography in Shimooka in the early 1860s. When Wilson left the city in 1861 or 62, he exchanged his camera for a painting by his pupil. In the early 1870s, Shimooka was employed by Schoyer Raphael (1800-1869), a journalist and American auctioneer. Under the leadership of the woman of it, Anna, Shimooka tries to paint in Western style. One of his silk paintings, signed by his artist Tōen, is preserved in the Tokyo Museum of Fine Arts and Music Museum (pictured above). At the end of 1862, Shimooka founded his first photography studio in the Noge district of Yokohama, where he made souvenir photos, portraits of tourists or locals in scenes set , Which he later sold as souvenirs.
In 1876 he opened the Abura-e Chashitsu ("Oil Painting Café") in Asakusa Park in Tokyo, where the panoramas of the Battle of Hakodate (Hakodate Sensō) and the expedition of Taiwan of 1874. A year later, he stopped taking pictures and dedicated himself to the preparation of background images for the photo studios.
A monument has been erected in his native city.