PHOTOGRAPHY IN JAPAN: 1853-1912, by Terry Bennett. Tokyo/Singapore: Tuttle Publishing, 2006, 320 pp., 404 photographs, $65 (cloth).

This beautifully produced large-format photo collection is intended for the scholar. It is an illustrated historical accounting of all of the early photographers in Japan.

The author, a well-known photo historian and author of the 1996 "Early Japanese Images," states that this new work has four objectives: to provide curators and collectors with new research material, to give all available biographical detail of the early photographers, to stress the importance of ascertaining who took what, and to offer new research tools. These aims he further supports in another 2006 publication, "Old Japanese Photographs: A Collector's Data Guide."

Bennett's book also satisfies a less intentional fifth objective: He gives the interested layman a long look at the vanished Japan of more than a century ago -- photos, many of them here published for the first time, from private collections including the author's own.

There is an 1857 portrait of Commodore Perry looking uncommonly like Douglas MacArthur; not only the body of the assassinated Charles Richardson but also the severed head of Murata Teiken, an accomplice in the attempt to murder Sir Harry Parks; an 1851 daguerreotype of "Sentaro, the Castaway," the first known portrait of a Japanese; and an 1857 portrait of the Satsuma daimyo, the first known photo taken by a Japanese.

There is also an 1859 picture of Alexander von Siebold, looking like a child; and an 1872 portrait of the Meiji emperor, originally banned from sale. Also of interest is a 1904 picture of General Maresuke Nogi appearing grave; a 1906 stereoptical view of Herbert Ponting peering into Mount Aso and held in place by a burly guide; and two of Frederick Sutton's pictures of the last shogun.

There is an unusual amount of scenic photography, all of it ravishing, attesting to the beauty that was once Japan's -- a hand-colored albumen print (circa 1900) of the Ryounkaku Tower in Asakusa and Felix Beato's lovely tinted photo of the Tokaido in 1867.

Bennett's interest in this collection, however, is much more historical than aesthetic. Indeed, he has a historical story to tell. This is indicated on the contents page where the chapters are variously titled: "Western Studios Dominate"; "Japanese Competition": "Western Studios Give Way"; "Japanese Studios Dominate"; "In Full Control."

The author is certainly not wrong to see the story of photography in terms of conflict. Not only is the ousting of Western photographers a fact, but there is also something bellicose in the very act of taking a picture. Observe the vocabulary: We load a camera, we aim it, we shoot.

As Susan Sontag remarked in her magisterial "On Photography," "there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed."

Here, in these early pictures by foreigners, we have Japanese posed in simulated "Japanese" surroundings -- examples of what Sontag calls "the great age of photographic Orientalism." Such photos, "bringing the exotic near, rendering the familiar and homely exotic, make the entire world available as an object of appraisal." And when the foreign photographer is sent home and the native Japanese takes over, there is no difference in the portraits and the poses because these are known to sell.

Thus Kanamaru Genzo's "Ladies at Their Toilet" presents "typical" specimens, and Ogawa Kazumasa's 1890 "Ancient Warrior" becomes a representative example. People being typical and representative are no longer persons, however. Thus, glorious as the scenery remains for us, the people we must usually experience as objects.

All this is unimportant to the aims of this book. Bennett has well fulfilled his historical concerns. At the same time he has lifted a corner of the past for us to peer under, to examine, and to wonder at.