A good retrospective presents an artist's full career, challenges our preconceptions and encourages us to rethink his or her work and contributions. Two new exhibitions at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography do just that, shedding new light on two very different photographers: Felice Beato (1832-1909), one of the first photographers to work in Japan, and Masao Horino (1907-98), an important figure in the establishment and development of modern Japanese photography, who nevertheless is hardly known today.
"Felice Beato: A Photographer on the Eastern Road" was organized by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where it was on show last year as the first full retrospective of this well-known photographer's work. The J. Paul Getty Museum owns the world's large collection of Beato photographs, and nearly all of the 144 works here are being shown in Japan for the first time.
As the retrospective makes clear, Beato was first and foremost a war photographer, a fact that will surprise many here who know him only for the picturesque images of Japan he produced for Western tourists. But long before he came to Japan, Beato had established himself recording the aftermath of conflicts in the Crimea, India and China. Beato's photographs of battlefields were the first to show the dead, a shocking development at the time.