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In 1886, a year after Adolfo Farsari opened his Yokohama photography studio, it burned to the ground during a city-wide fire. Farsari spent the next several months traveling Japan to replenish his stock, including several Buddhist sites popular among globetrotting tourists.
Moreover, with the destruction of Farsari’s studio, he also lost the older negatives of Felice Beato and Baron von Stillfried. Farsari’s studio was among the last of the foreign studios in Yokohama as more Japanese photographers were turning to professional ventures.
Farsari’s scene of the Kamakura Daibutsu shows a person in the middle of prayer.
We can also see another man standing on the stone pedestal, a common sight in photographs of this era.
Farsari’s work earned the praise Rudyard Kipling who complimented him on the fidelity of the hand-coloring. Further commentary on Farsari’s Kamakura Daibutsu photo can be found here: https://peterromaskiewicz.com/2019/01/19/farsaris-dai-butsu-visual-literacy-of-buddhism/
The Buddhas in the West Material Archive is a digital scholarship project that catalogues artifacts depicting Buddhist material culture for Western audiences. It’s comprised of prints, photos, and an assortment of ephemera and other objects. For a brief introduction to this archive, visit the main Buddhas in the West project page.
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