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The Arab Imago: A Social History of Portrait Photography 1860–1910, by Stephen Sheehi

definitive archive has resulted in innumerable spurious attributions. Gartlan astutely adopts a conservative approach to the daunting task of recovering and reassessing Stillfried’s archive by limiting his discussion to a small selection of folios with unassailable attributions. Titles Stillfried printed directly on his photographs helped Gartlan identify images of temples, shrines, and bucolic rural scenes that highlight Stillfried’s work from the early 1870s. Gartlan used Stillfried’s itinerary and list of negatives to assemble representative examples of the photographs he produced during his 1872 trip to Hokkaido. The inventories of commercial studios in Japan typically included some combination of scenic views and “costumes,” a term Japanese studios employed in their advertisements to describe portraits and genre scenes depicting Japanese people and customs. Costumes are notoriously difficult to attribute with certainty. Gartlan deploys several criteria to identify representative examples of Stillfried’s work in this genre. Like many of his competitors, Stillfried sold albums containing either or both views and costumes. The title pages of some extant albums bear images of the prize Stillfried won at the 1873 Vienna World Exhibition. From these, Gartlan defines aesthetic sensibilities unique to Stillfried, which he then applies to the task of attribution. Treaty port studios tended to reuse the same models, backdrops, and props in many of their photographs. Stillfried was no exception, and these reoccurring features furnish additional means to identify his costumes from the midto late 1870s. During his legal struggles with Andersen, Stillfried produced an innovative series of overpainted landscape photographs. These, along with photographs of Kyoto that Stillfried took during his first year in business, represent two of Gartlan’s most startling discoveries. By seamlessly integrating these core attributions into his chronological survey of Stillfried’s career, Gartlan maps out a coherent and convincing developmental trajectory of Stillfried’s photographic practice. The benefits of applying biographical study to archival recovery are readily apparent throughout the book, especially when Gartlan turns his attention to Stillfried’s last years in Yokohama. When Stillfried departed for his tour of the United States and Europe, Andersen hired American photographer John Douglas to add to the studio’s inventory. After Stillfried and Andersen parted ways, Andersen retained the Stillfried brand and continued to sell his former partner’s photographs along with those produced by Douglas. Franz von Stillfried also remained in business long after his brother had left Yokohama. Through careful scrutiny of newly discovered sources, Gartlan was able to unravel these complex relationships and cast doubt on our inflated sense of Stillfried’s oeuvre. Scholars of early Japanese photography will be reassessing photographs attributed to Stillfried based on the template of Gartlan’s forensic work for the foreseeable future. For the most part, Gartlan judiciously mines the evidence he has unearthed to reach insightful and defensible conclusions. One comes away from many of his arguments convinced of the intrinsic value of biographical study. But where his sources are few, Gartlan’s commitment to biography sometimes leads him to suggest causal relations from what are at best circumstantial correlations. This is particularly so in the first chapter, where, from spotty evidence, Gartlan constructs a character for the youthful Stillfried that conspicuously affirms points he intends to make later in the narrative. Additionally, some of the overextended conclusions he reaches seem pointless. An account of Stillfried’s maritime training, for example, leads Gartlan to observe that Stillfried was not a privileged landlubber like other nineteenth-century travel photographers, which adds nothing to our understanding of his work. Examining Stillfried’s early life also disposes Gartlan to speculate on the genesis of Stillfried’s interest in visual media. He proposes that cartes de visite portraying Maximilian that Stillfried acquired while serving in Mexico led to his interest in commercial photography. Yet in the following chapter Gartlan introduces other cartes de visite that Stillfried acquired in Japan prior to his military service in Mexico, leaving readers to ponder why photographs of Maximilian had more impact on Stillfried’s future profession than those depicting the very subjects on which he would forge his career. Much of chapter 1 subscribes to the now-discredited practices of conventional historical biography. Thankfully, this proves an anomaly in a project that is otherwise a productive application of new biography. Biographical study necessitates the exploration of personal relationships, whose contextualization requires a sense of the individuals involved. Gartlan’s impulse to generate biography extends to every member of the rather large supporting cast that inhabited Stillfried’s life. In most cases, he is reasonably succinct when supplying this information, but some of his biographical digressions divert attention away from the core arguments he constructs. A particularly egregious example occurs in a discussion of Kusakabe Kimbei and Usui Shuzaburo, proprietors of two Japanese studios that would eventually come to dominate commercial photography in Yokohama. Many scholars suggest that Kusukabe apprenticed with Stillfried, but Gartlan dismisses his candidacy on the grounds that supporting evidence is circumstantial. In his stead, he nominates Usui. Gartlan admits that his evidence for this claim is no less circumstantial, yet he pursues a gratuitous exegesis of Usui’s career that runs to nearly five thousand words, none of which affirms a relationship with Stillfried. In the following chapter, Gartlan states that Usui trained with Douglas. Though not foregrounded in the introduction, an argument emerges in later chapters of the book that points to a productive rationale for threading Stillfried’s biography through the lives of his supporting cast. Gartlan argues that through his personal and business relationships, Stillfried played a critical role as a transcultural mediator bridging the divide between Europe and Japan. This proposition is certainly worthy of further consideration—for all photographers working in every nineteenth-century contact zone. But it raises questions of intentionality that in Stillfried’s case, at least, would require looking beyond the naked ambition that seems to be his predominant character trait.