Japan in Early Photographs: The Aime Humbert Collection at the Museum of Ethnography, Neuchatel

Photographs taken in Japan between the late Edo and early Meiji periods that found their way overseas played a major role in forming Westerners’ image of Japan. Among these collections, the pictures gathered by the Swiss diplomat Aime Humbert (1819-1900) in the 1860s were crucial in building lasting representations of the island nation: many of these, mainly collected in 1863/64 during a sojourn in Yokohama and Edo, were used as sources for the well-known and largely distributed engravings of his famous book Le Japon illustre, published in Paris in 1870.