File:Kenji Morita MET DP369548.jpg

When Japan opened its ports to the West in the 1850s, photography—called shashin, literally, a copy of truth — soon became widely available. High-end professional salons and open-air studios operated by itinerant practitioners offered portraits at every price range. While the popularity of ambrotypes, a positive photograph on glass, was short-lived in the United States, Japanese ambrotypes were in demand from the early 1870s until the end of the nineteenth century. This ambrotype portrait depicts a dreamy-eyed, fourteen-year-old student. Housed in poetry-inscribed kiri-wood box, it provides an intimate and rare glimpse of how modern Japanese society represented itself.