I love vintage photography and so I went on a search of Samurai portraits. This slide show has a wonderful mix of armor and swords. It was very touching watching of this video, there so much sadness and pride within these men.
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cristina on June 9th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
Wonderful photos. Many of these actually remind me of the Japanese photo albums in the museum’s collection (three of which are displayed right now in the Photographic Memories exhibition).These albums were assembled by late 19th and early 20th century travelers to Japan as both an itinerary for their travels and as a souvenir. Often included in such albums were photos of Samurai. The ones I’ve seen are usually hand-colored studio photos, and bear a great resemblance to some of the images in this slide show. Pretty cool.
dave on September 12th, 2009 at 12:16 am
Several of these photos appeared to be of Sakamoto Ryoma, one of the instigators (or perhaps the primary instigator) of what became the Satsuma Rebellion that led to the Meiji Restoration and the reentry of Japan into the modern world.
One photo looks to be the young Emperor Meiji.
It would be nice to have captions for the photos to show, as far as is known, who is pictured.