No typical tourist

Almost from the moment of its public announcement in 1839, photography has been linked to travel. Early inventors such as William Henry Fox Talbot (1800–77) documented their excursions with the camera. ¹ In the 1840s, 50s and 60s, camera-carrying travelers took daguerreotypes, calotypes and collodion negatives in locales as diverse as Canada, Egypt and India. However, it was the invention of the gelatin dry plate in 1871 and, especially, George Eastman’s (1854–1932) Kodak camera in 1888 that led to the camera’s becoming an essential accessory for every tourist, including a young woman from England who made a reputation for herself in American photographic circles and whose articles on photography in the popular press were intended to capture the imaginations of her peers—especially the growing numbers of “Kodak girls,” to whom Eastman shrewdly pitched his products. ² That she turned her lens towards the East, to the Land of the Rising Sun, reflected Japan’s growing hold on the popular imagination of a certain class of “artistic” Westerners at the dawn of the twentieth century. Surprisingly, particularly given the wide circulation of her images of Japan in the American popular press, Zaida Ben-Yusuf ³ is not included in Terry Bennett’s encyclopedic study of early photography in Japan. ⁴ Indeed, she is notably absent from all of the referenced books on the topic—an omission that this chapter endeavors to correct.