Sanshichiro Yamamoto: Five original photos of Chinese landscapes, 1890s -1920s

Sanshichiro Yamamoto (1855-1943) was a Japanese photographer from Okayama Prefecture. He started a photo studio in Shibahikage-cho (near present day Shimbashi Station) in Tokyo, Japan, in 1882 (the 15th year of Meiji Era). Yamamoto later moved to Peking (Beijing) and opened a photo studio (Yamamoto Shōzō Kan or Yamamoto Syozo House), from where he sold photographs, souvenir photobooks and coloured post cards, of Beijing, its suburbs and people, at the end of Qing period.

Accompanied by one photograph from Sze Yuen Ming, Shanghai.The Chinese studio Sze Yuen Ming and Co was known in Chinese as Yao Hua studio (Shangyang Yaohua zhaoxiang 上洋耀華照相). This studio based in Shanghai and active between 1892 and the 1920s was directed by Shi Dezhi 施德之 (1861-1935). Szes production ranged from portraits (notably popular hand-tinted photographs of courtesans) and news pictures, to topographical scenes that suited the tastes of both Chinese and Western communities. Szes landscape photographs received official recognition at the Parisian Exposition Universelle in 1900 with the jury awarding the studio a honourable grant. It became then the only studio in the late Qing dynasty period to be awarded an international prize. Yamamoto’s photographs were published in Views of the North China Affair, Picturesque Views of Peking and View and Custom of North China (1909).