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2021 Virtual Fall Lecture Series: Flesh and Fantasy: The body in early Japanese photography
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When Charles Longfellow travelled to Japan in the early 1870s, he commissioned and collected photographs of people and places he encountered while living in his temporary Tokyo area home. Longfellow’s sojourn occurred within the context of a frenzied Western interest in Japan, which had enmeshed other prominent Bostonians such as Isabella Stewart Gardner and William Sturgis Bigelow, who, like Longfellow, enthusiastically collected photographs. This lecture will explore photographs acquired by these and other collectors produced during the last decades of the 19th century, when the craze for “things Japanese” was at its height. The photographs demonstrate how the (foreign) interest in collecting images of bodies operated through a lens of fantasy. Photographs from the Longfellow House, Harvard Art Museums, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and other area collections will be discussed.
Join Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters National Historic Site and the Friends of the Longfellow House-Washington's Headquarters for our 2021 Virtual Fall Lecture Series, Histories of the Body in Art, Science, and Society, featuring historians, scientists, and poets. The series will trace the site's intersections with broader stories of early anesthesia, disability history, medicine and literature, the body in art, slavery and illness, and more.
Each lecture will be live captioned. Please use the registration form or email us to request additional accessibility accommodations.
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