Photographs of 19th Century Japan

You’re really underplaying how awful the life was for an average person in before-times. Sure, pretty buildings, different cultures, and etc. were more prominent. But also an average person would never be able to enjoy those in their lifetimes.

Not unlike how it went in a lot of places at the time; the problem with history is that they mainly focus on and make records of the upper echelons, the pretty parts. Few historians / writers / etc make notes of the common people. Some exceptions, of course, but you'd be forgiven for thinking Europe was mainly castles, knights and political intrigue back in the middle ages.

It hasn't changed much; in theory everyone has a camera in their pocket now to record the mundane, but in practice a lot of it is "content", where people put on a show for the camera.

My grandpa was an amateur photographer, he'd go out and make photos of local events, scenes, people, etc. His work has been donated to a regional museum and digitized, because there was little other visual records of these old (well, 50's) traditions.

I can't find them though. Some were uploaded to a Facebook page but that's a really poor platform for archiving / displaying works. I should reach out to my dad and start a project to build a website for this collection or something like that.

Whether it's good or bad I feel like what you mention is partially besides the point no? As in prosperity might look different without the things influencing this cultural mixture but surely the argument would not be that we'd be living in the 1800's

I'm not buying this. All these claims rely on some nebulous "poor people" who were kept hidden away somewhere. There is no good reason to doubt that these photos show regular people, and the buildings they lived in.

Both of my grandpas (who have passed away long ago), would beg to differ. People, especially when taking photos wasn't basically free, don't take photos of ordinary things. If you see 1 rose among 500 tulips, that will catch your eye. And vice versa.

Poor people were not hidden away, it's just their lives weren't that beautiful to be shown and paraded around.

Mm. When I go on holiday, I take notice of mundane things in the new place that are different to mundane things in my normal life. Street furniture, pylons, graffiti, the contents of supermarket shelves, dusty unpaved roads[0].

But over the years I have come to realise that I'm very odd.

When you go on holiday, how many photos do you take of regular people, vs. tourist attractions? Or, in reverse, do you know regular people[1] who often find tourists visiting their area like to take photos of their homes?

[0] When I visited Nairobi a decade back, one of my photos was along the lines of this Google Street View image: https://www.google.com/maps/@-1.2811367,36.9148575,3a,75y,17...

[1] This site being what it is, there's a decent chance you know someone world-famous and people do actually want photos of their home. They're not "regular people".

Maybe, these being taken in the 19th century when photography was expensive, they were well off enough to afford paying for it?

My dad took quite a few pictures of everyday life in Japan after WW2, including everyday life on the military bases.

The same during the Korean War he was a pilot in.

I have a couple books full of photos of the Civil War. There are a lot of ordinary soldier and camp life pictures in it.

Most of the people in the photos seem be ordinary, working class people. Even buddhist monks, who swore to live in poverty, celibacy and to avoid food that was too flavorful.

It isn't like we don't have records of ordinary people, even the homeless, or criminals. It's more like people like you claim the existence of a whole another kind of "poor people", who were supposedly the absolute majority, who suffered somewhere, completely ignored by everybody, and worked long hours every day on... being poor? It just doesn't seem to add up.