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Photographs of 19th Century Japan

(cosmographia.substack.com)
444 points merothwell | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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hoseyor ◴[] No.43640040[source]
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tokioyoyo ◴[] No.43640197[source]
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.
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1. Cthulhu_ ◴[] No.43641389[source]
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.