Swirling Emptiness, or Reflections on the MHP Album 5982/II/1-88

“Someday we must write the history of our own obscurity-manifest the density of our narcissism, tally down through the centuries the several appeals to difference we may have occasionally heard, the ideological recuperations which have infallibly followed and which consist in always acclimating our incognizance of Asia by means of certain known languages (the Orient of Voltaire, of the Revue Asiatique, of Pierre Loti, or of Air France). Today there are doubtless a thousand things to learn about the Orient: an enormous labor of knowledge is and will be necessary [...]; but it is also necessary that, leaving aside vast regions of darkness [...], a slender thread of light search out not other symbols but the very fissure of the symbolic”.

Roland Barthes The Empire of Signs

“Swirling Emptiness” is an exhibition that presents works by pioneers of photography in Japan. Hand-coloured albumen photographs dated to the end of the 19th century give an insight into the realities of life at a breakthrough moment in the history of Japan, and offer a starting point for reflection on cultural differences and the related notion of “exoticism"

The second half of the 19th century was a time when Japan emerged from its almost three hundred-year-long isolation. The Meiji period (1868-1912) was a time of Japan’s dynamic development through intense contact with the West. Photographs presented at the exhibition, coming from a souvenir album currently in the collection of the MHP.

This exhibition has been prepared as part of the “Key to the Storeroom”, a long-term project focused entirely on the collection of the Museum of History of Photography in Krakow. It aims to present the variety of the collection of the MHP and to create a new ground for its interpretation.