Maeda Genzō (前田 玄造) (1831–1906) was a Japanese
photographer
A photographer (the Greek φῶς (''phos''), meaning "light", and γραφή (''graphê''), meaning "drawing, writing", together meaning "drawing with light") is a person who makes photographs.
Duties and types of photographers
As in other ...
from northern
Kyūshū. In
Nagasaki
is the capital and the largest city of Nagasaki Prefecture on the island of Kyushu in Japan.
It became the sole port used for trade with the Portuguese and Dutch during the 16th through 19th centuries. The Hidden Christian Sites in th ...
he studied photography under
Jan Karel van den Broek and
J. L. C. Pompe van Meerdervoort. Neither of these teachers was an experienced photographer, and their attempts to produce photographs were largely failures. Nevertheless, in turn they taught
wet-collodion process to Maeda and his fellow students, who included Furukawa Shumpei, Kawano Teizō,
Ueno Hikoma, and
Horie Kuwajirō
Horie Kuwajirō (堀江 鍬次郎 1831 – 1866) was an early Japanese photographer and science writer.
Horie studied '' rangaku'', specifically chemistry, at the Nagasaki Naval Training Center where J. L. C. Pompe van Meerdervoort was an i ...
, among others. When Swiss photographer
Pierre Rossier arrived in Japan in 1858 on a commission from ''
Negretti and Zambra
Negretti and Zambra (active 1850 – c. 1985) was a company that produced scientific and optical instruments and also operated a photographic studio based in London.
History
Henry Negretti (1818–1879) and Joseph Zambra (1822–1897) for ...
'', Maeda was instructed to assist and accompany him and to further learn photography. Maeda and other students escorted Rossier around Nagasaki, while the latter took photographs of priests, beggars, the audience of a
sumo
is a form of competitive full-contact wrestling where a '' rikishi'' (wrestler) attempts to force his opponent out of a circular ring ('' dohyō'') or into touching the ground with any body part other than the soles of his feet (usually by ...
match, the
foreign settlement
A foreign settlement ({{Lang-ja, 外国人居留地, pronounced "Gaikokujin kyoryūchi") was a special area in a treaty port, designated by the Japanese government in the second half of the nineteenth century, t