PREFACE
1. TITLE
This photo album has no title. In a large ready-made Scrap Album, the photo book begins with McVane's departure from England, then introduces the Meiji Government officials he was employed by, the places of interest in Tokyo and other cities, and finally, what work he did in Japan. Some photo captions are incorrect or absent. It is named here as McVean Japan Photo Album.Here, I will call it the McVean Japan Photo Album, MJPA.
2 DISCOVERY
My research into modern architectural history began with tracking down British architects and engineers employed by the Meiji government. In 1990, I began interacting with British researchers, and in 2003, through one of them, I began to get in touch with McVean's family. McVean left his belongings in separate inheritances for his children, and while the whereabouts of valuable assets are unknown, documents were mainly kept by his eldest son and youngest daughter's grandchildren. In 2009, I visited the two and was shown McVean's belongings they had.
3. DUPLICATING
Because my time in the Isle of Lewis and Inverness in Scotland, where the surviving family members live, was limited, I basically took close-up photographs with my digital camera. Later, the family of the youngest daughter negotiated with the other surviving family members to collect the letters, diaries, photographs, and other documents in one place, scanned the small prints in them, and sent the digital files to me. These are the sepia-toned photos. I will call the entire document the McVean Achieves, or MVA.
4. FEATURE
The photo collection in the McVean Archives consists exclusively of family photographs, which are not compiled in albums. The only exception is the Japan Photo Album, which contains more than 20 business card photographs of Japanese people and foreign colleagues that are not included in the book. See <Japan Photo> for more information.
All of the photographs in the Japan Photo album are thinly printed, and some appear to have been acquired while serving abroad and others after returning to Japan. McVean operated the camera. There is no record of it at all, which means that he either obtained it off-the-shelf or had it taken by a photographer.
The photographs of the departure from England, places of interest along the route to Japan, the former Edo Castle and its surroundings, Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto, Ise Shrine, Zenkoji Temple and Nikko are sightseeing photographs, while those of the Meiji Government officials, the accession to the throne, etc. must have been sent by someone who collaborated with the photographer.
The photographs of the surveyor's office in Toranomon, the Yamato Yashiki official residence and his colleagues, the observation of the transit of Venus, and the Engineering Department (Kogaku-ryo) are known to have been taken by John Reddie Black, who introduced the Meiji Government's modernisation projects in the Far East magazine. This is corroborated by the McVean Diary.
The most likely person to have assisted in the preparation of this album and sent photographs from Japan was John Harlington Gubbins, who in 1871 became a British legation official in Tokyo and became a regular guest at the McVean residence in Yamato Yashiki, where he stayed for the next 30 years. in 1893. married Helen Brodie, the eldest daughter of the McVeans.
The circumstances of its creation suggest that at the Glasgow International Exhibition of 1888, at the request of Campbell Douglas, the organising committee member, McVean decided to lend his Japanese antiquities and also submitted a photo album to inform people of his experiences there.
COPYRIGHT写真の版権と取り扱いについて
(1) Copy right is owned by MVA.
(2) It is presented on this website in a smaller size for academic reference with the permission of the copyright holder. For use or questions, please contact me.