Author: Guest

When people ask about my relationship with religion, I tend to fall back to the Facebook option, “it’s complicated.” The United Methodist Church (UMC) I was raised in was actively warm and unconditionally loving. It was a place where I was safe to explore my identity and free to be anyone I wanted. In my adolescence, that meant experimenting with outfits as much as ideologies. To their credit, my church family never withheld their support, although my parents likely had some interesting conversations. As I grew older, I began learning about the incredible pain that other people were causing...

Although professional photography studios already crowded the Japanese treaty port of Yokohama by the 1870s, Milwaukee native William Henry Metcalf was one of the first amateur photographers who brought his own camera on a trans-Pacific trip to Japan. Metcalf’s views represented the earliest photographic images of Japan, stereograph or otherwise, published in the United States. “More than a decade before portable Kodak cameras ushered in a new era of amateur photography, Metcalf commissioned his friend and fellow photographer Henry Hamilton Bennet to construct a portable travel camera, equipped with both photographic and stereoscopic lenses. He arrived in Yokohama in...