When William Henry Metcalf stepped off a steamship into the bustling treaty port of Yokohama in June 1877, he carried a piece of custom-built technology that would change how Americans viewed Asia.
A wealthy Milwaukee shoe manufacturer and prominent art collector, Metcalf was not a professional photographer. Yet his four-month journey through Japan produced some of the earliest and most significant photographic records of the Meiji era published in the United States.
By contextualizing Metcalf’s journey within the rapid modernization of Japan and his deep ties to early Wisconsin industry, a clearer picture emerges of how a Midwestern businessman became a pioneer of global visual history.
A CONFLUENCE OF MODERNIZATION AND GEOPOLITICS
Metcalf’s arrival in East Asia occurred less than a quarter-century after Commodore Matthew Perry’s naval expedition forced the opening of Japan to Western trade. By 1877, the country was in the throes of the Meiji Restoration, a period defined by fierce internal conflicts between traditional samurai forces and a rapidly industrializing central government.
While professional commercial studios were already operating in Yokohama to serve foreign sailors and diplomats, Metcalf belonged to a rare class of wealthy Western travelers who brought their own equipment to document the changing nation.
Traveling alongside Edward Sylvester Morse, a pioneering American zoologist and Japanologist, Metcalf had access to a country pivoting between its ancient past and an industrialized future. His lens captured landscapes and religious landmarks at a moment when traditional Japanese society was transforming under Western influence.
ENGINEERING THE TRAVEL CAMERA
The technical achievements of Metcalf’s journey are inseparable from his partnership with Henry Hamilton Bennett, the landscape photographer from the Wisconsin Dells. In the 1870s, landscape photography was an arduous process, requiring bulky wooden cameras and chemical glass plates that had to be mixed and developed immediately on-site in a mobile darkroom tent.
Recognizing the logistical impossibility of transporting a traditional darkroom across the rugged terrain of 19th-century Japan, Metcalf financed Bennett’s photography studio in Wisconsin. In return, Bennett used his technical expertise to build Metcalf a revolutionary, highly portable travel camera.
This custom apparatus was engineered to utilize the cutting-edge dry-plate photographic process. Unlike the prevailing wet-plate method, dry plates could be prepared in advance, exposed in the field, and stored for development months later. Bennett equipped the camera with both standard photographic lenses and specialized stereoscopic lenses. This allowed Metcalf to capture two nearly identical images side-by-side, which created a three-dimensional illusion when viewed through a stereoscope.
THE GREAT BUDDHA AND THE STEREOGRAPH CRAZE
Upon his return to Wisconsin, Metcalf consigned over two dozen of his Japanese negatives to Bennett, who published them as a commercial stereographic series titled “A Summer in Japan.”
Among the most enduring images from this series is Metcalf’s photograph of the Kamakura Daibutsu, the Great Buddha. While international commercial photographers routinely documented the massive 13th-century bronze statue, Metcalf’s approach stood apart from the standard tourist imagery of the era.
Commercial photographers typically placed local residents or children at the base of the Daibutsu to provide a sense of scale and emphasize the exotic grandeur of the monument for Western consumers. Metcalf opted to photograph the monument in total isolation, leaving the frame completely devoid of people. This composition forced American viewers to confront the monument directly, focusing entirely on the craftsmanship and scale of the icon within its rural landscape.
Distributed across the United States by Bennett, these three-dimensional cards offered many Americans their very first glimpse of Buddhist art and Japanese geography, fueling a nationwide obsession with East Asian culture.
A LASTING MILWAUKEE FOOTPRINT
Metcalf’s technical experimentation in Japan reflected the same entrepreneurial spirit that fueled his success in Wisconsin. As a partner in the Bradley & Metcalf Co., a pioneering footwear firm established on Water Street in 1843, Metcalf helped build one of the city’s earliest manufacturing empires.
His wealth allowed him to become a major patron of the local arts, a passion reflected in the mansion he constructed in 1854 at the northwest corner of Cass and Division streets, now Juneau Avenue. Although the home’s attached art gallery was later demolished and the main structure shifted to accommodate the construction of the Summerfield Methodist Church in 1904, the historic residence remains a physical link to Metcalf’s legacy.
Through the intersection of Midwestern manufacturing wealth, Wisconsin photographic innovation, and the global politics of the Meiji era, Metcalf transformed himself from a local businessman into an essential chronicler of a vanishing world.
- Milwaukee County Historical Society (MCHS)
- William H. Metcalf images from the collections of George C. Baxley and Peter Romaskiewicz
This article was based in part on research from Peter Romaskiewicz’s Metcalf & Bennet’s “A Summer In Japan”
