Although Alfred Kroeber is universally regarded as the founder of California Indian studies, his important use of the camera as an ethnographic tool is virtually unknown. In fact, Kroeber was one of the first anthropologists to photograph California native peoples. California has never attracted as many photographers as other regions of Native America, such as the Southwest, most likely because of the rapid depopulation and massive acculturation of California Indians. By the time of Kroeber’s fieldwork at the turn of the century, there were comparatively few native people left in the state, and from a naive, Anglo perspective, they did not look particularly native. Most of the earliest surviving photographs of California Indians are by a handful of professional photographer. In the fall of 1892, Henry W. Henshaw photographed the Pomo living near Ukiah for the Smithsonian’s Bureau of American Ethnology. With these pictures, Henshaw became probably the first photographer of California Indians who made his living as an anthropologist-although his training had been in biology. Several years later, in 1899, Roland Dixon, a Harvard graduate student working for the American Museum of Natural History, began to photograph the Maidu. About the same time, Pliny Goddard, a Quaker missionary among the Hupa, was also taking pictures, which he published later, when he was an anthropologist at the University of California. Finally, in 1901, just before Kroeber joined the University of California, Dr. Philip M. Jones took a series of California Indian pictures for Phoebe Hearst, the founder of the university’s Museum of Anthropology.

This museum catalogue accompanies the Hearst Museum's 1994-1995 exhibition, "Back Roads to Far Towns: Folk Art of Rural Japan." The book includes a comprehensive introductory essay reviewing a century of interest in the folk culture of Japan. The book also contains a series of revealing and entertaining letters written by the Museum's collector who gathered traditional Japanese crafts in Kyoto during the mid-1960s.

People have been taking pictures of Native Americans for well over a century-for almost as long as they have been taking pictures. The earliest known photograph of an American Indian was exposed soon after the invention of the medium in 1839. Ironically enough, it was taken in Great Britain in 1844, and it depicted Kahkewaquonaby (known as the Reverend Peter Jones), the son of a Mississauga Indian and a Welshman. Thus, from its very beginnings, the photography of Native Americans has been inextricably bound up with the crossing of cultural boundaries. As photographers fanned out across the American continent, native peoples struggled to render their strange activities comprehensible. A term that appears to have been devised repeatedly and independently was shadow catcher. This ominous phrase spoke to one of the most profound aspects of photography: its seemingly magical ability to appropriate and remove some sort of essence of a person’s character. As it was phrased by Yurok author Lucy Thompson, “The old Indians do not like to look at a photograph or to have their photographs taken because they say it is a reflection or a shadowy image of the departed spirit, O-quirlth.” Contemporary Creek writer Joy Harjo remembers her “Aunt Lois’s admonishments about photographs. She said that they could steal your soul. I believe it’s true, for an imprint remains behind forever, locked in paper and chemicals."