Ogawa Kazumasa

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Planting rice, Japan, 19th century, hand-coloured albumen print.

Ogawa Kazumasa (小川一眞^[1], Ogawa Kazumasa^?, 1860-1929), also known as Ogawa Kazuma or Ogawa Isshin, was a Japanese photographer, printer and publisher who was a pioneer in photomechanical printing and photography in the Meiji era.

Ogawa was born in Saitama to the Matsudaira samurai clan. He started studying English and photography at the age of 15 under Yoshiwara Hideo, then in 1880 he moved to Tokyo in order to further hone his English language skills. One year later, Ogawa was hired as an interpreter in the Yokohama Police Departement, while learning photography from Shimooka Renjō in Yokohama.

In 1882, he moved to Boston where he took courses in portrait photography and dry plate process. He also studied collotype printing in Albert Type Company.

Upon his return to Japan in 1884, he opened a photographic studio in Iidabashi (Kōjimachi), the first in Tokyo. Four years later, he established the Tsukiji Kampan Seizō Kaisha (築地乾板製造会社 Tsukiji dry plate manufacturing company), which manufactured dry plates for use by photographers. In 1889, he set up Japan's first collotype business, the Ogawa Shashin Seihan jo (小川写真製版所), also referred to as the K. Ogawa printing factory. In the same year, Ogawa worked as an editor for Shashin Shinpō (写真新報, lit. Photography journal), the only photographic journal available at the time, as well as for Kokka magazine (国華, lit. National flower). He printed both magazines using the collotype printing process.

Ogawa was a founding member of the Japan Photographic Society, which gathered photography amateurs from all around Japan. In 1891, he was charged with taking 100 pictures of Tokyo's most attractive geisha, to commemorate the opening of the Ryōunkaku.