사진과 천황의 시각화― 메이지 천황과 전전·전중기 쇼와 천황의 사진 재현

초록

This article examines how photography had represented the MeijiEmperor and the Shōwa Emperor as divine absolute monarchs inJapan until its defeat in the Asia-Pacific War. The visualization ofthe emperor was at the core of making the political power visibleand constructing a national identity. One of its basic mechanismsseems to have been established in the visualization of the MeijiEmperor: what can be called the paradoxical dialectics between themaking visible on the one hand, and a visual taboo or the controlupon the way of seeing on the other. On the dimension of image,the emperors’ idealized political bodies, instead of their empiricalnatural bodies, were represented. On the dimension of the way ofseeing, that is to say the way of representing, the state monopolizedthe production and distribution of the imperial portrait, or controlledthe way of taking photographs of emperors’ natural bodies. By thiskind of the regulative visualization, making the emperor visiblemade the emperor the one who should not be looked at andconstructed the imperial gaze looking over its subjects.

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