The camera setup, with a computer-controlled tripod, used to shoot small sections that will be digitally stitched together.
Ordinarily, museums don’t encourage visitors to take super-high-resolution photographs of the art with the goal of exact replication. But for 10 days, through September 17, a contingent of five technicians from Japan, two reps from the Kyoto Culture Association, and a project manager are hunkered in the MIA’s Visual Resources area doing exactly that. When they leave, they’ll take with them all the imagery they need to reproduce a remarkable set of 16 sliding doors and place them once again in the temple from which they came.
Andreas Marks, at far left, head of the MIA’s department of Japanese and Korean Art, observes the shoot.
The sliding doors, called fusuma, were painted by Kanō Sanraku (1559–1635) and resided in the Daikakuji Temple in Kyoto from their creation in the 17th century until they were given to the artist Ōoka Shunboku in 1755 in exchange for decoration work. The effort to reproduce them, sponsored by Canon and organized by the Kyoto Culture Association, is part of the Tsuzuri Project to preserve Japan’s cultural heritage, which over the years has involved the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Freer Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Seattle Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Museum of Art.
The doors are painstakingly photographed, section by section, with Canon 5D Mark III cameras while a robot tripod head precisely points the 300mm lens to each of the 20 “tiles” that will comprise the final composite image. Canon printers and custom-made washi paper are used to precisely match colors while the artwork is still in the photo studio. When the crew returns to Japan, the images will be printed on a wide-format printer—each screen is 36 inches wide—and the prints will be enhanced by artist Hiroto Rakusho with gold paint. They will be mounted by artist Hirokazu Yokoyama on antique-looking frames and donated to the Daikakuji Temple in April 2014.