There Are People Who Can See and Others Who Cannot Even Look

The greatest early photographer's portraits of Hugo, Manet, Dumas, and more

In 1862, Japanese travelers arrived in Europe for the first time in 240 years. Their nation, isolated from the rest of the world for so long, was reluctantly opening to the outside world.

Imagine being a member of this group — 40 men, many of them samurai, venturing out into a world full of technologies and cultures with which they had minimal experience. Their job was twofold: to learn about some of the wealthiest and most powerful societies in the world and to slow the predatory opening of Japan that had begun with American warships’ arrival in 1854.

In Europe, these men from a country whose technological progress had largely been frozen in the 1600s dazzled at the inventions of the industrial age. When they visited France, the telegraph especially wowed them, as they marveled that messages could cross continents in minutes.

Then they went to experience another budding European technology at the photo studio of Nadar. The famous photographer memorialized a large group of young men f…