We go to museums and galleries to view and appreciate such cultural properties as paintings and sculpture. The root of this act can be found in the thought "I want to see the original with my own eyes". Further, beyond the backdrop of the hordes of people rushing to see exhibitions of famous works, is the fact that there is a shared perception of those famous works. Photography plays a major role in forming such awareness as a medium of visual information.
  Photographic techniques, invented approximately 170 years ago in 1839, have served the function of recording cultural properties since the earliest inception of this form. In France, where photography was invented, the daguerreotype was unveiled as the world's first photographic technique with the explanation, "In order to record the writings on the pyramids of Egypt, it would take many days and ample manpower. With the daguerreotype, it can all be accomplished in no time at all, and indeed, with even more accuracy than by hand". In 1849, ten years after its invention, Maxime du Camp traveled in Middle East to photograph ancient ruins in Egypt, Nubia, Palestine and Syria. In 1852, his photographs were published as a book, presenting photographic images of these ancient sites to the general public for the first time. In 1851, the Commission des Monuments Historiques (French Commission of Historical Monuments) launched a project known as Missions Héliographiques, involving a group of five photographers, to document French landmarks using photographic techniques.
  The same turn of events can be seen in Japan. People and scenery served as the first subjects of photography introduced to Japan at the end of the Edo period, but with the Meiji Restoration, the new technology was also used in surveys of cultural properties.
  In 1872 Yokoyama Matsusaburo took photographs for the government's survey of old temples and shrines, the so-called Jinshin Survey. As part of this survey the Shoso-in Imperial warehouse was unsealed and its treasures photographed. Details of this photographic project were noted in the Nara no sujimichi diary of Ninagawa Noritane, which described the process as a series of trial and error experiments.
  In 1888, sixteen years after the Jinshin Survey, a survey of treasures in the Kinki area (around Kyoto, Nara and Osaka) was conducted with a photographer, Ogawa Kazuma. This survey of cultural properties was larger in scale both in terms of quality and quantity, and the photographs taken in the Kinki treasures survey were published in the Kokka art journal that was launched the following year (inaugural issue October 1889). These photographs, reproduced in collotype, greatly impressed the people of the day.
  The recording of cultural properties in the photographic experiments produced by Yokoyama Matsusaburo in the early Meiji period was then fully established as a methodology in the later works of Ogawa Kazuma. Photography brought about changes in the value systems regarding antiquities and would generate a new method of artistic appreciation.