Archive feature, first published 2019-01-19.
Fireworks are beautiful to look at, but the moment can seem fleeting because of their temporary nature. That is what makes this digitized catalog featured in this archive of fireworks illustrations from Jinta Hirayama so mesmerizing. Fireworks are frozen in time to be enjoyed again and again. And the best part? They are available to download for free.
Jinta Hirayama’s documented work includes a U.S. patent for daylight fireworks, issued on August 7, 1883. The patent record identifies a display using lightweight figures released into the air. It provides a concrete piece of his history, without independently establishing the broader claim that he was the first Japanese person ever to receive an American patent. The illustrated catalogs offer another way into that history: through the forms a customer could imagine seeing in the sky.
Hirayama founded his own fireworks company in Yokohama, Japan in 1877. He produced bilingual (Japanese-English) catalogs to display his wares and ultimately moved products internationally. The Yokohama Library made the illustrations available online here. (For those who do not read Japanese, scroll down and click on any of the books titles written in English. On the next page, click on “本体PDF画像” to download the file as a PDF.)
Scroll down to see the combination of colors and forms:
A fleeting display becomes a page
A firework is gone almost as soon as its pattern has formed. An illustrated catalog makes that pattern available for a much longer encounter. In Jinta Hirayama’s pages, the burst becomes a design that can be studied without waiting for another launch: its centre, the reach of its outline and the space left around it all become part of the composition. A printed image cannot reproduce the movement or sound of the display, but that limitation gives it a character of its own. These are records of fireworks and attractive pages in their own right. The catalog title and archive information remain useful companions to any downloaded image, preserving where the design came from when it is reused or shared.
A closer look
Compare the designs as drawings before imagining them in motion. Repetition, spacing and color make each arrangement distinctive. The archive link is retained for readers who want to investigate the catalogs further.
Links from the 2019 feature: register a patent · here
h/t: Spoon & Tamago
Related reading: Small Cityscape Drawings From a Traveler's Sketch Diary.
More about the catalog project
The following details come from the 2019 profile; ages and relative dates refer to that report.
Fireworks are beautiful to look at, but the moment can seem fleeting because of their temporary nature. That is what makes this newly digitized catalog of fireworks illustrations from Jinta Hirayama so mesmerizing. Fireworks are frozen in time to be enjoyed again and again. And the best part? They are available to download for free.
Daylight displays also help explain why a fireworks catalog can contain more than patterns of luminous sparks. Hirayama’s 1883 patent describes recognisable lightweight figures, including birds and animals. Separately, the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s account of an 1883 Hirayama catalog discusses hand-drawn watercolour designs and the conservation of its delicate pages. The catalog and the patent preserve different aspects of the subject: one records a proposed invention, while the other also survives as a designed book. Reading them together gives the illustrations a richer setting than treating every strange shape as a frozen burst of light.
Hirayama founded his own fireworks company in Yokohama, Japan in 1877. He produced bilingual (Japanese-American) catalogs to display his wares and ultimately moved products internationally. The Yokohama Library has now made the illustrations available online for the first time here. (For those who do not read Japanese, scroll down and click on any of the books titles written in English. On the next page, click on “本体PDF画像” to download the file as a PDF.)
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