Mode of Shampooing
At first Beato photographed people he met outside, but once he went inside the studio to shoot, he had more control over the image. He would dress his sitters, often studio assistants, in clothes he collected and then arrange them among traditional artifacts. Beato often staged elaborate scenes—using the same tatami (mats), hibachi, screens, and other props—that depicted unfamiliar social customs.
The scene titled Mode of Shampooing would be inexplicable without the explanatory texts repeated in some of Beato’s albums for this and another photograph entitled, Amma, or Shampooer. An amma was an itinerant shampooer, most often blind, who attracted potential customers for massage and hair washing by blowing his whistle when walking through a town.
Mode of Shampooing offers a strange blend of realism—actual people posed in front of the camera—with an artificiality that is obvious. Beato’s clientele must have accepted the artifice as a means to make the figures emblematic of an exotic culture’s customs.