Photographs taken in Japan between the late Edo and early Meiji periods that found their way overseas played a major role in forming Westerners' image of Japan. Among these collections, the pictures gathered by the Swiss diplomat Aim Humbert (18191900) in the 1860s were crucial in building lasting representations of the island nation: many of these, mainly collected in 1863/64 during a sojourn in Yokohama and Edo, were used as sources for the well-known and largely distributed engravings of his famous book Le Japon illustr, published in Paris in 1870.