Japanese-American Photographs, 1920-1940

The standards upheld by the JCPC were rigorous. Members shared darkrooms, gathered for formal critiques, and mounted small exhibitions. At the time, such clubs were vital centers for mentorship and study as very few art schools offered photography curriculum.

Following initial employment as a gardener when he arrived in the United States, Kumezu Ota opened a photo studio in Pasadena in 1921. Although he was not a member of the JCPC—possibly because he had access to his own darkroom—he did exhibit his work alongside its members, as well as in salons throughout the United States, Europe, and Japan. This still life of gourds has been artfully lit from the left.

JCPC members’ work was frequently included in selective photography catalogs and international yearbooks. Salon exhibitions in Paris (1929) and London (1933) both featured an outsized number of images by West Coast Japanese-American photographers, and admirers included such artists as Helen Levitt, Margarethe Mather, László Moholy-Nagy, and Edward Weston.

Also not a member of the JCPC, Asahachi Kono worked at the T. Iwata Art Store on East First Street, an important source of supplies and gathering place for photographers throughout Los Angeles. This photograph, one of his most celebrated, appeared in multiple international salons the year it was made, including those in London, Paris, Tokyo, and the United States.

A few months later, over 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced to leave their homes and businesses behind, boarding buses that would take them to holding centers, and then internment camps. In the scramble to pack their entire lives into a single suitcase, many photographers hid, sold, or destroyed their cameras and their artwork.

Hiromu Kira was initially associated with the Seattle Camera Club before moving to Los Angeles in 1926, where he found employment at the T. Iwata Art Store. Although he never joined the JCPC, he associated with several of its members. During World War II he was incarcerated at the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona. After the war he worked as a photographic retoucher for Disney, RKO Radio Pictures, and Columbia.

Forty years after the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, Los Angeles-based artist, professor, and collector Dennis Reed began researching West Coast Japanese-American photography clubs. Slowly, by tracking down friends and relatives of the artists, Reed eventually assembled a collection of 79 photographs made between 1919 and 1940. 

Reed’s research also led him to photographers associated with camera clubs based in San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle. Dr. Kyo Koike, who had attended medical school in Japan before immigrating to the United States in 1916, had a successful medical practice in Seattle.

Koike was instrumental in founding the Seattle Camera Club in 1924 and was the group’s primary spokesman, as well as one of the most widely published and exhibited photographers of the period. This image of a lone rower was likely taken in Mount Rainier National Park, a favorite destination for Koike.

Some of the images that Reed collected are very picturesque and have decidedly Japanese sensibilities—a high horizon line, vertical format, long shadows.

Many photographs were made during nature excursions, often in one’s own backyard. This image of two figures strolling lakeside was taken in Hollenbeck Park in the Boyle Heights district of Los Angeles, just east of downtown. Ringed by trees and featuring an arched bridge—the likely vantage point from which Taizo Kato captured this scene—the manmade lake was a popular destination for strollers, boaters, and photographers alike.

Although only a fraction of the collection of Japanese-American photographs assembled by Dennis Reed and acquired by the Getty Museum in 2019 can be shown in this online exhibition, the selection demonstrates the parity of these landscapes, figure studies, portraits, still lifes, and abstractions with works produced by avant-garde European and American photographers of the same period. Their presence in the Getty Museum’s collection enhances our understanding of the transition from the expressive, softly focus Pictorialist aesthetic that was prevalent at the turn of the 20th century to the harder edged Modernist styles of the interwar years that privileged abstraction.

Each photograph is an exquisite example of the evolution of the medium, and the backstory to their creation, dispersal, and rediscovery is a significant, if lesser-known, part of 20th-century American art history. An in-gallery exhibition featuring Dennis Reed’s collection of Japanese-American photographs will be organized at the Getty Center in the coming years.