Echoes East

My photomontages begin as documents of a changing social landscape and reflect on the collision between personal memory and shared visual experience. Industrialization and technology have radically transformed our world. These changes have both enabled and oftentimes forced migration as well as huge cultural shifts. Our immigrant nation, born through the displacement of native people and now among the most technologically advanced societies of our time, finds itself fragmented and struggling to keep its promise of hope and knowledge.

My montages hold personal memories of my grandparents’ immigration from Japan and of raising families in a foreign land. One grandfather worked on the railroad and saved money to begin sharecropping a farm. My other grandfather ran an import business, which he slowly lost to an earthquake and then economic depression. His youngest son, my father, fought in WWII for the United States Army in a racially segregated combat unit. My family’s story is an American tale of honorable service, hard work, failure, and persistence to belong to a community. I embrace both the shared American story and the sensibility of being an outsider. 

Photography’s speed, immediacy and ubiquity are vital in responding to a world in flux and the decontextualized subjects that define visual experience. That immediate response though must be met with deliberate consideration for historical context and contemporary social reality. For over forty years, montage has provided me with a process for that examination. The photographic moment is an armature that transforms as a picture is viewed from different perspectives. I prime that armature, activate it and make it more powerful through contact with a second image.

Movement represents change. My movement in time and space is physical change. Memory can be a psychological response to change and variation. These photomontages are expressions about the complex interaction between culture, personal memory, and the experience of time.