Shadows of a Fleeting World: Pictorial Photography and Seattle Camera Club

In the early years of the 20th century a group of talented Japanese immigrants in Seattle took up the practice of pictorial photography. During that time, Japanese-American pictorial photographers were so numerous on the West Coast that they formed large camera clubs, particularly in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. They produced work that was published widely and exhibited in national and international competitions.

The Seattle Camera Club was founded in 1924. Shadows of a Fleeting World presents over 100 works by Seattle Camera Club photographers and others in the Seattle area who worked in the pictorial style during the movement’s heyday. Particular attention is paid to work by Seattle Camera Club members Dr. Kyo Koike, Frank Kunishige, and Iwao Matsushita, whose archives are in the holdings of the University of Washington Libraries. All of the 37 photographers who founded the club were male Japanese immigrants, but it was not their intention to maintain an exclusively male, Japanese American membership; in the five years of its existence the SCC gained American members, notably, the female photographers Ella McBride and Virna Haffer. Work by these members and Issei photographers Soichi Sunami, Yasuzo Nojima and Yukio Morinaga, among others, are included in the exhibition, along with photographs by prominent Seattle photographers like Imogen Cunningham who were working in the style prior to the founding of the SCC. The works in Shadows of a Fleeting World reveal a lively and fruitful aesthetic exchange between Eastern and Western artistic traditions expressed in the medium of pictorial photography.

The exhibition is part of a notable collaboration between the Henry Art Gallery, the University of Washington Libraries, and the University of Washington Press, who in early 2011 will publish a major book on the Camera Club and aspects of the artistic milieu in early 20th-century Seattle.