By Jerry Takigawa.
Balancing Cultures presents the work of a multi award-winning photography series about the artist’s family’s experience with the WWII American concentration camps. This project presented an opportunity to confront the racism perpetrated on the Japanese that resulted in their confinement in the American concentration camps sanctioned by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 issued on February 19, 1942.
Awakened by a discovery of old family photographs, taken in the Jerome, Arkansas camp, Takigawa was compelled to speak out in deference to his parents’ silence on the matter. Creating a visual journey through transitory collaged photographs using artifacts, documents, and memories resulted in a unique telling of one family’s journey from immigration to incarceration, re-integration, and re-assimilation. Balancing Cultures personifies a dark collective memory—long censored by the fear that if their voices were too loud, “it” might happen again. This work is important today because “it” is happening again.
Paper: 96 pp.
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