Preserving a Legacy of Light and Shadow: Iwao Matsushita, Kyo Koike, and the Seattle Camera Club
by Nicolette Bromberg, Shadows of a Fleeting World: Pictorial Photography and the Seattle Camera Club (2011)

My life as a historian has brought me vivid reminders of how partial is the remaining evidence of the whole human past, how casual and how accidental is the survival of its relics.
—Daniel J. Boorstin, Hidden History: Exploring Our Secret Past (1987)

DURING THE 1920s, many Japanese immigrants on the West Coast found a successful way to both express themselves and to share in the culture of the West by making and exhibiting Pictorial art photography. So many of them were making photographs that they came together to form amateur camera clubs to share their love of the medium. They were amazingly successful. The photographs these immigrant photographers produced were exhibited in both national and international competitions and were included in nearly every book and magazine of popular photography.¹ The artists were so talented and prolific that The American Annual of Photography noted in 1928 that, in various exhibitions, there had been "762 prints hung that were by Japanese photographers in the three [Pacific coast] states in contrast to 237 by non-Japanese photographers from the same region."² These were photographers who, in the words of the editor of the 1928 American Annual of Photography, "put a lasting mark on photography in this country, the repercussions of which are echoing throughout the world."³

Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, in particular, had large and active camera clubs regularly producing and exhibiting work—yet a few decades later, most of this photography was lost, hidden away, or destroyed. Regrettably, most of the achievements of these enthusiastic and talented Japanese camera club members faded into obscurity, in part hastened by World War II and the internment of West Coast Japanese American citizens. After the war and for many decades later, their work was relatively unknown, as were their achievements. In an article about a 1988 Museum of California exhibit titled Japanese Photography in America, 1920–1930, the author discusses how much of this work was lost by the end of the 1940s. The exhibition curator, Dennis Reed, sought out work of California camera club members, but it was a struggle for him to uncover work as he prepared the exhibit.⁴

Although San Francisco had the largest camera club, relatively few examples of the work of these photographers has survived.⁵ The same is also true with the Los Angeles club.⁶ The case of the Seattle Camera Club, however, is different. We are fortunate to have available a significant body of the work of the club members, along with a detailed record of their activities and achievements. While we celebrate the work of the Seattle Camera Club today, many circumstances over the years worked against the preservation of this material. During World War II, when the West Coast Japanese American photographers were in internment camps, it was illegal for any person of Japanese descent to own a camera or practice photography. Much of the work of the camera club members was lost when they were sent to camps or else was hidden away or destroyed by the photographers, who feared government reprisal.⁷ Continuing anti-Japanese sentiment after the war also made them reluctant to let it be known that they had been photographers, so they did not mention their previous work and achievements.⁸ In her discussion about the loss of most of the work done by the California Japanese Pictorialists, Abby Wasserman reflects on Boorstin's statement when she says, "History is never definitive, but a process of accumulation which is inexact and subjective."⁹ To be included in history, some record of the event, achievement, or person needs to exist for future historians, which means that someone must act to preserve it. Dennis Reed's efforts helped to uncover traces of the California camera club work and bring it back into our national history.

Collecting decisions made by institutions (and the people who work for them) have a major influence on the selection of what is preserved for our historical record. As places where our photographic heritage is stored, museums and historical archives have a great impact on which photographer's work will be preserved for future generations. It was through the actions of two members of the Seattle Camera Club that a large part of the history and photography of the club was preserved. Dr. Kyo Koike, whose energy and enthusiasm were the driving force behind the club, helped create a written record of Seattle Camera Club activities and philosophies. His close friend, Iwao Matsushita, saved the club records, along with a large collection of photography by the members. The collection includes a large body of work made by Koike and Matsushita, along with a significant amount from Frank Asakichi Kunishige and some prints by others such as Hiromu Kira, Kusutora Matsuki, Fred Yutaka Ogasawara, and Yukio Morinaga.

A third person instrumental in preserving Seattle Camera Club materials was Robert Monroe, who was the head of the University of Washington Libraries Special Collections. Monroe was particularly interested in photography and was ahead of his time in recognizing the broader value of photographs in the historical record. He was able to see the value of collecting a type of photography that, during the 1960s and 1970s, would normally be rejected by historical archives. In particular, images of personal expression or art did not fit into the realm of the historical archive. Monroe's philosophy was that it was his responsibility to anticipate the needs of future scholars—to see fifty or one hundred years into the future.¹⁰ He believed in the importance of the Seattle Camera Club work at a time when photography was relegated to the back rooms of archives and when Pictorial photography was of very little interest in the world of art photography.

But in the 1920s, Pictorial photography was a perfect fit for the Seattle Camera Club's Japanese Americans, with its emphasis on nature and emotion and presenting the photograph as art. It has been suggested that, for these immigrants, photography was a convenient way of maintaining their cultural heritage of Japanese arts and aesthetics.¹¹ They came from a culture that prized art and design in daily life. As Boye De Mente noted in Elements of Japanese Design, "There is no other culture in which design and quality have played such a significant role in the day-to-day life of the people."¹² At the same time, the immigrant photographers could also participate in the American mainstream, sharing a common interest and visual language with the broader photographic community unconstrained by language barriers. While they sometimes encountered racism (such as when a New York photographer and art critic reviewing an exhibition complained that Japanese American photographers should not be allowed to exhibit in the "American" category),¹³ generally their work was well accepted on the national and international scene in exhibitions and in photography magazines.

The Seattle Camera Club was one of the most active and successful of the camera clubs on the West Coast. While there had been the Seattle Amateur Photographic Club organized in 1901, during the early 1920s there wasn't an active camera club in Seattle. "We waited patiently for a long time," wrote Dr. Kyo Koike, "thinking that some Americans might organize a society for the friends of photography, but no light appeared on the dark sea. At last we Japanese determined to establish one by ourselves, and the result is the Seattle Camera Club."¹⁴ The club was formed by a group of immigrants from Japan who were drawn together through their enthusiasm for Pictorial art photography. Seattle was a popular destination for Japanese who wished to come to America. By 1917, when the thirty-nine-year-old Koike had set up his practice as a doctor in the heart of Seattle's Nihonmachi (Japantown), there was a vibrant community of around eight thousand Japanese immigrants. Koike, who was born on February 11, 1878, in Shimane Prefecture, Japan, was the first Koike son and was descended from a long lineage of physicians.

He, too, studied medicine, eventually opening a clinic in Hachibon-do, Okayama City.¹⁵ He was a widower at the time he arrived in America and had no children except for a son in Japan who had been "adopted" to assume the family name, as was a custom in Japan.¹⁶ He may have chosen Seattle because he already had two friends there, Mr. Tamura and Mr. Katayama. While he made his living as a doctor for the local Japanese community, Koike was an artist and poet at heart. He was both creative and articulate. He taught Japanese haiku poetry and helped to organize the Rainier Ginsha, a haiku club in Seattle. He also translated Japanese literature into English and typed his drafts and bound them into book form using his own photographs as illustrations.

In 1919, twenty-seven-year-old Iwao Matsushita and his wife, Hanaye, arrived in Seattle. Iwao was born on January 10, 1892, in Miike on the island of Honshu, and had been exposed to Western culture because his family was among the very few members of the Methodist Church in Japan. He grew up with an interest in the English language and graduated from the University of Foreign Languages in Tokyo with a certificate to teach English. He began work at a high school and met and married Hanaye, the daughter of the principal of his school. Dr. Kyo Koike was a friend of Hanaye's family and was close enough that she called him "Uncle." Hanaye was adventuresome and Iwao wanted to study more English to further his career as a teacher of English in Japan.¹⁹ Since they knew Koike and he arranged for them to stay with his friend, Mr. Katayama, in Seattle, it was a logical place for Iwao to study English.²⁰ When they entered the United States in 1919 it was for scholarly reasons and, while they did not originally intend to stay, Iwao would not return to Japan for almost fifty years, and Hanaye would never return.

In Seattle, Matsushita and Koike began a close and lasting friendship, seeing each other almost every day and sharing their love of nature and their interest in creative expression through haiku and photography.²¹ In his school days in Japan, Koike had owned a camera but had lost interest in it. In the United States, he was given a Kodak 3A camera by a friend and found that photography captured his imagination. "It was a fire-lighter to re-kindle the extinct ambition of my heart and to make me a photo-mania again," he recalled.²² Koike would go out photographing every Sunday and on holidays all throughout the year no matter the weather. He had little interest in the equipment of photography but was more concerned with his images. "I paid less and less attention to the photographic apparatus all the time," he wrote. "When pictorial photography is the heart's desire, the photographic apparatus is only secondary. Neither the apparatus nor our hands alone can create pictorial photography which is the record of our inspiration."²³

Iwao Matsushita often went out into the mountains to hike and photograph the landscape, usually with his friend Koike and his wife, Hanaye, who loved outdoor activities. He was also making still-life photographs at home and early on was an obsessive photographer of cats. The Matsushitas did not have any children but had a long succession of cats, and Iwao loved to photograph them. By 1921, he created a photograph album, The House That Cats Built, which included views of the cats engaged in various activities and even showed dead cats laid out for funeral ceremonies, such as in his photograph The Death of the Prettiest. Some of his cat photographs were exhibited and one, Interested, was later published and critiqued in a photography publication. During the 1930s, he made a home movie of his cats, also titled The House That Cats Built. It is not clear when he began doing photography, but he was most likely developing and printing his own work.²⁴

Koike, whose medical office was on Main Street in the Japanese district, took his photographs to be developed and printed at a nearby drugstore owned by Yasukichi Chiba. Chiba, who was a photographer himself, employed Hiromu Kira and Yukio Morinaga (who was a skilled photographer, said to have studied at the Eastman School of Photography) to process photographs in his store.²⁵ The four men (and possibly also Matsushita) often gathered at lunch breaks to discuss photography and, eventually, they discussed starting a Pictorial photography group.

Another talented professional Japanese American photographer was Frank Asakichi Kunishige, who was the same age as Koike, having been born on June 5, 1878, in Yamaguchi-ken, Japan. He came to San Francisco in 1895 at age seventeen and went to study photography in Chicago in about 1911. He opened a studio in San Francisco on Fillmore Street but by 1917 came to Seattle, where he went to work in the photography studio of the well-known photographer of Native Americans, Edward S. Curtis. He also worked for the Bon Marché department store doing display windows.

Koike, Matsushita, Kunishige, and other Japanese American photographers were already showing their work by the early 1920s. Matsushita exhibited in the North American Times Exhibition of Pictorial Photographs, October 30–31, 1921, with Kunishige and about twenty other Japanese American photographers. Koike had two photographs, Plain Foliage and Autumn, in the Frederick & Nelson Salon in 1920 and was first published in Photo-Era magazine in 1922.²⁶ Koike, Chiba, Morinaga, Kira, Matsushita, Kunishige, and a number of other Japanese photographers began to meet in late 1924. They held meetings at the Gyokkoken Café and paid club dues of fifty cents.²⁷ Members brought prints to view and discuss at the meetings. They also had a reading room at the Empire Hotel that contained a collection of photography magazines, catalogs, and other related publications for the use of the members. The first officers of the Seattle Camera Club were Koike, Iwasaki, and Kunishige. There were thirty-nine charter members—all Japanese Americans.²⁸ Also among them was Fred Ogasawara, a highly regarded Pictorial photographer who moved to Portland but remained an active member of the group. Most of the members were not professional photographers: Hideo Onishi, who became one of the most successful club members, was a cook at the Paramount Restaurant in Chinatown; Hiromu Kira was a traveling sewing-machine salesman; Kusutora Matsuki worked in a drugstore; and R. Sato was a barber.²⁹

Dr. Kyo Koike was the leader and spokesperson for the club. The Seattle Camera Club was one of the very few Japanese camera clubs that documented their activities.³⁰ Koike was one of the editors and a frequent contributor for the club's bilingual Japanese-English journal, Notan, which was filled with Japanese literature translated by Koike, essays on photography and other arts, monthly reports of members work and shows, announcements, prizes the club and members won, and reports of the meetings. Koike's energy and commitment to photography remained the guiding light of the club. He wrote essays for national photography magazines such as Photo-Era and Camera Craft, with titles such as "Why I Am a Pictorial Photographer," "Mount Rainier," "The Seattle Camera Club," and "Mountain Pictures with or without Figures." Koike's writing on photography both enhanced and defended the reputation of the Seattle Camera Club. His writing was lively and usually addressed personally to the reader. In "My Photographic Trip," published in The Miniature Camera in 1934, he brings the reader along on his photography outing, discussing his philosophies and techniques: " 'Why do you keep only one photographic apparatus on hand,' you may ask. One of the reasons is that I am not rich enough to buy many instruments at one time, but there is a more important reason…Pictorial work is the use of the photographer's mental abilities and we use the apparatus only as a means to express our ideas…My old Kodak is good enough for me; I know its foibles and I can use it correctly. This is why I cling to only one Kodak at a time."³¹

As the Japanese American photographers became more successful, Koike also responded to statements claiming that Japanese photography should not be considered "American," which sometimes appeared in the photographic magazines. (It has been suggested that the anti-Japanese statements were more about resentment of Japanese Americans' high level of success and the exposure they attained.)³² The head of the Cleveland Photographic Society complained that while the work of the Seattle Camera Club was beautiful, "I do not like to see a Japanese get into the habit of trying to reproduce the American art…I really feel that both the Japanese and the Americans are losing something unless the Japanese are careful to avoid this tendency.³³ In reply to a similar complaint, Koike said, "We are not allowed to become American citizens by law, but we may live in America just the same. What trouble could be caused by the difference of nationality in the realm of pictorial photography, I cannot understand."³⁴

Pictorialism has been defined as "the conscious attempt to turn beautiful objects and experiences into beautiful images."³⁵ This was the avant-garde style of its time that developed as photographers tried to gain acceptance of photography as an art form in the early part of the twentieth century. It often involved darkroom manipulation to make the work look more like "art." However, by the time the Japanese photographers came to it, the emphasis had changed to less manipulation and more expression; and many of them did not print their own work or do darkroom manipulation. Their ideas were visualized in the camera rather than in the darkroom. They took the Pictorial ideas of expression of beauty and emotion and blended it with characteristic elements of Japanese art—use of patterns, flat surfaces, and lack of perspective.³⁶ These Japanese American photographers were not seeking to be on the cutting edge of photography but found that the emotional and personal nature of Pictorial photography suited what they wanted to express about the world in their art. Indeed, by the 1920s, the Modernist "straight" photography movement, with its emphasis on sharp clear forms and direct documentation of the subject, was already on its way to overshadowing Pictorialism.

Koike discussed his ideas on why he saw Pictorial photography as an art in "Why I Am a Pictorial Photographer," published in the September 1928 issue of Photo-Era:

Some think pictorial photography is not a species of art; but I hold another view. Some compare photography with painting pictures; but I think pictorial photography has its own standing, somewhat different from that of painting… I read a few photographic books and magazines to learn something about compositions; but it is certain my idea is based on Oriental tendency, much influenced by the Japanese literature and pictures to which I am accustomed. I understand Japanese poems; and I think pictorial photography should not be an imitation of paintings, but it should contain a feeling similar to that of poems.³⁷

In "The Characteristics of Japanese Art," written by Hoshin Kuroda and translated by Koike, the author writes that while Western art focuses on "human life," nature is more often the subject of Japanese art. The Japanese artist uses nature in an "idealistic" rather than realistic way: "Accordingly, the Japanese picture is not a real sketch, but is an ideal image of nature."³⁸ Koike compared his work to Japanese sumi-e painting in the 1925 issue of Camera Craft, saying that "photographic work depends on the expression of atmosphere with only black and white masses… To be decorative is a strong point of Japanese workers. To be suggestive or poetic is another of our characteristics." He illustrated his statement with a set of photographs, Winter Decoration and Summer Breezes, that evoked the spare and expressive brushstrokes of the sumi-e painting.³⁹ "Art must not explain the detail, but it must abound in reverberation, that is the Japanese conception," Koike explained in "Pictorial Photography from a Japanese Standpoint." "To understand Japanese art, therefore you must shut your eyes and go far away to the slumberland where imagination governs the whole."⁴⁰ Koike saw himself as bringing the poetic "reverberation" from his Japanese culture together with the Western ideas of photography as an art to create his artistic sensibility.

Koike's work was intimate and subtle poetry, whether it was a photograph of a muddy track through the woods or a tree in the snow that hinted of the soft sound of snow falling. His images are quiet and thoughtful, with the slightly soft focus and matt-surface photographic paper helping to make them experiences rather than documents. It was said of Koike's work, "Our eyes are soothed by the gentle textural softness of snow; a shimmering surface of water becomes a moment of experience rather than a vision…for him photography was not self-expression of ego, but it was a expression of a desire to gain quietude in himself, a way to convey the echo of his inner calling."⁴¹ While generally Koike's photographs created a sense of serene nature, his image of a rushing waterfall, Thousand Thunders is at once both tumultuous and ethereal—it shows the power of the rushing water at the top; you can almost hear the booming thunder—then it fades into an echo of mist at the bottom. This is more than just a waterfall—it is powerful and yet delicate at the same time.

The legacy of Japanese culture meant that a sense of harmony was important in these Japanese Americans' work and that the decorative styles of bold shapes and flat two-dimensional patterns and shadows were also common characteristics. The name of the Seattle Camera Club's journal, Notan, and the Japanese idea of this term was a key part of their work. Arthur Wesley Dow defined this as "darks and lights in harmonic relations," which for the Pictorial photographer was the use of the negative space as a design element where the picture space maintains a balance between the dark and light elements.⁴² Koike explained in an article about the club in the November 13, 1925, Photo-Era, "We Japanese must, of course, work within the limit of Japanese ideas, and our art is decorative, suggestive and poetic…Most of us have still to learn how to fill the picture space with a pleasing combination of light and shade, and telling but little. Suggest a story that fills our picture space with meaning, and with pleasure to the beholder. If one may add to this a 'telling' placement of light and dark, perhaps that is as near as I can get to what I have in mind as Notan."⁴³ In Iwao Matsushita's photograph of trees and light streaking across the sky or perhaps a mountainside the well-known world is suggested by the trees in the foreground and the unknown by the placement of the mysterious light streak and shadow behind. What at first seems to be a simple picture of trees becomes more complicated and striking when the eye travels beyond the trees to the background. It is not clear what is happening here. Is something emerging from darkness? What is this world appearing behind the very mundane trees?

The Seattle Camera Club members not only loved photography, they also loved their adopted city. Seattle was a good place for creative Japanese immigrants who were interested in Pictorial photography. There was a large Japanese community for support and there were physical similarities to Japan in the landscape. Mount Rainier towers over the city and Mount St. Helens farther south, then with its perfect ice-cream cone shape, was commonly called the Mount Fuji of the West. Just as in Japan, water surrounds the city and there are islands nearby (Bainbridge Island, for example, had a large Japanese farming community). There is easy access to the natural world of the woods and forests. The light is diffuse and soft, and the rain is light and moody rather than heavy and pounding as it is in the Midwest and east. The trees bloom in February and March and spring lasts a long time, with waves of cherry, apple, and plum blossoms along with the spring flowers. In an article in Photo-Era, Koike said, "Well, give me some time to consider whether or not Seattle is a suitable place for pictorial photographers…There are many changes in the climate during the year. We are able to find spring flowers and snow scenes. Even in short trips of a few days, there are many famous high mountains and peaks or numerous lakes…in short there are plenty of subjects there."⁴⁴

While the club was started with Japanese members only, they invited all photographers to join. In the March 11, 1927, issue of Notan, Koike wrote, "Fellow photographers…in Seattle: please think about what I have said and plan to join us or at least to visit our club room…The latch string is always out to you." They had little success in attracting non-Japanese photographers to join in the beginning, although a few did join over the years and were noted in the club journal. Charles A. Musgrave was an early member and was an active one, even serving as an officer in the last year of the club. Also in the last months of the club, Virna Haffer, who had a photography studio, joined the group. She became close friends with Yukio Morinaga, who went to work for her and helped him throughout the rest of his life. ⁴⁵

The most important non-Japanese member joined not long after the club was formed. Ella McBride started a second career in 1907 at age forty-five when she moved to Seattle at the invitation of the well-known photographer Edward Curtis. McBride was a schoolteacher and principal in Portland, Oregon, who so impressed Curtis when they met on a mountain-climbing expedition in 1897 that he asked her to come to Seattle to assist in running his studio. In 1913, when Curtis's studio manager Adolph Muhr died, she took over the management. It was there she met Frank Kunishige and they became good friends. She established a close and lasting relationship with Kunishige, taking him with her in 1917 when she left Curtis to open her own studio.

McBride fell in love with photography. She had not been a photographer previously and began doing her own personal photography by about 1920. "I went into pictorial photography, and my avocation and vocation were one," she said. "I was most fortunate in finding a partner who, I think, is one of the world's most finest artists and a most cultured gentleman. It was his work that inspired me to make photographs."⁴⁶ She was the only non-Japanese included in the list of exhibitors in the North American Times Exhibition of Pictorial Photographs in 1921. It is probable that she was taught photography by Wayne Albee and Frank Kunishige. They often photographed together, using the same models or subjects. The three of them were published together in a special section of the 1924 Christmas issue of the Seattle arts magazine The Town Crier. Although she made portraits and landscapes, she became most well-known for her floral studies, which used elements from the Japanese aesthetic. She would become one of the most successful of all the Seattle Camera Club members.

McBride had an open mind for her time—while living in Portland, she had become close friends with a young Chinese man, Goon Dip, who remained close to her over the years. He later became a merchant in Seattle and also the Chinese consul. He was the Chinese representative for Seattle's first world's fair—the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (A-Y-P). He gave McBride a number of artifacts from the Chinese exhibit at the A-Y-P, which she would sometimes use in her photographs.⁴⁸ As an unmarried woman, possibly subject to many raised eyebrows from the proper community, she may also have felt kinship with the Asian minorities who were at times subject to prejudice from the surrounding community. She certainly shared their love of photography and nature and felt comfortable with both their company and aesthetics.

Other supporters and friends outside the Japanese American community encouraged members of the Seattle Camera Club and contributed to club meetings and activities. Wayne Albee, a photographer who worked for McBride (but was not a club member), served as a behind-the-scenes mentor. He wrote supporting articles about the club, photographed with members, was a guest speaker, and served as a judge for their shows. The Seattle Camera Club hosted many guest speakers from the Seattle, national, and international arts communities. University of Washington professor Glenn Hughes, who was a major contributor to the development of theater in Seattle, spoke about stage lighting at the second meeting of the club, contributed articles to Notan, and served as associate editor for the journal. The club secretary and a coeditor of Notan, Y. Iwasaki, helped Hughes translate a Japanese play, The Razor, for a production at the Cornish School of Allied Arts, where both European and Japanese plays were produced. Artists and writers also spoke at club meetings. Mark Tobey, a painter and instructor at Cornish, lectured at an early meeting on modern trends in painting. Tobey, who was not well-known at the time, would go on to become famous for his paintings that were clearly influenced by Japanese art.

The Seattle Camera Club served not only as a creative outlet for the members but also as a social group. Members went on hiking trips to Mount Rainier and Mount Baker and had other photography outings. The historian Shelley Sang-Hee Lee has noted that many of the members were bachelors or never had children and that the broader family-centered Japanese community may have regarded them as eccentric or strange for spending their time with photography.⁴⁹ Koike was a widower without children, Iwao and Hanaye Matsushita did not have children, nor did Frank and Gin Kunishige. For many, this group may have taken the place of family for a time. Certainly for Koike, his photography and the work of the club were a large part of his life and he in turn gave his time, enthusiasm, and support to the club.

The Seattle Camera Club and its members became extraordinarily successful in a short period of time. The club held its first juried exhibition in 1925. There were thirty-four photographers in the show, including Koike, Kunishige (who won third prize), Matsushita (who won honorable mention), McBride, Morinaga (who won honorable mention), Ogasawara (a member living in Portland), Onishi, and others. The contributors were from Seattle, Portland, Whitefish, Montana, and Effingham, Illinois. The first prize was awarded to Laura Gilpin. The Second Seattle Exhibition of Pictorial Photography was in May 1926. It had 429 prints submitted from the United States, Canada, England, Scotland, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Japan, and Java. The third annual had even more prints from even more countries. Eventually, the Seattle Camera Club would hold five juried exhibitions in all.

In 1925, members had 367 prints accepted into twenty-one Salons around the world. The success of the club peaked in 1926, when 589 photos from twenty members were accepted at thirty-three Salons. A Shirley Poppy, by McBride, was accepted into fifteen Salons. One of a Day, by Onishi, was accepted into ten Salons. Betti & Hamadryad, by Kunishige, and Magellans of Today, by Morinaga, were accepted into nine Salons. Looking Down Emmons Glacier, by Koike, and The Magic Vase, by McBride were in seven Salons. In 1925, McBride became the sixth most exhibited Pictorial photographer in the world.⁵⁰

During the peak of Seattle Camera Club activities, in 1926–27, members were among the top exhibited Pictorial photographers worldwide. Notable prizewinning members were Dr. Kyo Koike, Frank Kunishige, Hiromu Kira, Hideo Onishi, Yukio Morinaga, Fred Ogasawara, and Ella McBride. Onishi in particular was so successful that when he had a one-man show at the Japanese Commercial Club more than 1,000 people attended. He sold 233 copies of his prints, including 26 copies of Gathering and 17 copies of Sea Breeze. In total, he made $1,191 from print sales, and he donated $411 (the net profit after expenses) to the Seattle Camera Club.⁵¹ This was amazing given that generally the photographers only sold a few prints when they did have sales of their work. Matsushita, while he was not among the top exhibitors of the club, was successful in both exhibiting and publishing his work, and he won prizes now and then, including a first prize in a Photo-Era competition in 1926.

Though the majority of the members were beginners, they kept winning prizes. In 1926, Photo-Era offered a trophy for the club whose members won the most awards in the magazine's competitions. As the first winner of the trophy, the Seattle Camera Club (SCC) won an engraved silver cup and they were congratulated in The View Finder, the official bulletin of the California Camera Club: "We notice that the SCC has won the cup offered by Photo-Era for the Club whose members win the most prizes in the Photo-Era monthly competitions during the past year. The members of the SCC are real hard and honest workers, and the Club is now one of the leaders in pictorial work. Congratulations, SCC."

Koike was the most successful of the club members. He was extremely prolific and won many awards. He had articles published in national magazines and was chosen as one of the few photographers to offer advice about photography in Photo-Era. His work was shown all over the world, from Asia to South America, Europe and across the United States, and by 1929 he rose to be the most exhibited Pictorial photographer in the world. He was also honored with a membership in the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain and was its only Japanese member.⁵²

Koike and Matsushita shared a reverence and love for Mount Rainier and found much of their inspiration and imagery in nature. While Mount St. Helens was commonly called the Mount Fuji of the West, Mount Rainier, which was closer to Seattle, also reminded them of Mount Fuji and it served as a spiritual wellspring for them—Koike often referred to it as the "holy mountain."⁵³ Koike said, "When I go out for my photographic trips, I see the mountain from anywhere in the vicinity of the city of Seattle. The snow-cap is similar in the form to our holy Mount Fuji, so we Japanese often call it 'Tacoma Fuji.'"⁵⁴ Koike and Matsushita often climbed and photographed the mountain together. On one trip, Matsushita, who was a devout Methodist, made a vertical photograph titled The Mountain That Was God, in which a brightly lit Rainier looms up out of the mist as God made visible. A dark tree points the way, and there is no way to go in this scene but to the mountain/God.⁵⁵ Koike wrote about his experience on an August 1928 trip, when he made Sea of Clouds, a view at the top of the peaks. After encountering a severe storm as they rested at 10,000 feet up the mountain, Koike came out of the tent and, "looking back, there stood the holy peak of Mt. Rainier…Just before our face there was a sea of clouds, the top of Tatoosh Range (6,562 feet) appearing and disappearing like sunken rocks amidst dashing waves."⁵⁶

Ella McBride's specialty was delicate floral photographs, with strong Japanese design elements. She first exhibited at the 1921 North American Times Exhibition of Pictorial Photographs. She was immediately successful and quickly achieved world-class status. In 1922, at the Sixty-Seventh Annual Exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, only 154 photos were accepted from many hundreds of submissions. Only 12 photographs were from the United States and, remarkably, 3 of the 12 were McBride's prints of flowers: Poppies, Zinnias, and Life & Death, the latter a study of water lilies.⁵⁷ She remained among the top exhibitors throughout the years of the Seattle Camera Club.

Frank Kunishige's work was quite different than most of the other club members and was further removed from the traditional Japanese subjects and appearance; much of it was more mysterious and erotic. He was one of the few photographers in the group who was not an amateur. He worked for McBride and also had a studio in his apartment and taught photography. Kunishige studied photography in Chicago and was exposed to European and American art and photography, which may be why he developed a style that incorporated more of those influences and had less of the "Japanese" decorative effects, although he often placed his subjects in a flat picture plane common to some of the Japanese influenced work. His photographs were exhibited widely and he was one of the most successful of the camera club members, receiving praise from around the world.

Kunishige was an expert printer and experimented with various types of papers. He often printed on his own paper, Textura Tissue, a thin, delicate printingout paper, which he sold to other photographers. His information sheet on the paper said, "Textura Tissue Sensitized Tissue Art Paper a Printing-out Paper of Extremely Luminous Quality," and he listed himself as the "sole manufacturer" for the paper.

The paper was very coarse and thin, and prints on this paper appear almost like drawings. Printing-out papers have a wider tonal range than prints made with the developing-out papers used later in the twentieth century. Such prints tend to have a smoother transition through the darkest to lightest tones and look softer than modern prints, which have more definition between the various dark to light grey tones.

Although Kunishige photographed landscapes, portraits, and still lifes, he became more and more interested in working with the human form and the nude. The McBride Studio regularly did the photography for the Cornish School of Allied Arts, which had well-known dancers such as Anna Pavlova, Ruth St. Denis, and Ted Shawn visit and perform. Often, Kunishige, Ella McBride, and Wayne Albee would photograph together at Cornish, making portraits of the same subjects and photographing sets and actors for the plays at the school. Kunishige worked with models that were posed nude or draped in diaphanous cloth and made his photographs using controlled lighting to create an evocative mood. He tended to use flat backgrounds and a narrow depth of space. This combined with the coarse Textura Tissue printing-out paper made the subject almost sink into the background, helping to create a sense of mystery. One reviewer said of Kunishige that "a touch of intimacy, eroticism or mystery were ingredients he understood how to handle."⁵⁸ He made photographs for literature and poetry that fit with mysterious or erotic themes, such as series of photographs printed in The Town Crier with text claiming they were illustrations for "that weird and esoteric allegory, 'The Queen of the Dead' of the mad mystic, Talhora." One of the captions quoted from the allegory, paired with his photograph of a draped nude figure, said, "Silent and luminous, floated from the dark. A face of sorrow. The magic gossamer garment, tenuous as fog, yet strong, impenetrable. Armour it was to guard against the Black Queen's sorcery."⁵⁹

By 1928, the Seattle Camera Club made Seattle a significant force in the world of Pictorial photography. Dr. Kyo Koike wrote, "Our members have tried hard and taken chances. Now we have been able to put the name of Seattle on the map of the world's pictorial photographic field."⁶⁰ While the club was gaining accolades on the national and international scene, they had little recognition at home. Historian Shelley Sang-Hee Lee points out that while the club was receiving wide acclaim, Seattle was curiously reluctant to embrace the success of the club, which would have helped build Seattle's desired reputation as a national cultural center.⁶¹ But even as the Seattle Camera Club was receiving worldwide attention in 1928, participation was declining and the members were exhibiting less work. By 1929, the club began to fail, as many members could no longer afford to do photography. Fewer of them brought prints to the meetings and attendance fell. Since many of them worked in low-paying jobs, the bad financial times made it difficult for them to continue with their hobby. The club had its last meeting in October 1929. Yet even as the club said its farewell, the final Notan reported that Charles Musgrave was donating the $10 prize he won in the Eastman Kodak Company contest to help the club, and Shadows on the Snow by Dr. Kyo Koike and Sunlight in the Morning by Kusutora Matsuki had won awards in the advanced competition in Photo-Era magazine.⁶² Ironically, in 1929 the Fort Dearborn Camera Club had named the Seattle Camera Club exhibition one of the best in the world.⁶³

Some of the members continued to photograph and exhibit—those like Kunishige and Morinaga, who were photographers by occupation, and Koike and Matsushita, who had enough money to continue. While the club may have disbanded, members' work was still being prominently displayed. In the 1930 Christmas issue of The Town Crier, their work was highlighted as the main picture essay of the issue. "Looking through the Lens" noted, "The following photographs are by Seattle Japanese; most of the prints have been hung in salons throughout the world."⁶⁴ The article included photographs by Hideo Onishi, Kusutora Matsuki (who was exhibiting widely by the time the club ended), Yukio Morinaga, Frank Kunishige (two prints), and Dr. Kyo Koike. In an interesting twist, farther back in the issue were three photographs by Imogen Cunningham, illustrating an article called "The Camera Goes Modern," which compared her Modernist work to that of the Seattle Camera Club.

In the 1930s, Matsushita expanded his photography by also making home movies of trips to Mount Rainier, of Seattle, and of his cats. He intercut views of his photographs into the films along with the live action. He also continued to exhibit his work. For example, during 1933, Autumn Clouds was shown at the Saló Internacional d'Art Fotographic in Barcelona, the Third International Salon of Photography in San Diego, the Preston Scientific Society International Photographic Exhibition, and at the Camera Club of Syracuse. Kunishige continued to run his studio, exhibit, jury photography shows, and teach photography. He went to Japan for a year, where he was offered an opportunity to do photography, but he returned to the United States because he and his wife did not like Japan.⁶⁵ Ella McBride continued to operate her studio but soon stopped doing her own personal work. Hideo Onishi also continued to exhibit his photographs but eventually returned to Japan in the 1930s, where his work was probably lost during the war. Hiromu Kira left for California and continued to photograph there. But their world changed drastically on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.

On that day, some hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, two FBI agents came to Iwao Matsushita's home, arrested him, and confiscated papers, letters, miscellaneous written materials, as well as his reels of home movies.⁶⁶ Iwao and his wife, Hanaye, had never been separated and it would be more than two years before they would see each other again. Unknown to Matsushita and other Japanese, the FBI had been building dossiers on the Japanese community. Matsushita had been put on a surveillance list because he worked for a Japanese trading company with offices in Tokyo and because he was an intellectual and a language teacher. The fact that he was a teacher, bilingual, and a member of Japanese organizations such as the haiku club identified him as a community leader whose loyalty was suspect. He also had been marked by some members of the Japanese community, who accused him of being in the pay of the Japanese government. These accusations were never substantiated but were accepted as fact by the U.S. government.⁶⁷ By December 18, he was on his way to a detention holding camp in Fort Missoula, Montana, as a dangerous alien, while the government decided what to do with him.

On December 9, 1941, Dr. Kyo Koike turned his camera over to the Seattle Police Department to comply with the federal order for enemy aliens to turn in their radios and cameras because they might be used for spying.⁶⁸ By March 30, 1942, it became officially illegal for any Japanese to have a camera. Later in April, as evacuations of the Japanese began in Seattle, Matsushita's wife, Hanaye, was sent to the Puyallup Assembly Center, known as Camp Harmony. Matsushita's Italian landlord offered to store the family's possessions. Koike, whose residence was outside the targeted areas to be evacuated, offered to be evacuated also and went along to be with Hanaye. She and Koike eventually were placed in Minidoka along with Morinaga, Kunishige, and other Japanese Americans from Seattle.

Hanaye Matsushita was devastated to be separated from Iwao. Both she and Koike wrote to him almost weekly. Koike and Matsushita discussed Hanaye's health and also talked about their creative outlets—their interest in haiku and other arts. "You must have some spare time now to read books," Matsushita wrote to Koike. "Our haiku group are all scattered and we have no meeting but I still compose sometimes."⁶⁹ When the detainees at Fort Missoula took up shaping stones as a creative outlet, Matsushita wrote to Koike that he had "stone fever": "I have been spending every day by doing some stone work…You can't imagine how all detainees spend every day from morning to bedtime, working on stones. Some are grinding, some are polishing them, and some are even making flower vases and suiban (water basin) with stones & cement."⁷⁰ Koike in turn sent Matsushita a cane made from greasewood that he made in Minidoka. Matsushita commented that all of them, including the guards, were amazed at the wood.⁷¹

Matsushita often spoke in his letters of the mountains that he could see from the camp: "The mountain slopes which confront us have crazy quilt pattern of emerald green, rustic brown, tilled black soil. I wish I could hike on trails which I can see very clearly on the mountain side." ⁷²Sometime later, the guards at the camp took a group on a climbing trip to the mountains. Matsushita wrote to Koike, "You probably read my letters to my wife about mountain climbings. It was my pipe dream to stand on the top of mountains, surrounding us, but my dream came true, thanks to the kindness of officers here. But how I wish I were with you and enjoy the Snake River scenery together!"⁷³

Matsushita taught English in the camp and served as the camp mayor. As time passed, the number of internees at Fort Missoula dwindled to twenty-eight as they were cleared to be transferred to Minidoka and other camps; but Matsushita's requests to go to Minidoka were denied. He continued to apply to be moved to be with his wife, who was nervous and ill. At one point he wrote to his wife, "You, as well as a host of others, know that I haven't done anything that would harm America. I stand before God innocent of all guilt…The fact that I couldn't be released to Minidoka may be God's divine will, and we won't know whether it'll be for the best until later…The reason for my internment, according to the Attorney General, was that I was 'potentially dangerous to the public safety.' I am keenly disappointed that the sincerity of my love of America in my appeal had not been accepted."⁷⁴ It was not until January 11, 1944, that he was finally paroled to Minidoka, where he was reunited with his wife and his friends Koike, Kunishige, and Morinaga, and other members of the Seattle Japanese American community.

Minidoka had an Outside Employment Office, which received offers of jobs outside the camp and procured approvals for residents to leave the camp to work. While he was at Minidoka, Frank Kunishige was able to go to work for The Album, a photography studio in Twin Falls, Idaho. The Album studio advertised in the Minidoka Interlude, September 1942—October 1943 yearbook put out by the Minidoka residents, so Kunishige may have been working there by then. John Harrington Edwards, who supplied letters of recommendation for Gin Kunishige and Frank's cousin, Tomoko, to work for families in Twin Falls, kept the Kunishiges' possessions, which they finally had sent to Idaho in March 1945. Kunishige must have found part of the community welcoming, because he was invited to show his photographs to the 20th Century Club in July 1945. An article in the Twin Falls (ID) Telegram of July 16, 1945, "Exhibit of Internationally Known Photographer Here," reported, "Mr. Kunishige who has had a photo studio in Seattle for 30 years has resided in Twin Falls during the past two and a half years…A noted artist has made this statement of the photographer and his work: 'Frank Kunishige's name is Japanese, but his pictures are American.' "⁷⁵ Apparently at this point, a Japanese American photographer's work could be finally said to be "American."

By 1943, some Nisei (American-born children of Japanese immigrants), such as students who were attending colleges away from the West Coast and those who joined the army, were allowed to leave the camps. Others were permitted to leave over time. After a "presettlement" interview in May 1944, Iwao and Hanaye Matsushita decided to wait to resettle because Japanese Americans were not allowed back to the West Coast yet and they wanted to return to Seattle. As the war ended, Iwao, who had no employment prospects, applied for a position in the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to help returning Japanese Americans with various problems of resettling, such as housing, employment, medical issues, and discrimination.⁷⁶ He returned to Seattle in August 1945, leaving Hanaye behind at Minidoka while he stayed in the WRA lodging. The housing market was very difficult for the returning Japanese Americans, whose homes had been taken over by whites, African Americans, and Filipinos who had moved into the Japanese district.⁷⁷ Lack of housing and hostility to the returning Nikkei (those of Japanese descent) made it difficult to find places to live. Even Iwao, who was there to help others with resettlement, could not find a home and had to leave Hanaye at Minidoka until October 1945, when he finally was able to rent a home for them.

Dr. Kyo Koike's time in the camp seems to have affected him greatly. When interned in Camp Harmony before the move to Minidoka, Hanaye wrote to Iwao that Koike "walks round in a daze"; and Koike wrote to Iwao that "our daily life is like the floating cloud, moving aimlessly in the mercy of various winds."⁷⁸ Although his work as a doctor in the camp helped to ground him, one wonders if he ever truly recovered from the experience. He returned to Seattle and opened his medical office again but never was the same. At age seventy, he was outside in his beloved nature, picking ferns on March 31, 1947, when he collapsed. Matsushita was called to the hospital where Koike was dying and in Koike's pocket he found forty-five specimens of the fern called sawarabi in Japanese. In honor of this, the Rainier Ginsha haiku group published a memorial book for Koike titled Sawarabi.⁷⁹ All of his work was left to his friend Matsushita, who buried his ashes as he desired under a large tree on Mount Rainier, Koike's "holy mountain."

After the war, Yukio Morinaga was cared for by Virna Haffer but never really recovered from his experience.⁸⁰ Many of the other members of the Seattle Camera Club might have had similar feelings or experiences. During the war, photography was associated with anti-American activities, so during or after the war many of the West Coast Japanese American photographers hid their work or never showed it publicly again.⁸¹ For many of these photographers, even their children and grandchildren were unaware of their achievements.⁸² Their work and contributions to the photographic field were bypassed as Pictorial imagery faded as a popular photographic style. The Modernist sharp-focus documentary style of photography dominated the art world in the decades after the 1920s, and over time Pictorial photography came to be regarded outmoded and uninspired.⁸³ Hiromu Kira, one of the most successful members of the Seattle Camera Club who had moved to Los Angeles, never went back to photography after he was interned. Dennis Reed, having interviewed Kira about why, explained that "color photography had come in; it was too prominent after the war and he wasn't interested."⁸⁴ It seems possible that, in addition to lack of interest in the changing technology, Kira felt out of step with the change from the subtle tonalities expressed with the matt printing-out papers used in Pictorial photography. These had been replaced with the higher contrast tones and sharp gloss of the developing-out papers that were suited to Modernist photography, with its emphasis on documentary rather than expressive work.

By May 1946, Iwao Matsushita was fifty-four years old and out of a job as his WRA employment came to an end. In 1927, Matsushita had pioneered the first Japanese-language course at University of Washington through the urging of his friend Eldon Griffin, a professor in the Department of Oriental Studies. Griffin, who had remained supportive throughout the war years, again came to his aid and helped him get a job teaching Japanese at the university. Matsushita spent a number of years teaching Japanese-language courses until he was offered a job as a subject specialist for the university's Far Eastern Library. He also offered his skills to the Japanese community by teaching Japanese to young students at the reopened Seattle Japanese Language School.⁸⁵ In 1954, after thirty-five years in the United States, he was naturalized and became an American citizen.

During the internment, Hanaye Matsushita had many health and emotional problems, and she never seemed to recover from her experience. She continued to have problems with her health and finally died on February 3, 1965, leaving Iwao alone after forty-six years of marriage. Over the years, the Matsushitas had remained close friends with Frank Kunishige and his wife, Gin. Frank, who was also in poor health after the war, died in 1960. After Hanaye's death, Iwao decided to visit Japan for the first time since he left there in 1919, so in 1966 he took a tour around the world, ending up in Japan. One of the people on his tour was Gin Kunishige, and in June 1967 the two were married.

Matsushita had kept both his and Koike's photographs and negatives, the complete set of Notan, various publications with Koike’s writings, copies of show announcements, awards, and other documentation of the Seattle Camera Club and its activities, along with the letters that Hanaye, Iwao, Koike, and others had written while in the internment camps. Now the work of three members of the club came together in one household. (Also within the collection were photographs by other club members along with work by other noted Pictorialists that Koike and Matsushita had collected during the camera club era.) Together, Iwao and Gin had a substantial collection of the Seattle Camera Club’s work and a detailed record of the group’s achievements.

As an intellectual, Matsushita was aware of the value of libraries and archives. He donated about 500 books in English and Japanese to the University of Washington Library in the late 1960s and followed that with a donation of 964 books in 1969.⁸⁶ Matsushita became friendly with Robert Monroe, head of University of Washington Libraries, Special Collections. In the early 1960s, photographs were still seen as peripheral to the "more important" collections of books and papers in historical archives, but Monroe had come to realize the value of photos.⁸⁷ He became a serious advocate for the photography collections and worked actively to add to the holdings in the archive by building relationships with antiquarian dealers and descendents of early Seattle photographers. "Lots of old time photographers have died and their photos are no longer thought of as valuable," he told a Seattle newspaper. "Once the person is gone, others throw the photos away, burn them or neglect them." ⁸⁸ Monroe realized that the then-current practices of handling photograph collections by dismantling them were not useful for understanding the information contained in the photographs. In 1964, he wrote that the "old practice of distributing all photographs in subject folders" was not the way to keep photograph collections, and he began to "maintain significant collections separately" by keeping them together as a unit.⁸⁹ During that time, a number of important collections were acquired by Monroe and were kept together as collections rather than split apart; he saw that they had importance beyond the individual subjects of the pictures.⁹⁰ Monroe was ahead of his time in regarding photographs as important to collect and in seeing that they had value apart from their relationship to manuscript and book materials.

Monroe was also interested in collecting both the work of minority and of artistic photographers for the archive, which was unusual for the time. He had become particularly interested in the Japanese immigrant photographers who lived in the Puget Sound area, so he asked Iwao Matsushita if he would consider donating some of the Seattle Camera Club photographs to Special Collections. Not only was it unusual for an archivist or librarian to have such a high regard for photography during this time, but it was even more unusual for one to be interested in a collection of art photography. During this era, museums were collecting and showing "straight," or Modernist, photography, which emphasized sharp focus and presenting the world "as it is," and there was little interest in collecting Pictorial photography. Monroe saw something important in preserving the Seattle Camera Club work. He was aware of its aesthetic value, something usually overlooked when photography collections are in libraries. Most archives would not have considered the club photographs as having "historical" value because the camera club work was personal rather than documentary. Many years after Robert Monroe retired, some of Ella McBride's prizewinning Seattle Camera club prints were offered to Special collections, but the donation was turned down because the prints were "art".

Monroe's interest convinced Iwao Matsushita that the Special Collections archive might be a good home for the Seattle Camera Club work. Iwao and Gin gave Frank Kunishige's pieces to the library in 1970. Monroe understood that accepting this gift was a major shift in the focus for the photography collection, and he later wrote in a report on the gift that "the Kunishige collection represents the first purely creative and decorative photographs added to the University Library collection which previously was limited to the work of documentalists."⁹¹ Matsushita was pleased with Monroe's response to Kunishige's work and then donated some of Dr. Kyo Koike's photographs to the collection. After receiving the donation of prints, Monroe wrote to Matsushita, "The thing of the greatest interest to me now would be to learn whether any of either man's negatives are preserved—do you know? If there are any negatives to be found, I should like to have them too."⁹²

Monroe continued to show interest in the Seattle Camera Club and, along with the photography, Matsushita gave the library writings by Koike and himself, copies of Notan and other photography magazines from the camera club era, and a large amount of correspondence with Koike and Kunishige and others. Matsushita even had the silver trophies won by Koike for his photography. All in all, he turned over a substantial record of the club and its activities to the University of Washington Libraries. Eventually, Matsushita donated all of his own papers, prints, and negatives before his death in 1979. The collection also included the reels of 8mm home movies of his cats, outings on Mount Rainier, and scenes around Seattle that the FBI had confiscated and returned. Thus the work of Frank Kunishige, Dr. Kyo Koike, and Iwao Matsushita (along with a few photographs by other Seattle Camera Club members collected by Koike and Matsushita and photographs by other Pictorial photographers from around the world) came to the University of Washington Libraries. The papers and writings contained the only record of some of the Seattle Camera Club photographers.

Through the collaboration of Robert Monroe and Iwao Matsushita, the Seattle Camera Club history came to be preserved for future generations. As Koike had written in 1925, "Now we are all Japanese living in America. You can see it is clear what the members of the Seattle Camera Club should do for the advancement of photographic art. Yes, we must be the best interpreters for both nations, because we are not free of Japanese ideas and yet at the same time we understand Western ways. We should not make our pictures aimlessly, but must try hard to combine both ideas, in other words stick to our peculiar point of view. To add something new and valuable to the photographic circle is not a bad plan."⁹³

Other Resources

Notes on sources

Kyo Koike photographs

Frank Asakichi Kunishige photographs

Shadows of a Fleeting World: Pictorial Photography and Seattle Camera Club Henry Art Gallery exhibit, February - March 2011

New book, exhibition to give us a special look at the Pictorialist works of the Seattle Camera Club, Columns Magazine, December 2010

Shadows of a Fleeting World: Pictorial Photography and The Seattle Camera Club - UW Press, February 2011

'Shadows of a Fleeting World' reveals a hidden chapter in Seattle's cultural history - Seattle Times Newspaper, March 12, 2011

What became of the members and the work of the Seattle Camera Club? Seattle Times Newspaper, March 12, 2011

A snapshot of local history: the Seattle Camera Club KPLU podcast, February 6, 2011