The Seattle Camera Club (SCC) was an organization of photographers active in Seattle, Washington, during the 1920s. It was founded in 1924 by Japanese immigrants and thrived for the next five years. The SCC was the only Japanese American photography club to include both Caucasians and women photographers as members, and because of their inclusivity their members were among the most exhibited photographers in the world at that time. [1]
The 39 charter members of the club were all Japanese men. Unlike other prominent clubs of Japanese photographers, they decided at the beginning to welcome women and Caucasian members. [2] The driving force behind the club's formation was Dr. Kyo Koike, who was a well‒respected medical doctor in Seattle's Issei community.
They held monthly meetings at 508½ Main Street near Dr. Koike's office. At these meetings members critiqued each other's prints and discussed current ideas about photography. Dr. Koike wrote about these discussions in their monthly bulletin, as well as descriptions of photography trips the members had taken, names of those members who had exhibited recently, and commentaries about photography in general. [3]
The club's bulletin was called Notan, which is a Japanese term that roughly translates as "light and shade". These were qualities that defined the primary elements of a Japanese style of pictorialism that most of the original members prized. [4] Many of their photographs contained strong lighting and rhythmical patterns that emphasized the artistic quality of a scene.
In 1925 the club began its own salon, which originally featured photographs by its own members but later expanded to an international field of photographers. The artistic strength of their membership is indicated by the fact that in 1926 members of the club showed a collective 589 prints in different exhibitions around the world. [1] That same year Photo‒Era magazine offered a trophy for the photography club whose members won the most awards in the magazine's competitions. The first winner of the trophy was the Seattle Camera Club. [5]
The club reached its peak membership in 1925 with 85 members, including several photographers who in lived in other areas of the country. [1] Two prominent Seattle women, Ella McBride and Virna Haffer, were among the club's members by that time. [6] Only one‒quarter of the members then were Japanese Americans. [7]
Soon thereafter the membership in the club began to decline, primarily due to increasing economic difficulties that led up to the 1929 Great Depression. Many members held low-paying jobs, and with increased prices and a scarcity of jobs they could no longer afford to buy film or other photographic supplies. [8] On October 11, 1929, the club held a farewell meeting. Only 7 members attended, and they formally disbanded the club at that time.
Some of the more well-to-do members, like Koike and Matsushita, continued to make photographs and exhibit them when they could. All of their efforts ended with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. Soon thereafter almost all of the Japanese American community in Seattle was transported to the Japanese American internment camps in Idaho or Montana. [9]
Ansel Easton Adams was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating "pure" photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph. He and Fred Archer developed a system of image-making called the Zone System, a method of achieving a desired final print through a technical understanding of how the tonal range of an image is the result of choices made in exposure, negative development, and printing.
Pictorialism is an international style and aesthetic movement that dominated photography during the later 19th and early 20th centuries. There is no standard definition of the term, but in general it refers to a style in which the photographer has somehow manipulated what would otherwise be a straightforward photograph as a means of creating an image rather than simply recording it. Typically, a pictorial photograph appears to lack a sharp focus, is printed in one or more colors other than black-and-white and may have visible brush strokes or other manipulation of the surface. For the pictorialist, a photograph, like a painting, drawing or engraving, was a way of projecting an emotional intent into the viewer's realm of imagination.
Group f/64 or f.64 was a group founded by seven American 20th-century San Francisco Bay Area photographers who shared a common photographic style characterized by sharply focused and carefully framed images seen through a particularly Western (U.S.) viewpoint. In part, they formed in opposition to the pictorialist photographic style that had dominated much of the early 20th century, but moreover, they wanted to promote a new modernist aesthetic that was based on precisely exposed images of natural forms and found objects.
Minidoka National Historic Site is a National Historic Site in the western United States. It commemorates the more than 13,000 Japanese Americans who were imprisoned at the Minidoka War Relocation Center during the Second World War. Among the inmates, the notation 峰土香 or 峯土香 was sometimes applied.
Clarence Hudson White was an American photographer, teacher and a founding member of the Photo-Secession movement. He grew up in small towns in Ohio, where his primary influences were his family and the social life of rural America. After visiting the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, he took up photography. Although he was completely self-taught in the medium, within a few years he was internationally known for his pictorial photographs that captured the spirit and sentimentality of America in the early twentieth century. As he became well known for his images, White was sought out by other photographers who often traveled to Ohio to learn from him. He became friends with Alfred Stieglitz and helped advance the cause of photography as a true art form. In 1906 White and his family moved to New York City in order to be closer to Stieglitz and his circle and to further promote his own work. While there he became interested in teaching photography and in 1914 he established the Clarence H. White School of Photography, the first educational institution in America to teach photography as art. Due to the demands of his teaching duties, his own photography declined and White produced little new work during the last decade of his life. In 1925 he suffered a heart attack and died while teaching students in Mexico City.
The Photo-Secession was an early 20th century movement that promoted photography as a fine art in general and photographic pictorialism in particular.
Frank Eugene was an American-born photographer who was a founding member of the Photo-Secession and one of the first university-level professors of photography in the world.
Myra Albert Wiggins (1869–1956) was an American painter and pictorial photographer who became a member of the important early 20th century Photo-Secession movement.
Mary Devens was an American photographer who was considered one of the ten most prominent pictorial photographers of the early 20th century. She was listed as a founding member of Alfred Stieglitz’s famed Photo-Secession.
The history of photography in Japan begins in the 19th century and has continued to be a prominent art form into the present era.
California Tonalism was art movement that existed in California from circa 1890 to 1920. Tonalist are usually intimate works, painted with a limited palette. Tonalist paintings are softly expressive, suggestive rather than detailed, often depicting the landscape at twilight or evening, when there is an absence of contrast. Tonalist paintings could also be figurative, but in them, the figure was usually out of doors or in an interior in a low-key setting with little detail.
Alfred Horsley Hinton was an English landscape photographer, best known for his work in the pictorialist movement in the 1890s and early 1900s. As an original member of the Linked Ring and editor of The Amateur Photographer, he was one of the movement's staunchest advocates. Hinton wrote nearly a dozen books on photographic technique, and his photographs were exhibited at expositions throughout Europe and North America.
Ella Etna McBride was an American fine-art photographer, mountain climber, and centenarian known for her career achievements after age sixty. In addition to running her own photography studio for over thirty years, she also spent eight years running the photography studio of Edward S. Curtis.
Soichi Sunami was a Japanese and American modernist photographer, influenced by the pictorialist movement, and best known for his portraits of early modern dancers, including Ruth St Denis, Agnes De Mille, Helen Tamiris and Martha Graham, with whom he maintained an extended artistic collaboration. He produced some of the only known images of the early black modern dancer, Edna Guy, and also photographed the modern dancer Harald Kreutzberg.
David F. Martin is an art historian with a primary focus on female, gay or Asian-American artists. He is an authority on the art of Washington State during the period 1890-1960, and in particular on members of the Seattle Camera Club, and chiefly composed of Japanese American photographers working in the Pictorialist style.
Virna Haffer was an American photographer, printmaker, painter, musician, and published author.
Asakichi “Frank” Kunishige (1878-1960) was a Japanese-American Pictorialist photographer. He was a founding member of the Seattle Camera Club. He created and sold his own photographic paper, Textura Tissue, which was a favorite of club members because it emphasized the soft qualities that Pictorial photographers prized. Along with Wayne Albee and Soichi Sunami, he worked for Ella E. McBride at the McBride studio. During the 1920s, Kunishige’s work was included in many prominent international exhibitions including those of the Royal Photographic Society, London; the Pittsburgh Salon; the Buffalo Salon; the Paris Salon; and numerous others. From 1925 through 1929, he was one of the most exhibited Pictorialist photographers in the world. His work was illustrated in national and international publications including Photofreund, the American Annual of Photography and Photo-Era.
Dr. Kyo Koike was a Japanese-American poet, physician and photographer.
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Iwao and Hanaye Matsushita were a young Japanese American couple who were interned apart during the Internment of Japanese Americans during the 1940s. The couple are famous for writing hundreds of letters back and forth throughout the duration of the war. The story of the two lovers is a poignant reflection of the Japanese experience during World War II. Their forced separation by Executive Order 9066 reveals a correspondence that has allowed historians to understand the daily routines and feelings of those imprisoned. Their circumstances are a significant resource to academics studying Japanese-American history.
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