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Seattle Camera Club

Seattle Camera Club

The photographs of Kyo Koike.

09 Jan

Kyo Koike, Cayuse Pass, Mount Rainier, approximately 1934

Words by Daisy Alioto, photographs curated by Maddie Kao.

A few years ago, I became very interested in the Japanese Camera Clubs of the 1920s-30s. These Camera Clubs arose to cater to non-professional photographers with a passion for Pictorialism (the philosophy that a photo should have a painterly approach to light and shadow). This art movement was very much in line with traditional Japanese aesthetics. Japanese immigrants to America were leaders and award-winners in photography salons of the period. These Camera Clubs were also unusually inclusive of women for the period.

Unfortunately, the Great Depression forced the closure of many Camera Clubs. But it’s the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII that led to the loss of these clubs’ rich photographic archives. The majority of their work was lost except for in Seattle, where an archive of their work paints a unique portrait of the city. The Seattle Camera Club remains the best-archived of the West Coast clubs, due to an Italian landlord who offered to hold on to the club’s archive during the course of the war.

Kyo Koike, one of the Seattle Camera Club’s most prominent members, died of an illness contracted while interned. Another early member, Soichi Sunami, avoided internment because he moved to New York and worked for The Whitney Museum for almost four decades.

The University of Washington has spent years digitizing this archive, but there is much work left to do. The curator of the collection, Nicolette Bromberg, has written a book titled Shadows of a Fleeting World about the collection. The tragedy of Japanese internment and the loss to the photography community is also covered by the book Pictorialism in California by Michael G. Wilson and Dennis Reed. Letters between Seattle Camera Club member Iwao Matsushita and his wife Hanaye are collected in the book Imprisoned Apart: The World War II Correspondence of an Issei Couple.

Below is a selection of photographs by Kyo Koike, curated by Maddie Kao, courtesy of The University of Washington.