Balancing Cultures
Jerry Takigawa
Photographs by Jerry Takigawa
Foreword by John Hamamura
Published by Dayo Press
Format & Features
Softbound with dust jacket
7″ × 9″, 96 pages, Smyth Sewn in signatures
ISBN 978-0-578-83392-7
Released
April 2021
About Balancing Cultures
Jerry Takigawa’s 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.
“The poetic photos by Jerry Takigawa on the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII collected in Balancing Cultures moved me profoundly. So melancholy, so personal, and so deeply felt… like ghostly memories that haunt America’s conscience.”
— George Takei, Actor, Author, Activist
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“This powerful collection allows for a deeper understanding of how the past informs the future, in particular a past that is often hidden from the next generations. Balancing Cultures is an important historical presentation of American racism focused on Japanese families, but it is also a tribute to art as a form of reconciliation and documentation.”
— Aline Smithson, Founder, Lenscratch
Meet the Artist
Jerry Takigawa
Jerry Takigawa is an independent photographer, designer, and writer. He is the founder and creative force behind the Center for Photographic Art’s PIE Labs. He is a recipient of the Imogen Cunningham Award, the Clarence J. Laughlin Award, CENTER’s Curator’s Choice Award, and the Rhonda Wilson Award. His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and the Monterey Museum of Art. He studied photography with Don Worth at San Francisco State University and received a degree in art with an emphasis in painting. Takigawa lives and works in Carmel Valley, California.
