Across the top of the photograph, patches of water decay shimmer, drip, and dance in a bright nebula of pastel gradients. The parents of Shigeko Kumamoto sit with her younger brother Bobby in the garden in front of their tar-papered barrack. As a family of Japanese descent, the Kumamotos were forcibly removed from their home in California and incarcerated in Arkansas for the duration of World War II. Like the garden that surrounds them, the wooden name plate that hangs next to the door frame suggests an attempt at making the unlivable livable under forced circumstances. 

Following President Roosevelt’s issuance of Executive Order 9066, the Kumamoto family was evacuated alongside over 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the west coast and relocated to detention sites across the country. Although government officials at the time declared that the incarceration was a “military necessity,” the government has since acknowledged that the decision was motivated by racist sentiment, wartime hysteria, and the failure of political leadership. Cameras were considered a technology of espionage during the period and Japanese Americans were banned from taking photographs during their evacuation and the early months of their wartime incarceration. As a result, this period was captured predominantly by photographers that were hired by the War Relocation Authority, the government body in charge of the administration of the camps. The earliest photographs taken by the Kumamoto family from within the camps began in 1943 once Japanese Americans were permitted to purchase camera equipment from store catalogs and general stores. Shigeko’s son, Ken Carl, inherited his mother’s photographs after she passed away, and he remains uncertain how the family came to procure a camera and film especially given the substantial cost during the war. 

Shigeko was a teenager when her family was forced to leave their home in Long Beach, California and relocated to the Santa Anita temporary detention center where they remained for a period of months before they were taken by train to Jerome Relocation Center in Arkansas. The photograph of her family members in front of their barrack is part of an archive of over one hundred images taken by Shigeko and her family members while they were incarcerated, and for histories of vernacular photography during this period, the archive is unparalleled in sheer quantity. Reflections of a Young Woman: Photographs from the Archive of Shigeko Kumamoto at Latitude presents a selection of photographs from this archive that show nuanced perspectives of everyday moments in the camp as well as significant life events for the Kumamoto family. The archive speaks to photography’s ability during this period to provide a sense of familial stability by maintaining an image of family unity in the face of an uncertain future. 

As a high schooler when the war broke out, Shigeko’s photo albums offer the rare vantage point of the tenderness of teenage romance, friendships with other girls in the camp, and family gatherings. The exhibition also includes photographs Shigeko received from friends and young men serving in the military presented along with handwritten inscriptions written on the back of the images. The small scale of the photographs, a selection of which are included in the exhibition in their original format, made possible their circulation among family, friends, and suitors who were held in separate camps, traveling for military service, or permitted to leave the camps through the process of relocation. Photography therefore also became a means of staying connected with loved ones across barbed wire. In contrast to the government photographs that have become emblematic of the period, the familiarity between the photographer and the sitter is apparent in her photographs due to the intimacy that comes with being a part of the same family and community. 

The Kumamoto family remained in the camps for the entirety of the wartime period from April 1942 until April 1945 moving from Jerome to the other camp in Arkansas at Rohwer for the final year of their forced relocation. Once Shigeko was permitted to leave the camp, she attended college at Phillips University in Oklahoma and graduated in 1949. She then worked for the U.S. Army as a civilian clerk-stenographer and visited Japan where she saw the remains of the bombing of Hiroshima firsthand. In the years that followed, she married her first husband and they had a child together. After she remarried, the family frequently moved between houses, and during a particularly harsh winter, the basement where she kept her photographs flooded and many were lost or damaged. The flat gradients of color that obscure the photograph of her family sitting in front of their barrack are the result of this damage. 

What testimony is offered by these ruined photographs? The decay speaks to the difficulties in preserving the family’s archive due to the hardships that Shigeko faced during the wartime period and in the decades that followed. The decay paradoxically returns the image to that which it originally was, the paper on which the image is printed, which is as fragile and vulnerable to damage as the histories that one seeks to understand through the photograph. While decay is often considered the result of neglect, the mold’s colorful transformation of the image instead suggests a more paradoxical union of loss and love and the love involved in holding onto the fragments of an experience of loss. The watermarks that cover the image are as much representative of the damage as the unearthed beauty of the photograph: the love between family members caught in a space and time that is not of their own making. Like the garden that surrounds them, they continue, still, to grow.