Jerry Takigawa

Jerry Takigawa’s monograph Balancing Cultures presents a multi award-winning photography series about the artist’s family’s experience with the WWII American concentration camps. This project offered an opportunity to confront the racism perpetrated on the Japanese that resulted in their incarceration in the camps sanctioned by President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 issued on February 19, 1942. Awakened by a discovery of old family photographs taken in an Arkansas concentration camp, Takigawa was compelled to speak out in contrast to his parent’s fearful silence on the matter. He created a visual journey through collaged photographs using artifacts, documents and memories, resulting in a distinctive telling of one family’s journey from immigration to incarceration, and re-assimilation. We see renewed violence against Asian Americans and Balancing Cultures is a reminder that racism, hysteria, and economic exploitation are ubiquitous forces underpinning the social, political and environmental landscape we face today.