What a beautifully named exhibition of the Seattle Camera Club at Cascadia Art Museum! “Shadows of a Fleeting World: Pictorial Photography and the Seattle Camera Club” evokes the “floating world” of Japanese art while also paying homage to a group of photographers who almost vanished from history.
The Seattle Camera Club formally existed from 1925 to 1930. Their exhibitions included many photographers, but it was founded and led by Japanese American photographers with several consistent white photographers. Their intertwined histories are carefully told by David Martin and Nicolette Bromberg in their book Shadows of a Fleeting World, Pictorial Photography and the Seattle Camera Club. Martin carefully explains the meaning of the term “pictorialism” and the early incarnation of the Seattle Camera Club in the late nineteenth century. Imogen Cunningham and Roi Partridge were also active as pictorialists in Seattle in the early 20th century until they left for San Francisco in 1917.
But the current exhibition primarily includes the artists of the later incarnation. We need to adjust to the small scale of the works in order to appreciate all their subtleties and variety. It includes a few earlier works such as Edge of the Cliff 1901 by Myra Wiggins. A woman and child walk beside a steep drop with apparently no path; from the many footprints, it looks like people have passed this way before. Wiggins was already a well-known photographer in 1901, and was included in publications by Alfred Stieglutz, the premier promoter of photography as art, when she moved to Seattle in 1907.
Kyo Koike, also a practicing doctor, was the founder of the Seattle Camera Club, and he articulated the need for the club and launched its first exhibition in 1925. His work in this exhibition emphasizes landscape, but through the eyes of a Japanese aesthetic of patterns, shallow depth and flat surfaces. One of my favorites is Network of Mountain Goddess, a view looking down on a river from above to which he has given this metaphorical title.
The pictorialist photographers’ use of nature to symbolize feelings, as well as soft focus, points to their desire to be taken seriously as artists. But while earlier photographers manipulated negatives to create painterly effects, these artists found the soft focus through the lens. My favorite subject is boats. In these images such as Going Fishing by Koike, Untitled, Person in Rowboat and In the Canal by Hideo Onishi, we can appreciate the full range of tones that these artists achieved.
Another repeated subject is Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood, including Sunshine and Mist, Morning, Quiet Hour, Canyon of Streets, Untitled (Pioneer Square) and Untitled (bicyclist near Japan Town), by Yukio Morinaga or Misty Morning by Chao-Chen Yang. All have one or a few figures set into a backlit setting with carefully observed patterns of light. A favorite motif is the round streetlights that appear repeatedly as an accent. Since the pergola is still there today, the image resonates with us. The eerie sense of silence and stasis in these photographs convey a very different era, although the artists clearly sought it out in the early morning or evening.
Mount Rainier dominates many of the landscapes. The artists who had come from Japan to Seattle said it reminded them of Mount Fuji. They hiked there and frequently took photographs as we see in Self Portrait at Mount Rainier by Soichi Sunami. Between the Trees by Koike firmly frames Rainier between two foreground trees.
Another type of subject matter, more predictable in the annals of art history, is the female figure. It ranges from misty idealized images to straightforward portraits such as that of Elle McBride by Wayne Albee. McBride primarily created photographs of still life flowers usually isolated on a single stem. The Ella McBride Studio was the official photographer for the Cornish School of the Arts, and many famous avant-garde dancers came there. In the Cascadia exhibition the most striking is Martha Graham in Lamentation by Soichi Sunami. Her incredible performance is perfectly captured in this still photograph.
Although the Seattle Camera Club only officially existed for five years, the photographers were like an extended family both before and after the official club. They struggled to show during the Depression years. Then in 1942, the devastating Executive Order 9066 removed Japanese Americans from the West coast. Seattle Camera Club members still in Seattle included Kyo Koike, Frank Kunishige, Hiromu Kira, and Yukio Morinanga. The incarceration had devastating effects on all of them. Soichi Sunami had moved to New York City, but his wife and family were incarcerated. He became the leading photographer of the Museum of Modern Art.
But for Sunami and the other members of the Seattle Camera Club, their pictorial work was lost, until the recent pioneering efforts of a few art historians. These photographers were extremely prominent in the early 20th century, showing all over the country. But after the shift to modernist photography, with its hard edges and clean light, the pictorialist tradition was denigrated. Fortunately, it is now reestablished in the context of an important chapter in the history of photography.
“Shadows of a Fleeting World: Pictorial Photography and the Seattle Camera Club” is on view at the Cascadia Art Museum (190 Sunset Avenue, Edmonds, WA) until September 13.
