Jerry Takigawa’s work, 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.
Jerry Takigawa is an independent photographer, designer, and writer. He studied photography with Don Worth and is the recipient of many honors and awards including: the Imogen Cunningham Award (1982), the Clarence J. Laughlin Award, New Orleans, LA (2017), Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 50, Portland, OR (2017, 2020), CENTER Awards, Curator’s Choice First Place, Santa Fe, NM (2018), the Rhonda Wilson Award, Brooklyn, NY (2020), and the Foto Forum Santa Fe Award, Santa Fe NM (2021). His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Brooklyn Museum, Crocker Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Japanese American Museum of Oregon, Monterey Museum of Art, and the Library of Congress. His monograph for Balancing Cultures was published in 2021. Takigawa lives and works in Carmel Valley, California.
