TITLE: Documented

The series is about the rupture and resilience of immigrant identity. I took two portraits of Nobuo, age 80, one facing forward and one backward to emphasize the space between past and present. On these portraits I superimposed scans of childhood and school photos taken in the late 1940s to mid-1950s during the American Occupation of Japan. Nobuo immigrated to the US in the early 1970s, became a citizen, and had a long career as a university professor. The photo-collages merge two photographic styles important to immigrant experience: the photo as a document or “proof of identity” and the family album as a reliquary of memories, loss, love, and dreams. I made the series in 2024, at the height of political rhetoric against immigrants in the United States.

AUTHOR: Carole Cavanaugh (United States)

I began a dedicated practice in photography in 2020 after a long career as a professor of Japanese culture and cinema. A guiding principle of my work is expressed in the Japanese word miren — a feeling of lingering attachment for a lost time, love, or experience. The medium of photography uniquely conveys the layered emotions of miren — a photograph captures a moment only to remind us it is gone forever. The lens conspires with light and atmosphere to bring something unexpected to the photographic process — an emotionality beneath the contours of the visible. I am a minimalist at heart. I aspire to the balance in the black-and-white compositions of film directors Ozu and Kurosawa. I have also found inspiration in the forms and tonality of ukiyo-e prints, sumi-e drawing, and Nihon-ga genre painting.