Jon Yamashiro: WWII Japanese Incarceration Camp Photographs

Jon Yamashiro: WWII Japanese Incarceration Camp Photographs presents a series of black-and-white photographs documenting sites of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. Created between 2010 and 2019, the photographs emerge from the artist’s visits to all 10 incarceration camp locations with his family. Yamashiro, a Professor of Art at Miami University and photographer with a long studio practice, approaches these landscapes with quiet directness. Some sites contain memorials or preserved structures. Others remain as open desert, scattered rubble, or traces barely visible in the terrain. Yamashiro’s images emphasize the isolation of these environments and the physical distance from the communities where those imprisoned once lived.

Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, many of them citizens, were forcibly removed from their homes and imprisoned in government camps across remote areas of the United States. Yamashiro, who is of Japanese ancestry and raised in Hawaii, did not have immediate family members incarcerated, yet the history remains deeply personal. This work also reflects the artist’s experiences raising biracial children who have faced questions and comments about race and identity. In some photographs, his children appear within the landscapes, placing contemporary Asian faces within spaces marked by historical injustice. The photographs invite viewers to confront these locations not as distant history but as present landscapes shaped by memory. Through quiet, stark imagery, the work asks how the legacy of incarceration continues to shape conversations about race, belonging, and citizenship in America today.