CENTER’s Curator’s Choice Award First Place Winner: Jerry Takigawa
©Jerry Takigawa, Yes. Yes.
Congratulations to Jerry Takigawa for his first place selection in CENTER’s Curator’s Choice Awards for his project, Balancing Cultures. The Choice Awards recognize outstanding photographers working in all processes and subject matter and the winners receive recognition via exhibition, publication, admission to Review Santa Fe portfolio reviews and more.
Juror Lisa Hostetler, PhD, Curator-in-Charge, George Eastman Museum shared her thoughts on her selections:
As usual with CENTER awards, there were a number of strong submissions that made selecting the finalists difficult. The ones that I chose seemed to me to be the most effective combinations of concept and form; in other words, the idea for the project and its execution were equally matched in quality and originality. It was a coincidence that the three projects all had to do with the role that photographs play in constructing ethnic, political, and national history, but the fact that materiality is an important factor in each is not. Although images on screens are increasingly important in today’s culture (and, I believe, valid as an art form), my knowing that works by the photographers would be exhibited in physical space drove me to pay particular attention to the submitters’ notes about the images’ final form. I felt that the finalists had a solid vision about the presentation of their work, as well as its concept and images.
“Balancing Cultures,” the project I chose for first place, combines family photographs and memorabilia with images of signage and ephemera related to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. The works are poignant meditations on the intertwining of personal and political history during a particularly grim era in our country’s past. Given the force of rhetoric about immigration and ethnicity in today’s public discourse, the project is a timely argument for an open and humane approach to nationality and citizenship.
©Jerry Takigawa, “This World,” February 8, 1942
Lisa Hostetler, PhD, Curator-in-Charge, George Eastman Museum
Prior to the Eastman Museum she was the McEvoy Family Curator of Photography at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and curator of photography at the Milwaukee Art Museum for seven years. Before her position in Milwaukee, Hostetler was a research associate in the photography department at the Met.
©Jerry Takigawa, Shikata Ga Nai (It cannot be helped)
Jerry Takigawa is an independent photographer, designer, and writer. He is a co-founder and creative force behind the Center for Photographic Art’s PIE Labs. He received the Imogen Cunningham Award in 1982, the Clarence J. Laughlin Award in 2017, and CENTER’s Curator’s Choice Award in 2018. His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Crocker Art Museum, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, and the Monterey Museum of Art. He studied photography with Don Worth at San Francisco State University and received a degree in art with an emphasis in painting. He is a past president of People in Communication Arts, Monterey, CA, and the Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, CA, and is a former trustee of the Monterey Museum of Art. Takigawa lives and works in Carmel Valley, California.
©Jerry Takigawa, Reasons to Serve
Balancing Cultures
To better understand my affinity to paradox, I was compelled to examine my past. I began working with family photographs, combined with text-based artifacts, to express a long silenced family story through simple in-camera photographs. My fearful anticipation of working with images dealing with WWII incarceration was borne out in the emotions that were exposed. Balancing Cultures evolved to prompt conversations about racism, hysteria and economic exploitation in America. I came to understand my family’s (and my own) shame and to believe that our culture’s inability to live with paradox resulted in perilous polarities.
In 1942, Executive Order 9066 brought untold distress to all Japanese Americans living on the west coast. My family experienced the economic loss of property, the shame and indignation of incarceration, and the task of re-integration into American society after release from the WWII concentration camps. How did the Japanese Americans resolve such a travesty of justice? They have a saying for this—shikata ga nai—it cannot be helped. But there is another saying—gaman—persevere and stay silent, that distinguished the tolerance of their losses.
©Jerry Takigawa, Possession of Navigational Charts of Monterey Bay
The polarities we see today are caused by an inability to live with diversity. The intent of this project is to commemorate my unheard family story and bring its kindred feelings to light through art. Balancing Cultures posits accepting paradox as an essential ingredient for a balanced life. It speaks to the wholeness of an inclusive “both/and” model of living and encourages a tolerant and plural tomorrow—the only positive tomorrow possible. – Jerry Takigawa,
©Jerry Takigawa, Minatos
©Jerry Takigawa, Memories
©Jerry Takigawa, Looking Like the Enemy
©Jerry Takigawa, Insuring the Democratic Way of Life
©Jerry Takigawa, Immigrant’s Story
©Jerry Takigawa, Family ID Tags
©Jerry Takigawa, EO 9066
©Jerry Takigawa, Citizen’s Indefinite Leave
©Jerry Takigawa, A Jap’s a Jap
©Jerry Takigawa, 2A and a Father
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![In the early morning of Sunday, September 15, 1963, four members of the United Klans of AmericaÑThomas Edwin Blanton Jr.,Herman Frank Cash, Robert Edward Chambliss, and Bobby Frank CherryÑplanted a minimum of 15 sticks of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, close to the basement.
At approximately 10:22 a.m., an anonymous man phoned the 16th Street Baptist Church. The call was answered by the acting Sunday School secretary: a 14-year-old girl named Carolyn Maull. To Maull, the anonymous caller simply said the words, "Three minutes", before terminating the call. Less than one minute later, the bomb exploded as five children were present within the basement assembly, changing into their choir robes in preparation for a sermon entitled "A Love That Forgives". According to one survivor, the explosion shook the entire building and propelled the girls' bodies through the air "like rag dolls".
The explosion blew a hole measuring seven feet in diameter in the church's rear wall, and a crater five feet wide and two feet deep in the ladies' basement lounge, destroying the rear steps to the church and blowing one passing motorist out of his car. Several other cars parked near the site of the blast were destroyed, and windows of properties located more than two blocks from the church were also damaged. All but one of the church's stained-glass windows were destroyed in the explosion. The sole stained-glass window largely undamaged in the explosion depicted Christ leading a group of young children.
Hundreds of individuals, some of them lightly wounded, converged on the church to search the debris for survivors as police erected barricades around the church and several outraged men scuffled with police. An estimated 2,000 black people, many of them hysterical, converged on the scene in the hours following the explosion as the church's pastor, the Reverend John Cross Jr., attempted to placate the crowd by loudly reciting the 23rd Psalm through a bullhorn. One individual who converged on the scene to help search for survivors, Charles Vann, later recollected that he had observed a solitary white man whom he recognized as Robert Edward Chambliss (a known member of the Ku Klux Klan) standing alone and motionless at a barricade. According to Vann's later testimony, Chambliss was standing "looking down toward the church, like a firebug watching his fire".
Four girls, Addie Mae Collins (age 14, born April 18, 1949), Carol Denise McNair (age 11, born November 17, 1951), Carole Robertson (age 14, born April 24, 1949), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14, born April 30, 1949), were killed in the attack. The explosion was so intense that one of the girls' bodies was decapitated and so badly mutilated in the explosion that her body could only be identified through her clothing and a ring, whereas another victim had been killed by a piece of mortar embedded in her skull. The then-pastor of the church, the Reverend John Cross, would recollect in 2001 that the girls' bodies were found "stacked on top of each other, clung together". All four girls were pronounced dead on arrival at the Hillman Emergency Clinic.
More than 20 additional people were injured in the explosion, one of whom was Addie Mae's younger sister, 12-year-old Sarah Collins, who had 21 pieces of glass embedded in her face and was blinded in one eye. In her later recollections of the bombing, Collins would recall that in the moments immediately before the explosion, she had observed her sister, Addie, tying her dress sash.[33] Another sister of Addie Mae Collins, 16-year-old Junie Collins, would later recall that shortly before the explosion, she had been sitting in the basement of the church reading the Bible and had observed Addie Mae Collins tying the dress sash of Carol Denise McNair before she had herself returned upstairs to the ground floor of the church.](http://lenscratch.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/001-16th-Street-Baptist-Church-Easter-v2-14x14-150x150.jpg)
