The Japanese photographer who turned an empathetic eye on rural communities of the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th century – The Art Newspaper

The new documentary film Our Mr. Matsura, screening this week at the Vancouver International Film Festival, chronicles the life of photographer Frank (Sakae) Matsura (1873-1913) as he navigated the boundaries between cultures, nations, and the photographer and his subject.

The latest film from the producer, writer and directorBeth Harrington, Our Mr. Matsura examines the extraordinary life of an orphaned photographer who emigrated to the United States and found an unlikely home in a small town in Washington state at the turn of the 20th century. A kind of Frontierland Cinema Paradiso, the film traces how Matsura, born into a family of noble samurai lineage in Hirado, Japan, toward the end of the feudal era, becomes an integral part of a settler community in Washington’s central Okanogan County, a mining region near the border with Canada.

With a mix of charm, fluent English and his Christianised Japanese heritage, Matsura soon became enmeshed with local people, photographing and befriending both Native people of the Colville Confederated Tribes and newly arrived settlers and immigrants, including miners, ranchers, shopkeepers and cowboys. When he died of tuberculosis at age 39, he was widely mourned in one the largest funerals the region had ever seen.

Matsura’s engaging photographs of people, events and landscapes, as well as his unusual self-portraits, offer viewers a documentary glimpse of a time of great change and a view of the peripheral space he created that allowed him to serve as a bridge between cultures.

His playful insertion of himself into photographs, revealing a camaraderie with his subjects, as well as his unusual stagings—perhaps, as the film suggests, an influence of the Shinto temple in his hometown, with its carnival-like scenes—read as a prototype of sorts for contemporary photo-conceptualism. They also reflect a time when photography democratised portraiture, a format that was hitherto the domain of the aristocracy. Matsura’s portraits of ordinary townspeople laughing, in their Sunday best or at community picnics are also tributes to a time when photography was a slow, intimate art- not an anonymous blur of scrolling.

Matsura’s portraits of members of the Coville Confederated Tribes were also exceptional for their time. As the curator Michael Holloman—who curated a touring exhibition of Mastura’s work at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane (2023-24)—says in the film, at a time when their images were often contrived or romanticised, his photographs gave Indigenous people agency.

“He wanted them to be comfortable,” Holloman says. “He also pushed the boundaries at a cultural level,” he adds, pointing to a portrait where Matsura focussed on an Indigenous girl by bringing her to the foreground and moving a white girl to the margins.

It was the quality of foregrounding Indigenous experiences that first inspired Harrington to make the documentary. A pitstop in Tacoma in 2002 and a visit to the Washington State History Museum provided a chance encounter with Matsura’s work that eventually led her on a five-year film-making journey.

In contrast to the romantic images of “noble savages” made by Edward Curtis and others, which erased signs of modernity and promoted the trope that Indigenous people and their cultures were “vanishing”, Harrington tells The Art Newspaper that Matsura’s work suggested a relationship and connection between the sitter and the photographer—a sense of casual familiarity and closeness that seemed to contradict Curtis’s thesis. Matsura managed to convey the subjects’ personal agency.

“These were people being depicted as they wished, arriving at the photographer’s studio dressed as they chose, and posing in ways that projected their autonomy, resilience, and modernity,” Harrington says.

His photographs, she adds, also seemed to cross proscribed social boundaries, “At that moment in 2002, they transcended time with a freshness that defied photographic conventions of the day,” she says.

Harrington says she soon learned that more than a century after his death, descendants of people in Matsura’s photos still knew who he was, still knew of his connection to their families and still could relate stories of his contributions to their communities. In the film, several of these descendants pose thoughtfully and affectionately inside of frames, as an homage to the power of Matsura’s personality and vision.

In Matsura’s photographs, Harrington says, “we encounter his humanity, the humanity of others depicted who may not be ‘like’ us, and we also feel our own humanity rise in a kind of sympathetic vibration. That depth, that joy, that connection forms a bridge.”

Now, as political tensions and violent immigration crackdowns grip the US, Harrington believes Matsura’s story is all the more poignant. “A Japanese immigrant alone in a region hundreds of miles from his nearest countryman, who forms deeps bonds with people from diverse backgrounds,” she says. “One can’t help but marvel at the combination of emotional intelligence, empathy, humour and inner fortitude it must have taken to navigate the challenging landscape of the Pacific Northwest at a time of great transition.”

Watch the trailer for Our Mr. Matsura:

• Our Mr. Matsura, 4 October and 5 October, Vancouver International Film Festival