Intimate Archives: Japanese‐Canadian family photography, 1939–1949

Abstract

‘Intimate Archives’ situates domestic photographs of Japanese Canadians taken during the 1942–1949 internment in Canada within historical crisis and subjective narrative, tracing the possibilities of meaning for both the depicted subjects and the possessors of the images. In 1942, as Japanese Canadians were uprooted from familiar communities throughout British Columbia, Canada and overwhelmed with the loss of those closest to them, photography was employed to recentre themselves within a stable, yet somewhat imaginative, network of relations. Domestic photographs and albums produced at this time worked to construct, preserve and contain the visual and imaginative narrative of cohesive family stability and communal belonging, despite divisive political differences, disparate geographical living situations and elapsed family traditions. Namiko Kunimoto was awarded a double major BA in art history and anthropology at the University of British Columbia in 1998 and her MA in at the same university, where she was awarded a University of British Columbia Grant Fellowship. She is studying for her PhD in art history at the University of California, Berkeley, supported by a Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Research Council of Canada. Publications include, ‘Mariko Mori at the Tokyo Museum of Modern Art’, Last Call, June 2001, and ‘The Guerrilla Girls’, Discorder Magazine, April 2000.