Jennifer Sakai
Lives and works in the USA
www.jennifersakai.com
When We Return Home
My project ‘When We Return Home‘ is a photographic series based on my Japanese family relocation to Poston Concentration Camp in Poston, Arizona, after World War II. The residue of that intergenerational trauma has been passed down and been reborn in hope and beauty from what my grandparents, aunts, and uncles endured. We are living in a current climate that has echos and reflections of the same racial and gender xenophobia, both in my own country and globally.
During WWII, it led to the atrocious dehumanizing act of seizing all property of those of Japanese heritage and their forced removal to one of ten different concentration camps scattered across remote areas across the United States. My family was one of the estimated 120,000 people that were affected by this. My goal with this work is to both educate viewers while also moving forward from what my family braved during this time. The project utilizes two elements. The first includes ephemeral objects, images, records, and letters of my Sakai family and their experiences during World War II and the post-World War II era. In the second element these items are juxtaposed with images from my own photographic practice. These combined conversations echo their messages to me, but with a new reverberation.
Through the interplay of my personal images and archive, I’ve gone backwards through time to unwind my own creative beginnings and the need to record and document life, starting with their voice. On the surface, it is the record and story of what one families great-grandparents aunts and uncles endured in the United States. But more poignantly, it documents the new life they created for themselves amid the undercurrent of a painful past and leaves instead notes of beauty and wonder where there was once only loss.
‘When we return home‘ is the farewell note from a postcard my Grandmother wrote to me, it’s dual meaning is both informal from one beloved family member to another, but also the undercurrent note of their experience and life’s journey.
