Introduction
Jerry Takigawa’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in museums, galleries, and alternative spaces. He has been the recipient of a variety of photographic honors and awards including the Imogen Cunningham Award; nominated for the Santa Fe Prize; twice nominated for the Prix Pictet; Critical Mass Top 50; the Clarence John Laughlin Award; LensCulture, Fine Art Photography Awards Finalist; NY Center for Photographic Art, Humans, First Place; CENTER Awards, Curator’s Choice, First Place; the Rhonda Wilson Award; Foto Forum Santa Fe’s Annual Photo Award; and LensCulture Critic’s Choice Top 10. Takigawa studied photography with Don Worth at San Francisco State University and received a BFA with an emphasis in painting. His work is in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Brooklyn Museum, Crocker Art Museum, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Monterey Museum of Art, the Japanese American Museum of Oregon, and the Library of Congress. His monograph, Balancing Cultures, was published by Dayo Press in 2021. Takigawa was born in Chicago, Illinois. He lives and works in Carmel Valley, California.
Retrospective — Center for Photographic Art, 2021
Liminal Language, 1980-2020
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“Do I have something to say? And what might it be? … Personally, I felt like I needed to have an answer to that question. I think that in the end, I wasn’t going to find it out there in the world. It was something that was already inside of me and I needed to uncover it from inside. I think meaning comes from who you are more than what you’re thinking about.”
A search for meaningful engagement from an authentic perspective drives Jerry Takigawa’s creative practice. A deeply reflective artist, his multi-layered, assemblage-like photography mirrors the competing forces that shape him—the interior world of personal expression, the outer world of social and environmental engagement, his Japanese heritage versus his homegrown American experience. From an effort to harmonize these dichotomies comes Takigawa’s singular vision and his award-winning body of work.
As a painting major at San Francisco State University, Takigawa first took up the camera in support of his photorealist art. While there he studied photography with Don Worth, and began to photograph the political movements and community action of the late 1960s Bay Area. About the same time he was developing graphic design skills, which aligned well with his photography, and which he still practices today. Now a highly regarded designer, he maintains a successful graphics studio in Monterey, California. Although he ultimately abandoned painting for photography, the twin disciplines of painting and design have honed his eye to subtlety and nuance and helped shape the trajectory of his art.
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“We’re looking at the fact that if you want to grow your art, you will want to look at yourself, too. And that will help your art. I mean the two things are just in conversation; they’re connected. They’re inseparable. I mean every photograph is a self-portrait, in a sense.”
Takigawa’s 1980s Kimono Series is a purposeful break from his past documentary photography. Switching to color film, he took his camera out into the landscape and set up lengths of Japanese kimono fabric against the background sky, ocean, and hills. The selection of this particular fabric was a first in a cultural sense; although unplanned it revealed an unexpectedly lovely affinity with the surroundings. Takigawa unerringly matches his swatches to the existing light and color, merging the floating pieces to the twilight sky (Kimono Series U-002) or, in a slightly different approach (Kimono Series U-015) blending them harmoniously against the hills. Hovering there, the kimonos appear like mysterious spirits of the air—alternate translations of the same language.
Then, in a radical reversal, Takigawa brings the kimono fabric into the city. In the urban environment they create startling contrasts, unruly apparitions intruding on their concrete and steel backdrops. Here the two languages clash—the unbounded swaths of Japanese cloth introducing color and elegance into the solid gray geometric regularity of the Western façades. Both the urban and rural Kimono Series photographs strive to unite intrinsic differences—handmade with nature, immensity with delicacy, stability with flow, buoyancy with weight, Japanese with American. This impressively original work won Takigawa the Imogen Cunningham Award—the first ever presented for a color portfolio.
“You start with something deep inside that’s really important, something unique and different. Then you bring it to the outside and start expressing it, and that expression has to back up what you’re feeling inside.”
The award-winning Kimono Series opened the door to themes of relationship and contradiction that Takigawa has continued to investigate. Its integration of Japanese elements inspired his further engagement with his culture, and in Landscapes of Presence, the black and white still life series that follows, he continues to mine this aesthetic. A selection of patterned kimono and gossamer fabric, sheets of Japanese calligraphy, select leaves, bark, and simple stones come together with the delicacy and precision of a miniature Zen garden. Adding another layer of complexity, Takigawa inserts background photographs of clouds or trees into several of the arrangements (Landscapes of Presence U-126 and U-171). He has curated personally significant sacred spaces here—landscapes of presence. With the inclusion of the photographs he’s also added the dimensions of space and time, and begins to invent a new language to represent them.
“… everything you throw away, literally you end up consuming, either in the air, the water or your food. It comes back.”
The artistic practice of collecting diverse materials and assembling them into meaningful combinations harkens back to the early 20th century innovation of assemblage, when Pablo Picasso integrated found objects into his paintings. In his next series, False Food, Takigawa embraces this additive process (first used in Landscapes of Presence), this time in service of the environment. As a Monterey Bay Area resident with family ties to the fishing industry, he was aware of the increasing reports of plastic pollution in the world’s oceans. At the Monterey Bay Aquarium he saw pieces of plastic detritus recovered from the stomachs of dead birds who had ingested it as food. Stunned, he asked for some to photograph, and combined it with a variety of two and three dimensional elements. The assemblages pair misshapen bottle caps, abraded doll pieces, ravaged lighters, and unidentifiable beads and shards with antique Japanese art reproductions (False Food 353) and books in the Japanese language (False Food F-335). He also returns to the photographs, often bodies of water purposely out of focus, to highlight the plastic layered above them (False Food F-374). False Food underscores a plastic epidemic that we now know is universally destructive and tragically, human-generated. This unwanted and discarded debris overlays everything beautiful that we might also wish to look at and to experience. In a sense, each one of these images signifies an offering—to sorrow and maybe to hope—an invitation to notice, to pay attention. Takigawa’s intention is key: to convey the extent of the crisis without also generating a reaction of horror and avoidance. Only when we can see and acknowledge the damage done can we take positive action to repair it.
“Ultimately, I found photography to be a malleable medium that allowed me to
express a hybrid Japanese American aesthetic and message. Through photography, I
was able to integrate my Eastern and Western points of view. Finding a way to
creatively bridge and balance two cultures, is the milieu of all immigrant offspring.”
Takigawa follows a distinctive path and his artistic voice is evident in every photograph. He has cultivated and refined a singular process and visual language to express the stories he wants to tell and the ideas he wishes to convey. His current project, Balancing Cultures lies at the junction of two worlds, working to unite the personal and the universal, the past and present, and the Japanese and American. As a third generation Japanese-American he had occasionally heard mention of “camp” in family conversations. It was only on the death of his mother and the discovery of long hidden snapshots of family members in America’s World War II concentration camps that he began to grasp the true anguish of “camp.” Because Takigawa had been encouraged to be as American as possible, to blend in and stay safe, the full realization of his family’s war experiences came as a great shock. In addition, cultural attitudes led many victims to suppress their experience. Gaman, a Japanese word meaning to endure the seemingly unbearable with patience and dignity explains this reasoning. But Takigawa chose to abandon the legacy of silence. With much trepidation at first, because to reveal these images felt like the betrayal of a family secret, he decided to access the hidden photographs and make them the subject of his work.
As always, Takigawa orchestrates every component he chooses with thoughtful consideration. The unfocused family photographs remain slightly elusive, but they are foundational to the project, contextualizing and humanizing all the materials accompanying them. Juxtaposing Japanese calligraphy (Stereotypes Oppress), small personal mementos (Insuring the Democratic Way of Life), Go tiles (Yes. Yes.) and additional black and white snapshots (Staying Silent) with racists tracts, prisoner identity cards, and cruel government edicts (A Jap’s A Jap, When You Leave), he unites his family circle with documentary evidence of the racist rhetoric and vile treatment they experienced. For the first time he includes text, adding one more element and layer of information to the work. But language is also a strategy of miscommunication, and as set out in uneven Scrabble tiles or unreadable on jumbled shreds of paper, become like important messages difficult to decode (EO 9066, Possession of Navigational Charts). Finally, leaves and seedpods punctuate the arrangements, adding a lyrical and poignant note (Memories, Like Goes with Like).
Balancing Cultures alerts us in the most nuanced and powerful way, to the fact that our relationships to each other and the world are tenuous. At the merest shift of the social or political wind everything we know and care about can change. The cruel and unlawful imprisonment of Japanese Americans was generated by war hysteria, fear mongering, and bigotry, with no basis in factual evidence. Sadly, parallels can be drawn in the world today, as we see renewed discrimination and mistreatment based on the most basic human traits—fallacious divisions of race, religious beliefs and customs, and gender orientation and inequality. Such parallels are what make Balancing Cultures so relevant today, and also why the photographs have resonated so strongly everywhere they are shown, and have garnered multiple awards.
Balancing Cultures brings Takigawa to the heart of his exploration into his dual Japanese-American cultural experience. The discovery of his hidden family photographs was revelatory, and their integration into his body of work led to a deeper understanding of his Japanese heritage and contextualized the reality of social injustice as never before. In truth, he has spent forty years on this artistic path, as this retrospective collection clearly shows. He has created a personal language of transformation, and through his photographs we discover that his story is universal.
—Helaine Glick, Curator.
