Los Angeles

By 1922, Wakaji was an active photographer in the Los Angeles photography community. By 1925 he was an assistant at Toyo Miyatake’s studio in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo.

Toyo was the son of the first Japanese confectioner in Los Angeles. Like Wakaji, he yearned to be an artist and did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps. After Toyo took a course with local photographer H. K. Shigeta, he bought the Paris Photo Studio in 1923 and renamed it the Toyo Studio LA. It would eventually become the best-known studio in Little Tokyo.

In 1926 and 1927, Wakaji produced extraordinary panoramas of Japanese American tenant farmers in the Los Angeles area. Families and their workers stood in the fields as if they were rooted in the ground like the produce they grew. These poignant photographs show the difficult challenges confronting Japanese Americans, as well as their resolve and resilience in facing those challenges. He also recorded activities from his own life, including his family farm, Little Tokyo, the produce market, and his children’s schools.

During the 1920s, Wakaji also created photographs as a form of personal expression. As a member of the Japanese Camera Pictorialists of California (JCPC) in Little Tokyo, he was at the center of an influential community recognized for its modernism. The club’s visual style was admired by members of the European avant-garde, such as Moholy-Nagy, whose compositions often used the same visual effects. While Little Tokyo seemed to be an isolated, almost insular ethnic enclave, such was not the case. JCPC photographers established extensive connections throughout the US, Europe, and Japan. Their work was exhibited in London, Paris, and Tokyo, and was reproduced in international publications.

Although Wakaji did not exhibit his work extensively, he presented six prints in the JCPC club’s first exhibition during 1926: California Field, Silent Under the Bridge, Road to Valley, Study, Parade, and In the Temple. None of these prints are known to exist today with the exception of In the Temple, which was taken inside the Hompa Hongwanji Buddhist temple when it was constructed in 1925. Although his output was small, his art photographs demonstrate his contributions to the vital photography community in Little Tokyo during the early 1920s.

JCPC members were also associated with Edward Weston and Margrethe Mather, both of whom were interested in Japanese art. Weston visited JCPC members’ studios and Mather juried the first exhibition of art photography in Little Tokyo that was sponsored by The Rafu Shimpo in 1924. 

Watch the video to learn more about Wajaki’s art photography and explore his work in three photo galleries.
 

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