Untitled

Photographer Shigemi Uyeda (1902-1980) immigrated to the United States at age fifteen, working in farming in the Central Valley, and later, in Lancaster. He was part of the artistic community of Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo in the 1920s and 30s.

This picture is small in size because it is a contact print—made by exposing the negative directly onto photographic paper, without using an enlarger. Uyeda stored his contact prints in albums that mixed his art photography with more intimate family snapshots. In this scene, a relay of glances links the on-shore spectators with the boatmen at the bow and stern.