(Gila River, Arizona, 1945 - 2006)
1996
Panoramic collage of chromogenic prints
Collection of the Akron Art Museum
Gift of Joan E. Baker in memory of Masumi Hayashi
2008.79
When Hayashi learned that the Canadian government, following the U.S., incarcerated Japanese Canadians after Pearl Harbor, she made it a goal to photograph Canadian camps, as well as American ones. To photograph a scene, Hayashi began at the horizon, shot, rotated her 35 mm camera slightly, shot again and continued until she covered 360°. Then she repeated the process for the higher, then the lower parts of the scene. To assemble an image, she trimmed prints to whatever sizes she needed; the result is often not a uniform grid. She occasionally cut along the edges of objects, such as the mountains in this image. Most of Hayashi’s collages use 4 x 6 or 5 x 7 inch prints, but she made some larger scale works using bigger prints.