(Gila River, Arizona, 1945 - 2006, Cleveland, Ohio)
1996
Panoramic collage of chromogenic prints
40 1/4 x 119 1/4 in. (102.4 x 303.0 cm)
Collection of the Akron Art Museum
Gift of Joan E. Baker in memory of Masumi Hayashi
2008.79
© Masumi Hayashi
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.