Shadow Traces: Seeing Japanese/American and Ainu Women in Photographic Archives

by Elena Tajima Creef

Images of Japanese and Japanese American women can teach us what it meant to be visible at specific moments in history. Elena Tajima Creef employs an Asian American feminist vantage point to examine ways of looking at indigenous Japanese Ainu women taking part in the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition; Japanese immigrant picture brides of the early twentieth century; interned Nisei women in World War II camps; and Japanese war brides who immigrated to the United States in the 1950s. Creef illustrates how an against-the-grain viewing of these images and other archival materials offers textual traces that invite us to reconsider the visual history of these women and other distinct historical groups. As she shows, using an archival collection’s range as a lens and frame helps us discover new intersections between race, class, gender, history, and photography. Innovative and engaging, Shadow Traces illuminates how photographs shape the history of marginalized people and outlines a method for using such materials in interdisciplinary research.

188 pages, Hardcover

Published April 12, 2022

Reviews

[Miguel Fernandez · Rating 5 out of 5]

"This book is invested in the different ways we might look anew at historical images of Japanese/American and Ainu women not only because they offer us historical testimony in visual form but for their potential, once we jailbreak them from their archival frames, in helping us to ask new questions, give new answers, and experiment with nothing less than new ways of seeing" (128)

I really enjoyed this book because Creef's work was informed heavily by her background as a Japanese/American woman, daughter of a US soldier and Issei war bride (to put it reductively). Some might say that this bias can impede the research, but I don't care---I liked it. All research is informed by our interests and life experiences. Creef doesn't hide it, and, to me, this makes her book all the more compelling. Especially her last chapter, where she studies her mother's personal photo album as archive.