Picture Man

• Main Author: Hu Pegues, Juliana
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: University of North Carolina Press 2020
• Subjects: Yakutat; Alaska
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.5149/northcarolina/9781469656182.003.0005

Based on more than nine hundred recovered images, chapter 4 focuses on the life and photography of Shoki Kayamori, a Japanese cannery worker who settled in Yakutat, Alaska, in the 1910s. For three decades, he photographed the everyday activities of the town’s Native, Asian, and white residents, but, as World War II escalated, Kayamori committed suicide as rumors circulated that he was a spy. Kayamori’s photographs capture Asian immigrants within the Native place of Alaska as well as the complex sovereignty strategies of mid-twentieth-century Alaska Natives, approaches that exceeded settler temporality. Kayamori’s suicide, read alongside the internment of Unangax̂ and mixed Native-Japanese families, elucidates carceral violence and surveillance that reinforces the argument that, in Alaska, colonialism and militarism have always been intertwined processes.