Little Tokyo's Resurrected Portraits
Mike Saijo in collaboration with Yvette Marthell Family Portrait by Chikashi Tanaka 1920s Little Tokyo Glass print negative analog print 2025 resize.
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There's something poetically fitting about photographs rejected for being too damaged becoming the centerpiece of a groundbreaking exhibition. The glass plate negatives that the Japanese American National Museum turned away, contaminated with dirt, warped by moisture, their edges eaten away by time, now appear as large-scale reproductions towering over Azusa Street, announcing the full exhibition at the Los Angeles Center of Photography.
GLOWING EARTH, which opened in November and runs through January, represents more than artistic achievement. The outdoor posters on Azusa Street are the culmination of Mike Saijo's 15-year quest to bring art to these walls, navigating community concerns about vandalism and territorial politics with patient determination. Thanks to support from the Little Tokyo Historical Society and LACP, these vinyl prints now draw passersby toward the complete exhibition at the gallery.
The photographs themselves carry extraordinary weight. Shot around 1912 by Chikashi Tanaka from his 1st Street studio, they document the 20,000 Japanese Americans who fled to Los Angeles after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. These weren't just migrants—they were survivors rebuilding lives in unfamiliar territory, their faces now preserved in images the museum system deemed too imperfect to matter.
But imperfection is precisely what makes them powerful. Those decayed edges, the dirt trapped between glass layers creating abstract halos around faces, these "flaws" become visual metaphors for resilience itself. The damage doesn't obscure the subjects; it frames them in history's honest texture.
When Jon Tanaka, the photographer's great-grandson, asked Saijo to do something with his ancestor's rejected negatives, he sparked a resurrection. Saijo carefully separated the fragile plates. Jessica Marthell scanned them at high resolution. Now they exist both as exhibition prints at LACP and as public art reproductions on Azusa Street, the same "Cultural Pathway" where Pentecostal churches once stood when these portraits were new.
The street installation transforms historic Azusa Street into a gallery without walls, inviting the community to encounter their ancestors and reminding them that broken things still speak, that a century later, these faces still glow.