Moving Images of Japanese Immigration: The Photography of Haruo Ohara

Abstract

The photography of Haruo Ohara featured prominently in the cultural celebrations that marked the 2008 centenary of Japanese immigration to Brazil. His images appeared alongside nineteenth-century Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and the work of Japanese Brazilian artist Madalena Hashimoto in an exhibition held in the FIESP building in São Paulo, titled “Japão: mundos flutuantes” [“Japan: Floating Worlds”]. In the same year, Ohara’s family donated his archives, including around 20,000 negatives and a series of diaries dating back to the 1940s, to the prestigious Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) in Rio de Janeiro, home to the work of Marc Ferrez, José Medeiros, and others.¹ Ohara came to Brazil from Japan as an immigrant in 1927 during the strongest wave of immigration between the two countries. He and his family eventually settled in the city of Londrina in the state of Paranâ. Although he always remained a farmer, he became interested in photography during the 1940s and he built up a vast body of photographic work over the course of his life. Ohara’s photographs were “discovered” and celebrated as part of the eightieth anniversary in 1988, and his first solo exhibition took place in his home town of Londrina in 1998, a year before his death. The donation of the archive in 2008 marked Ohara’s consecration as what the IMS describes as “um dos fotógrafos mais expressivos do Brasil” [“one of the most expressive photographers in Brazil”] and the iconization of his images as representative of the experience of Japanese immigration to the country.