Seattle Camera Club


The Seattle Camera Club was an organization of photographers active in Seattle, Washington, during the 1920s. It was founded in 1924 by Japanese immigrants and thrived for the next five years. The SCC was the only Japanese American photography club to include both Caucasians and women photographers as members, and because of their inclusivity their members were among the most exhibited photographers in the world at that time.

History

The 39 charter members of the club were all Japanese men. Unlike other prominent clubs of Japanese photographers, they decided at the beginning to welcome women and Caucasian members. The driving force behind the club's formation was Dr. Kyo Koike, who was a well‒respected medical doctor in Seattle's Issei community.
They held monthly meetings at 508½ Main Street near Dr. Koike's office. At these meetings members critiqued each other's prints and discussed current ideas about photography. Dr. Koike wrote about these discussions in their monthly bulletin, as well as descriptions of photography trips the members had taken, names of those members who had exhibited recently, and commentaries about photography in general.
The club's bulletin was called Notan, which is a Japanese term that roughly translates as “light and shade”. These were qualities that defined the primary elements of a Japanese style of pictorialism that most of the original members prized. Many of their photographs contained strong lighting and rhythmical patterns that emphasized the artistic quality of a scene.
In 1925 the club began its own salon, which originally featured photographs by its own members but later expanded to an international field of photographers. The artistic strength of their membership is indicated by the fact that in 1926 members of the club showed a collective 589 prints in different exhibitions around the world. That same year Photo‒Era magazine offered a trophy for the photography club whose members won the most awards in the magazine's competitions. The first winner of the trophy was the Seattle Camera Club.
The club reached its peak membership in 1925 with 85 members, including several photographers who in lived in other areas of the country. Two prominent Seattle women, Ella McBride and Virna Haffer, were among the club's members by that time. Only one‒quarter of the members then were Japanese Americans.
Soon thereafter the membership in the club began to decline, primarily due to increasing economic difficulties that led up to the 1929 Great Depression. Many members held low-paying jobs, and with increased prices and a scarcity of jobs they could no longer afford to buy film or other photographic supplies. On October 11, 1929 the club held a farewell meeting. Only 7 members attended, and they formally disbanded the club at that time.
Some of the more well-to-do members, like Koike and Matsushita, continued to make photographs and exhibit them when they could. All of their efforts ended with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December, 1941. Soon thereafter almost all of the Japanese American community in Seattle was transported to the Japanese American internment camps in Idaho or Montana.

Partial list of members