When did you start your Americana series?

I started it back in the winter of 1986 when I took a road trip from LA to Texarkana. A friend and I loaded up our 4x5, Medium Format, and 35mm cameras and hit Interstate 10 heading east through California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. We would stop wherever we liked and drink 10-cent mugs of coffee at truck stops in the truck driver sections. We drove all night from Phoenix straight through New Mexico to reach the Cadillac Ranch at dawn. We skipped New Mexico, which was a shame because it’s amazing, but we were trying to get to Texas for Christmas. We spent Christmas Eve in Dallas and Christmas Day in Texarkana. We explored small towns with streets that have completely disappeared today. Thinking about it today shows you that you can never go back as the world is in constant change.

Tell me a bit more about the ghost towns that you photograph. What makes them so special?

For a town to be named a ghost town in the US, it doesn't have to be completely abandoned. There can be people living there. However, what makes it a ghost town is people moving away, maybe due to industries closing. There isn’t any new technology. There aren't any new buildings going up. It might have the minimal necessities, or be completely barren.

When I visit these ghost towns, I love the minimal and stripped-back feeling. I like that it feels old and from a different time. That’s probably why I don’t put people in my photographs. I want to maintain the timelessness of the place and I want it to look old. I've always felt that in my photography ever since I started, and I've been doing photography for a long time.

When I started out doing commercial photography, I started figuring out a way that I could add my art to these commercial projects. I started doing period pieces where I would recreate people and moments of the past, maybe an old football player or a carhop from the 50s or 60s. I don’t do that anymore but I always felt like I was from a different time.

It’s funny because I would mention this to my mom, and she would say, “You wouldn't want to live back then because of all the racism.” She was Japanese and came to America, married my dad, and faced a lot of racism just for being a Japanese woman in Texas. Then they moved to California and everything was fine. Now things are a bit different, too, I guess.

When I go back to these places, these ghost towns, I feel like I’m in the past, in a different time.

It’s difficult to tell that your photographs were taken in the twenty-first century. I can imagine that’s on purpose.

Well, I do that subconsciously and consciously, intentionally and unintentionally. When I'm framing something, I'll try and eliminate anything that's part of the present. Here in Seattle for example, if you see a really cool hotel that’s from the 50s or 60s, there's usually something next to it, a car park that clearly sets it in 2024. When I go to a ghost town, that car park isn’t there. If I go to a town in California in the desert or Arizona, and Nevada, I can usually get a scene that doesn't have new technology or new buildings and it just seems to be that way.

You studied commercial photography at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. How did your full-time career as a photographer start? 

In the Art Center, you can work with designers. It’s like a real-world situation where you have graphic designers and photographers coming together to produce an end product. A few projects that I did were using period pieces, and I built my whole portfolio around this period-type photography. That was in the mid-80s, so pre-digital.

After the Art Center, I worked in LA as a studio manager for a car shooter. A year into that I learned that I didn't want to be a car shooter. It was too hard and too many hours. You'd spend from 7pm to midnight every night shooting cars. I didn't like that.

I got my portfolio together again and I thought, “maybe I want to work in Japan.” My parents were living in Japan at the time. I sent my work to different ad agencies in Japan just to see what they would say. A bunch of them wrote back, including Dentsu, which was the number one biggest ad agency in the world back in those days. When I met them in Japan, they even had a translator and everything. I sat with them for two hours in their office and then another three in a cafe. They loved my period photographs and also loved the ones I took of Japan. They said, “We like them because it's how an American sees Japan and not how a Japanese person sees Japan.” They told me to come out there to work and that they’d give me a gallery show. It was kind of scary going to a foreign country. But also cool, too.

While I was in Japan, a company out of Wisconsin offered me a job to shoot in their studio. It was a studio of twelve photographers and by then it was the late 80s. At that time, the industry was booming in Wisconsin. So I take the job and once I get there, they hand me a Hasselblad, a light meter and I start shooting industrial stuff every day. I got so much experience in the eight years that I was there. Then I came to Seattle to open my own studio, about 30 years ago. Thinking back, what really launched me into my photographic career was all that period stuff I first got into.

In your opinion, how does the industry compare to today?

I don't know if I would want to be a photographer starting today, especially here in Seattle.

You have these retail companies that have their own studios and pay photographers next to nothing to shoot their products. Thinking about it, I did go through that for a bit, but then I started working for bigger clients, like Nordstrom, whom I shot their catalogs for about six years. After COVID, they stopped doing that so I lost that client, and most of my other retail ones as well.

I had to pivot, so I started doing industrial work. Fortunately, since I’m a jack-of-all-trades, I could adapt and it was great for me. I’m not just photographing retail fashion, product, or lifestyle. I’m doing everything. One of the clients that I've had for the last 40 years is John Deere; they're a manufacturing company making tractors and agricultural equipment and machines. So we decided to shift our studio’s style and now I travel all over the world shooting industrial photography.

Being someone who can shoot a lot of different styles of photography has worked out for me. Sometimes you hear many people say, “You have to have a certain style and you need to focus on retail, fashion, or whatever.” But that's not true, especially in times of economic demise.

I consider myself to be a jack-of-all-trades commercial photographer and a fine art photographer at the same time. One day while chatting with the Head of the Photography Department at Art Center, he told me something that I have remembered and quoted all my life: “A fine art photographer can wake up in the morning and decide he doesn’t want to be creative that day. A commercial photographer wakes up in the morning and has to be creative that day.” I’ve always been a fine art photographer by heart but commercial photography has taught me how to see light by visualization and having to recreate it to sell a product.

We love that. Can you expand on this concept a bit, about seeing light by visualization and having to recreate it to sell a product in commercial photography? 

On a commercial project, an art director shows you a layout and says, “This is what we want to create to sell our ad.” Sometimes, you’ll get a photographer who won’t really know what to do and will take them a long time to work out the light. Whereas if you can pre-visualize what the light is going to look like, then you can create it.

In fine art photography, when I'm shooting a photograph for my Americana series, I'm not bringing lights. I'm just dealing with the light that's there. I may be on a road trip passing through Vaughn, New Mexico, at noon. I have to make do with the light that’s there at that specific time. Maybe then I go to Tucumcari and it’s five o’clock and there’s a beautiful light coming through. It all depends on where you are at any given time during a road trip.

You shoot a lot of typography. Why does this interest you?

I gravitate to it as a design element and the story it tells. Maybe the specific typeface, or even what it says. A building that just says ‘beauty’ on it could mean a lot of different things. Most of my photographs incorporate type, which might even be subconscious, to be honest. You look for the text ‘Color TV’ or ‘Motel’ in a very specific and unique typeface, and it can tell the story that you want it to tell. I’m not just trying to take pictures of a historic sign or important piece of American typographical design; what I’m doing is trying to incorporate them into larger compositions. 

How do you manage your time between your commercial and personal projects? We can imagine that you have a calendar filled with your commercial projects, and then in between, or if you’re traveling, you try to fit in your personal projects. And maybe whenever you know you’re going to pass through something interesting, you do your research and try to go prepared. Did we get it right?

That's exactly what I do. I travel so much now. I was supposed to go to Louisiana next week, but that got postponed due to the rain. I was looking forward to it because Louisiana has some great small towns. The week after next, I'm going to Arizona to shoot in the middle of the desert. Unfortunately, not by Route 66 which would have been fun. Then I’m going from Arizona through California to Oregon. After that, I'm going to Las Vegas for a week for a shoot.

I’m going from not working in January to working every day through March. It's crazy. But yeah, that's what I'm hoping to do, taking time in between the commercial projects for my own stuff. I find I get the best photographs when I plan a trip with the end goal being taking photographs like the ones in Americana.

During one trip I did in 2019, right before the COVID pandemic hit, I rented a car in Moline, Illinois, and drove down through Iowa and into Missouri. I crossed Missouri three times, into Kansas, down to Oklahoma and across it, then through the Texas Panhandle and back across the state. I did that in five days. I find I can get tons of photographs because all I'm doing is thinking about that work. I'm not thinking about anything else but driving and finding the places I want to photograph. 

Your photo trips are planned while your photographs feel spontaneous. Tell us a bit more. 

When I find myself in a city, like New York or Paris, I often enjoy shooting street photography because I enter a trance-like state. A state where you’re looking and feeling your surroundings, and pointing your camera and shooting. You’re in motion, the city is in motion, and the people are in motion. And that’s the same when I’m out by myself shooting in a ghost town. I’ll be thinking about the place and enter a trance. It’s like the surrealists’ practice of automatism, where the artist suppresses conscious control over the making process, allowing the unconscious mind great sway.

It's also like when you're driving a car and you're deep in thought. Then all of a sudden you realize you’ve driven a mile and you don’t know how you got there. Your subconscious takes over and you get to where you want to go or photograph whatever it is you want to photograph. 

And I guess you enter that trance-like state when you’re in between those pre-planned stops on your trip.

Yeah, exactly. Everywhere in between those main stopping points is spontaneous. On this one trip, I went to Clayton in Oklahoma to find an old hotel that would be demolished. Luckily, it wasn’t so I managed to photograph it. Along the way, I found many other things and places. I stopped in little towns like Electra, Texas, and photographed them.

Have you noticed a growing interest amongst young people in going to these places and taking photographs?

Yeah, definitely. In the 80s, I had a teacher who told me, “There are a lot of people out there who are great photographers, but all of their pictures are in drawers.” Now with digital photography, everyone can easily get their pictures out there. Before digital, many people didn’t have the means to express themselves through photography because you needed to have a darkroom and you had to print. Whereas now, you can get a digital camera, shoot something, upload it, and post it online. Regardless of if it’s good or not.

For me, photography is not meant to be online. A photograph is meant to be in print, to be held, to be hung up on the wall. A photograph can’t just be experienced online through a screen. That’s why I’m glad I’m not a learning photographer these days. I want to be able to pick something up, look at it up close, and hang it up on the wall. For me, that’s my end product.

INTERVIEW FROM TWO ITALIAN RASCALS MAGAZINE - ISSUE 3 AMERICAN DREAM