Seattle Camera Club photographs, approximately 1920-1939

Hiromu Kira was born on April 5, 1898 in Hawaii and grew up in Japan; he then lived in Canada before moving to Seattle in 1917. He bought his first camera in 1919 (a Kodak) and proceeded to reach himself photography, with the first exhibition of his work in 1923. Kira was one of the founding members of the Seattle Camera Club beginning in 1924, and later moved to Los Angeles in 1926. While in Los Angeles, he connected with members of the Japanese Camera Pictorialists of California, but did not join this club. Kira was recognized for his still life photos, in particular images of folded paper birds. His work was published in Camera Craft, Notan, Photo-Era. and the American Annual of Photography. For Kira, photography was not his full-time profession; he worked at a Seattle drugstore selling camera equipment and processing film. He also worked at T. Iwata's Art Store and for RKO Radio Pictures in Los Angeles as a retoucher. Kira died in Los Angeles on July 19, 1991.

Kusatora Matsuki was an amateur photographer who worked in a drugstore.

Yukio Morinaga was born on January 11, 1888 in Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan. After emigrating to the U.S. he moved to Seattle in 1907. He and fellow photographer Hiromu Kira worked for Mr. Yasukichi Chiba, who was also an amateur photographer and like the two men, a founding member of the SCC. Morinaga and Kira worked in the camera department of the store and they often socialized with Dr. Kyo Koike who had his medical practice a few blocks away. Koike and other SCC members relied on Morinaga’s darkroom expertise to print many of their exhibition photographs.

Fred Yutaka Ogasawara was born in 1883 and was one of the founding members of the Seattle Camera Club. He later lived in Portland and was one of the most internationally exhibited members of the SCC. Ogasawara returned to Japan before WW II; unfortunately, very little of his work and biographical information about him has survived.

Soichi Sunami was born in Okayama, Japan on February 18, 1885. He emigrated to the United States in 1905 and arrived in Seattle on February 24, 1907. He became interested in photography as a young art student when he was part of a group of young Issei modern artists in Seattle who studied under Fokko Tadama. By 1918 he was living in Tacoma, where he worked as a cook, but shortly thereafter he returned to Seattle and found employment in Ella McBride’s studio. Sunami exhibited in the first Frederick & Nelson Salon in 1920, where he was one of only a few regional artists to be presented with an award. The following years, he participated in the North American Times Exhibition of Pictorial Photographs represented by six works. A few months later, he was awarded two additional prizes in the Frederick & Nelson Salon. In 1922, he moved to New York City to pursue his art studies. Soichi maintained his contacts in the Pacific Northwest, although he lived in New York. He exhibited with the Seattle Camera Club (SCC) in 1926, where his single entry was a portrait of artist Walter Kethmiller. The following year, he exhibited a chloride photograph titled Claire de Lune in the third SCC annual salon. According to his widow, Sunami, like Fred Yutaka Ogasawara, was an out-of-state member of SCC. He later worked for the Museum of Modern Art and produced over 20,000 large-format negatives for the museum's archives. Soichi Sunami died on November 12, 1971.

John Bertram Eaton was born in England and emigrated to Australia with his family eight years later. His father ran a small gallery and framing shop in Melbourne, where Eaton began work. In the early 1920s his photographs were included in local and international exhibitions, and in 1921 he joined the Victorian Pictorial Workers Society. Four years later he held a solo exhibition of 124 photographs, nearly all of them landscapes. He became a founding member of the Melbourne Camera Club and remained a prolific exhibitor into the late 1940s.

James Wallace Pondelicek was an award winning pictorialist photographer from Chicago who was active during the 1920's. His photographs often consisted of Art Deco fantasy-themed idyllic nudes typically taken along the shores of Lake Michigan and high society commercial portraiture of Chicago's rich and beautiful. His work appeared in the Art Deco era periodicals Theater Magazine and Shadowland - Expressing the Arts. As the onset of the Great Depression made work scarce, and in the midst of a messy divorce from his wife, the artist killed himself by a self inflicted gunshot in 1929.

Rovere Scott worked in San Francisco and lived in Berkeley.