The samurai's son with a camera takes centre screen in Vancouver
A frontier photographer who died at 39 is getting his close-up in Vancouver.
Our Mr. Matsura, a documentary about photographer Frank (Sakae) Matsura, who lived from 1873 to 1913, is screening at the Vancouver International Film Festival in Vancouver, Canada, according to The Art Newspaper. The film is produced, written and directed by Beth Harrington. It traces a life that crossed an ocean and ended in a small town in the American West.
Matsura was born in Hirado, Japan, into a family of noble samurai lineage. Accounts describe him as the orphaned son of a samurai. He emigrated to the United States as part of the first wave of Japanese immigrants. He arrived in 1905, lived briefly in Seattle, then crossed the Cascade mountains to Okanogan County in central Washington state in 1907, where he opened and ran a photography studio.
In Okanogan, Matsura photographed and befriended two communities living side by side. His sitters included members of the Colville Confederated Tribes and newly arrived settlers, including miners, ranchers, shopkeepers and cowboys. Members of Indigenous communities allowed him to photograph them on reservations. Others travelled to his studio to commission formal portraits.
Festival notes point to the unexpected playfulness in his pictures. That humour, the notes say, reveals trust and intimacy between the man behind the camera and the people in front of it. The film runs 97 minutes and is presented in English and Japanese, according to Argo Pictures. VIFF describes it as honouring Matsura's legacy through photography, and programmes it in its Portraits series.
The 45th Vancouver International Film Festival runs 1 to 11 October. Its lineup includes more than 160 films and 85 shorts, alongside VIFF Live performances, talks and special events across the city. A screening at the Kiggins Theatre in Vancouver was accompanied by a travelling exhibition of Matsura's work, according to Oregon Public Broadcasting.
Matsura died of tuberculosis. He was 39.
What makes this stand out for a first-time viewer is how much fits into that short span. Samurai family. New immigrant. Small-town studio keeper. His glass plates hold miners and tribal families with the same direct attention, a record of a frontier moment that might otherwise have gone unseen.
