ICP Incubator Space: Haruka Sakaguchi - The Camps America Built

In The Camps America Built, photographer Haruka Sakaguchi (b. 1990, Osaka, Japan) brings together portraits, landscape photography, personal testimony, and historical documents that reflect on the legacies of Japanese American incarceration during World War II. After Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, over 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—two-thirds of whom were U.S.-born citizens—were forcibly displaced from their homes and incarcerated in government-run concentration camps across the country. Since the end of the war, former incarcerees and their descendants have been making "pilgrimages" to these sites in search of healing and closure. In this project, Sakaguchi documents the ten camps as they stand today and the families who journey back to them. Each sitter is asked to handwrite a letter: for former incarcerees, a letter to their younger self when they were incarcerated, and for descendants, a letter to a former incarceree they are commemorating. As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, the project explores a critical question: what does it mean to be American?