Vancouver filmmaker Beth Harrington remembers visiting the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma 25 years ago to see an exhibition of mostly stoic-looking portraits of Native Americans taken by Edward Curtis.

She was struck, however, by a handful of playful, humorous portraits shot by one of Curtis’ contemporaries.

“The images were so powerful to me — they showed a relationship between the person in front of the camera and the person behind the camera,” she said. “Very palpable connection going on and, in many cases, a relaxed attitude from the people who were posing.”

That encounter introduced Harrington to Frank Sakae Matsura, a Japanese American photographer who documented Indigenous people in Okanogan County, Washington, during the early 20th century. It sent her down what she calls a “rabbit hole” of research that eventually became her new documentary about his life.

The 90-minute “Our Mr. Matsura” will screen Sunday at Vancouver’s Kiggins Theatre. The event accompanies a traveling exhibition of Matsura’s photography, on display at the Japanese American Museum of Oregon in Portland from Sept. 27 through Feb. 8, 2026.

Washington State University art professor Michael Holloman — a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation, which shares geography with Okanogan County — co-curates the exhibition, pairing period-specific regalia with Matsura’s photographs. Holloman appears in the documentary alongside descendants of Colville members and white settlers who visited Matsura’s studio in the town of Okanogan.

Holloman says Matsura’s portraiture stands out for its authenticity and self-directed style, avoiding the common practice at the time of portraying Indigenous people as a vanishing race.

“He’s not trying to ensure that he’s capturing something from an ethnographic perspective,” he said. “Local tribal people (who) came into his studio … (were) deciding how they wanted to look, so you can tell that engagement with Frank was not a paternalistic, hierarchical engagement.”

According to the documentary, Matsura was born in 1873 to a samurai family that had ruled in southwestern Japan before the Meiji Restoration dissolved feudalism.

With few written records available, Harrington and her researchers in Japan found Matsura’s early diaries and photos from his relatives, and connected with people at the Christian girls’ school and nearby church in Tokyo where he taught and attended.

They found that in 1901, the 28-year-old Matsura boarded a steamship from Yokohama to Seattle without telling his family and friends, becoming part of the first wave of Japanese immigrants to the U.S.

His writings never explained why he left Japan or when he learned photography. But Harrington says his Christian upbringing and sharp intellect helped him to adapt to American life.

“(In Japan) people were learning about Christianity in conjunction with learning English (and) using the Bible means speaking English,” she said. “He (spoke) English very well … he also stayed up late every night studying — sometimes it was astronomy, sometimes it was philosophy, and sometimes it was English.”

“That translated into how he adapted.”

Harrington adds that Matsura adapted so well he even learned to speak Chinuk Wawa — a pidgin of Nuu-Chah-Nulth, Canadian French and English used among tribes and fur traders — with his Indigenous clients.

Holloman says Matsura’s photographs helped bridge racial and gender divides: “He’s presenting these different groups in ways that they might not themselves interact, and that’s remarkable.”

Matsura died of tuberculosis in 1913 at age 40. The documentary recounts newspaper reports describing his funeral as the largest of its kind in Okanogan County, with 300 people in attendance. He was buried in Okanogan according to his family’s wishes.

His legacy endures, as Harrington saw during screenings of her documentary in Omak, Washington, in April.

“Six hundred people saw the film in two days, and at the Q&A session, several people got up … and said, ‘Look at us all sitting here in the same room.’ One of them was (Colville tribal elder) Randy Lewis, who was in the film. He said, ‘Frank has done it again.’

“People there still felt this connection to him a century later.”

Matsura came to the U.S. during a time of rampant discrimination against Asian immigrants and other populations of color. Harrington hopes her documentary can help break barriers between people, just as Matsura did in his lifetime.

“I’ve been trying to emulate Frank,” she said. “I do hope people might just pause for a second and think about how we can be kinder within our own communities.”

Listen to Beth Harrington’s interview with OPB “Weekend Edition” host Lillian Karabaic:

Editor’s note: Beth Harrington was a freelance producer with OPB from 1996 to 2020.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/09/27/frank-matsura-photographer-documentary-exhibit/