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About Ken Light:
www.kenlight.com

Ken Light was born in 1951 in the Bronx, New York.

He is a social documentary photographer, and educator, whose work has appeared in books, magazines, catalogues, on-line media and exhibitions. He is the author of eight books including, His most recent book Valley of Shadows and Dreams published in 2012 by Heyday. Coal Hollow published in 2006 by The University of California Press. His text Witness In Our Time; Working Lives of Documentary Photographers was published by the Smithsonian Institution Press in October 2000 and in a revised second edition in 2010. His photo book TEXAS DEATH ROW University Press of Mississippi was published in the fall of 1997. TEXAS DEATH ROW is a look at life inside the death house as the condemned wait to be executed in Americas largest and most active Death Row. This work was published in Newsweek Magazine (6 pgs) , Paris Match (France-8 pgs.), Tempo (Germany-6pgs), London Telegraph, Nieuwe Revu (Amsterdam-6 pgs) and in Japan and Korea, Holland, Denmark, Mexico, Spain, Italy as well as on MSNBC on line , 60 Minutes and numerous documentary films
He is also the author of DELTA TIME published in 1995 by the Smithsonian Institution Press. This book looks at rural Black poverty, cotton, and the southern landscape and has 104 photographs and an essay by legendary civil rights organizer Bob Moses. This work has been published in VSD in Paris, Granta, the London Independent, Spanish Elle with Walker Evans and in the Academy Award nominated documentary film Freedom on My Mind. His other books are TO THE PROMISED LAND (Aperture 1988) WITH THESE HANDS (Pilgrim Press 1986) and IN THE FIELDS (Harvest Press 1982) which examine the lives of farm workers and their journey from Mexico illegally to the United States.
He has exhibited internationally in over 200 one-person and group shows including one person shows at the International Center of Photography (NYC), Visual Studies Workshop (Rochester), San Jose Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum of California, Smith College Museum of Art, Visa Pour L’IMAGE (France) and is the collection of numerous collections including the San Francisco MOMA, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the International Center of Photography and the American Museum of Art at the Smithsonian. He has received four National Endowment for the Arts grants including two Photographers Fellowships, the Dorothea Lange Fellowship and a fellowship from the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation.
He is a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley and 2012 Laventhol Visiting Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has taught workshops at the ICP in New York City, The Missouri Workshop, Anderson Ranch, the S.F. Art Institute and the School for Photographic Studies in Prague. He was editor of the University of California Press series on contemporary photography and a founder of the International Fund for Documentary Photography which awarded grants to photographers internationally and Fotovision.org anon-profit documentary organization based In San Francisco, California. He is associated with the editorial photo agency Contact Press Images in New York City.

Web site/www.kenlight.com
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About Paul Kitagaki Jr.:
Paul Kitagaki Jr. has been a senior photographer at The Sacramento Bee since 2003. During his 34-years as a photojournalist he has worked at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Oregonian, the San Jose Mercury News, the San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco Progress and the San Mateo Times. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in broadcasting from San Francisco State University 1978.
Kitagaki has covered the Olympic Games in 1984, 1996, 2002, 2008, 2010 and 2012.
He recently photographed the 2012 summer Olympics games in London. He also has covered numerous national stories, as well as international events from Vietnam to Iraq. His awards include being named California photographer of the year in 1990, National Press Photographers BOP, Pictures of the Year, POYi, San Francisco Bay Area Press Photographers Association, McClatchy President’s Award 2004 and sharing in the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Loma Prieta earthquake while at the San Jose Mercury News in 1990.
He is associated with the news photo agency ZUMAPRESS in San Clemente, California and Corbis.

ABOUT THESE IMAGES:

Paul Kitagaki Jr.:

70 years ago the first group of first-generation — Issei — and second-generation — Nisei — Japanese-Americans, were lead into assembly centers set up in racetracks and fairgrounds on the West coast under guard by United States Army soldiers. There they would spend months behind barbed wire fences living in horse stalls or in temporary shelters. Their difficulties would only increase. Ultimately, they were sent to permanent internment camps in desolated locations away from the west coast.
In the early 1980s I learned from my uncle Nobuo Kitagaki that acclaimed documentary photographer Dorothea Lange photographed my grandparents, father and aunt in 1942 as they awaited a bus in Oakland to begin their journey into detention until the end of the war. I gathered my family and photographed them at the same Oakland departure point six decades after they had been sent away.

Lange made over 900 images of the families held in the internment camps for the War Relocation Authority. I have been searching since 2005 for the identities of Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans whose images of forced relocation were captured by Lange and the other War Relocation Authority photographers.

Lange’s photographs documented the moment my family’s lives changed forever. I want the body of my work to mirror the original photography, showing the subjects’ strength and perseverance. I want the faces and voices to reach out and tell their stories of how this Presidential act changed the future of ethnic Japanese in America.
My hope is to gather enough stories for a book for a book project and gallery exhibition with an interactive component that allows you to listen to the subjects as they tell their story.
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