Masumi Hayashi was an artist, photographer, and professor whose photography gained international attention for its unique exploration of historical trauma, environmental degradation, and spiritual sites. Her signature medium—the panoramic photo collage—combined around one hundred individual photographs into unified, large-scale works that were both image and object, highly detailed yet expansive in scope.
Early Life and Education
Born September 3, 1945, at the Gila River Relocation Center in Arizona to Tomio and Sakae Hayashi, both of Japanese descent, Masumi's life and work were deeply influenced by her family's history. She was the fourth of six children, born into the Japanese American internment system that would later become the subject of her most significant artistic work. Her awareness of being a woman, a Japanese American, and a Buddhist in a largely Christian, white, male-dominated land shaped both her artistic vision and her choice of subject matter.
Hayashi earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from Florida State University in Tallahassee, where she began experimenting with photographic collage techniques around 1976-1977. During this period, she created autobiographical quilts by printing family photographs and documents onto fabric and sewing them together in grid structures—an early manifestation of the collage approach that would define her career.
Teaching Career
In fall 1982, Professor Hayashi joined the faculty at Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio, where she taught photography for over twenty-two years. Her dedication to education was matched by her commitment to expanding the field—she pursued post-college certification with honors in computer graphics from Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, Canada (1985), and continually incorporated new digital technologies into her teaching curriculum while maintaining her own analog artistic practice.
Artistic Evolution
Early Work: Photomosaics (1980-1985)
By 1980, Hayashi had turned to electrostatic printing as her principal medium, using color photocopiers to produce still lifes composed of lushly patterned fabrics, found objects, and images from popular culture and art history. These "photomosaics" ranged from 16 x 20 inches to 30 x 40 inches and incorporated airbrushing with acrylic paint. Her use of grid structures and the practice of imaging on a copier provided "a space for thinking sequentially about the construction of multifaceted pieces," establishing the foundation for her later panoramic works.
Transition: Life Forms, Simulated (1983-1985)
In 1983, Hayashi received a product grant from the Nimslo 3D Company to experiment with lenticular photography. Her series "Life Forms, Simulated" explored "the visual implications and sociological meanings behind the artificial, and sometimes mechanical, duplication of the human life form" using dolls, mannequins, and statues.
Breakthrough: Panoramic Photo Collages (1985-2006)
In 1985, during a week-long residency at the Kohler Art Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, Hayashi photographed a building interior by pivoting her camera through multiple frames—the first time she employed this technique. Returning to Cleveland, she began applying the method to document the city's abandoned factories and steel mills.
Her panoramic technique involved setting a 50mm focal length lens on a 35mm Nikon camera at eye level (approximately five feet) and systematically photographing in a 360-degree rotation, moving the camera twenty degrees with each shot. She would capture multiple vertical levels above and below the horizon line, consuming three to five rolls of film (108-180 exposures) per location. Each final collage comprised around 100 borderless prints (3.5 x 5 or 4 x 6 inches) assembled into a grid pattern with slight overlaps and spacing variations.
The resulting images appear believable at first glance but reveal fragmented, unstable space upon closer inspection. As Hayashi explained: "The normal two-point vanishing point can have three and four. The concept of a straight line connecting two points becomes a curved line connecting two vanishing points (flat walls become curved walls). Two-dimensional space is remapped, reconstructed."
Major Series
Post-Industrial Landscapes (1986-1990s)
Hayashi's first panoramic series documented Cleveland's Powerhouse (an abandoned 1892 power plant), steel mills in Youngstown, and other symbols of economic decline in the Rust Belt. These works meant "to be appreciated for their beauty on one level yet, on another, to create irony and tension."
EPA Superfund Sites (1990s)
Expanding her exploration of environmental and societal issues, Hayashi photographed toxic waste sites across Ohio designated for cleanup by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Abandoned Prisons (1990s)
This series examined institutions of confinement, including Eastern State Penitentiary and Alcatraz, exploring themes of isolation, control, and the architecture of punishment.
Japanese American Internment Camps (1990-2006)
Hayashi's most significant body of work documented the ruins of relocation camps where 120,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II. As a sansei (third-generation Japanese American), she brought personal connection and historical awareness to this project.
The work began in 1990 and evolved to include audio interviews with internees, family album snapshots, and eventually photo collage portraits of survivors. The landscape photographs reflected "history, memory and archeology," preserving both physical remains and emotional significance of sites disappearing from the American landscape.
Sacred Architectures (1999-2006)
During the final decade of her life, Hayashi explored a new direction—Asian temples and sites of ancestral worship. Her first photographic journey to India was funded by an Ohio Arts Council fellowship in 1999, followed by additional trips including a 2003 Fulbright research fellowship. This series raised her work to "a spiritual, healing plane," balancing the trauma explored in earlier projects with contemplation of the sacred.
Other Series
- War and Military Sites - Missile silos, B-52 graveyards, and military installations
- City Works - Urban architecture and public spaces, including commissions for Jacobs Field and Cincinnati Union Terminal
- Commissions - Public art projects throughout her career
Recognition and Exhibitions
Hayashi's work has been exhibited and represented in major museums and galleries internationally, including:
- International Center for Photography, New York
- Los Angeles County Museum of Art
- Japanese American National Museum, Los Angeles (2003 retrospective)
- Tokyo Museum of Photography
- Ludwig Museum of Art, Germany
- Victoria and Albert Museum of Photography, London
- Cleveland Museum of Art
Her photographs appeared in prominent publications including Doubletake (Fall 1997), Aperture (Beyond Wilderness, Fall 1990), Mother Jones (April 1995), Creative Camera (1993, London), and Die Zeit (1999, Germany).
Awards and Fellowships
- 1994 - Cleveland Arts Prize for Visual Arts
- 2003 - Fulbright Research Fellowship
- 1999 - Ohio Arts Council Fellowship
- 1997 - Civil Liberties Educational Fund Research Fellowship
- 1987 - Arts Midwest, NEA Fellowship
- Multiple - Ohio Arts Council artist fellowships and project grants
Artist's Philosophy
"Art is my life and when I have something to say, all that I'm interested in comes through in my art."
Her choice of subject matter always arose from personal concerns, even when not overtly autobiographical. She was keenly aware of her perspective as a woman, a Japanese American, and a Buddhist, and she expressed those tensions and that sense of difference through both technique and subject matter.
"These photographs are about beauty and irony, history and memory. The panoramic photo collages are a reconstruction of space, a remapping of space."
Her technique transcended photography's instantaneity. Each collage fragments space by combining individual moments into a unified picture that simulates the experience of being in a place rather than just viewing it. "The camera becomes my eyes... I have become the object," she said. "By viewing her collage, her experience and understanding of the place become ours."
Legacy
Masumi Hayashi died October 15, 2006. The Masumi Hayashi Foundation continues to preserve and promote her artistic legacy, ensuring her powerful explorations of history, memory, trauma, and healing remain accessible to new generations.
Through her art, Hayashi awakened people "gently but insistently to societal ills," applying "photography's most seductive traits—believability and formal beauty—to explore disturbing subjects." Her panoramic photo collages stand as permanent visual records of places that represent both trauma and resilience in American and world history, capturing what she called "memory, justice, and the enduring human spirit in the face of adversity."