The Cuyahoga County Courthouse opened in 1912, when Cleveland was the sixth-largest city in America—a three-year, $3.5 million investment in marble, granite, and bronze announcing that Cleveland had arrived. The building was designed as a temple of justice: Beaux-Arts grandeur, Corinthian columns, allegorical sculptures representing Law and civic virtue. Architecture meant to inspire respect for democratic institutions through sheer beauty and permanence.

By 1986, when Masumi photographed it, Cleveland’s fortunes had collapsed. The steel mills had closed. The population had cratered. The Cuyahoga River had caught fire. The city had defaulted on its municipal bonds. Yet the courthouse remained, marble walls still gleaming, still dispensing justice while the economy crumbled around it.

For Masumi, a Japanese-American artist whose family was imprisoned during World War II without trial or due process, courthouses carried complicated meaning. Her Internment Camps series documented what happened when legal protections were abandoned, when racial prejudice overwhelmed constitutional rights. Photographing a temple of justice meant engaging with both the ideal and its failures.

Her panoramic technique seems particularly suited to the subject. Classical courthouse architecture assumes a privileged central viewing position—a single authoritative perspective from which the building’s symmetry reveals itself perfectly. Masumi’s collage disrupts this, assembling multiple viewpoints into composite vision. Many perspectives merging into one image. Perhaps that’s how justice should work too.