This 29-by-41-inch panorama portrays Eji Suyama in the Badlands of South Dakota—a Japanese American survivor of wartime incarceration photographed in dramatically American landscape. The substantial dimensions suit environmental portraiture that places Suyama within terrain embodying the mythic American West.

Created in 2002, the work documents Suyama in landscape far from any Japanese American population center—the Badlands’ eroded formations creating backdrop that ironizes the “American” identity that incarceration denied Japanese Americans during World War II. The Western setting invokes frontier mythology while documenting a survivor of the nation’s failure to extend constitutional protections to its own citizens.

The Badlands location creates visual tension between Japanese American subject and quintessentially American landscape. The eroded formations—dramatic, desolate, iconically Western—provide ironic commentary on belonging and exclusion that incarceration represented.

The photo collage technique places Suyama within this Western panorama, the assembled composition documenting both individual presence and landscape context. The fragmented assembly captures the Badlands’ dramatic geology while maintaining focus on the human subject whose history the setting implicitly references.

Environmental portraiture in such locations extends documentation beyond residential settings to landscapes that carry national symbolic weight. Suyama in the Badlands asserts presence in American territory that wartime policy had effectively denied to Japanese Americans.