This 31.5-by-35-inch near-square panorama portrays Fumi Hayashida in Seattle—one of the most iconic figures of Japanese American incarceration, photographed by Dorothea Lange in 1942 holding her sleeping daughter while awaiting forced removal from Bainbridge Island. Hayashi’s portrait documents this survivor decades after the famous wartime image.

Created in 1998, the work reconnects with one of incarceration’s most widely reproduced images. Lange’s 1942 photograph of Hayashida—the young mother in coat and headscarf, her infant daughter Natalie held against her shoulder, the numbered tag identifying her family for processing—became emblematic of the human dimension of mass incarceration.

The near-square format creates formal composition for a portrait weighted with historical significance. Fumi Hayashida in 1998 carries the memory of the young mother in Lange’s photograph, her survival and subsequent decades of life representing the continuation that incarceration attempted to interrupt.

The Seattle location connects to the Bainbridge Island community from which Hayashida and 227 other Japanese Americans were the first to be forcibly removed under Executive Order 9066. Their removal on March 30, 1942, preceded the mass removals from coastal areas that would follow.

The photo collage technique documents Hayashida across multiple perspectives, the assembled composition creating portraiture that the historical resonance of her story enriches. Hayashi’s portrait documents living testimony to events that Lange’s wartime photograph captured in their immediate occurrence.