This 20-by-27-inch panorama portrays Mine Okubo in New York City—the artist and author whose illustrated memoir “Citizen 13660” (1946) became the first book-length personal account of Japanese American incarceration. The modest dimensions suit portraiture of this pioneering artist whose visual documentation preceded Hayashi’s own work by decades.

Created in 1997, the work documents Okubo late in life, decades after the wartime drawings that made her famous. “Citizen 13660” documented incarceration through Okubo’s own eyes—the assembly center at Tanforan racetrack, the Topaz camp in Utah—with drawings that combined artistic skill with documentary precision.

The New York City location reflects Okubo’s post-war career: she settled in New York after incarceration rather than returning to California, building an artistic career that included magazine illustration and fine art while continuing to speak about the wartime experience her book documented.

The near-square format creates balanced composition for portraying an artist whose own visual practice informed Hayashi’s documentation project. Okubo’s drawings and Hayashi’s photographs address the same historical events through different visual media, together creating layered testimony to incarceration experience.

Photographing Okubo represented meta-documentation: the photographer documenting the artist who first visually documented incarceration, the two women’s practices spanning sixty years of Japanese American testimony.