Janet Yoshii-Buenger (American, born 1949)
Untitled (Mother sleeping), from SFAI Photography Portfolio I, 1983
Gelatin silver print
Gift of Ralph Connor
1983.26.23
This photograph depicts Tsuya Yoshii, the photographer’s grandmother, asleep on her bed and surrounded by family mementos. Janet Yoshii-Buenger spent her formative years in the San Francisco Bay Area, growing up in Berkeley and attending the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI) where she earned her MFA in photography. Yoshii-Buenger’s photograph depicts her grandmother here as “the keystone holding the values and culture of our family together.” Seen through the reflection in the mirror of a dresser, we encounter the Yoshii family matriarch surrounded by a number of beloved objects, including gifts and toys given as gifts by her grandchildren, as well as many photographs of her children and grandchildren stacked in front of one another. This tender portrait offers an intimate view of a woman enveloped by meaningful objects—a testament to her successful efforts to build a life for her children and grandchildren as an immigrant to the United States.
In this candid moment, Yoshii-Buenger represents the layered experiences of an extended, Japanese-American family, which endured internment camps during World War II yet made a stable life in the Bay area for generations despite the hardship and destruction of forced relocation. In the years after the war, many Japanese-Americans maintained tight-knit communities by only marrying other Japanese-Americans, largely because of their shared experiences in the camps. This photograph comes from a larger series that Yoshii-Buenger describes as a “family tree in photographs.” In this scene of her grandmother at home, she brought together the shared experiences of Tsuya Yoshii’s children and grandchildren as Sansei (“third generation”), as the descendants of ethnic Japanese immigrants are commonly known in the Americas.
Trained as a photojournalist early on but more interested in making photography as art, Yoshii-Buenger studied at SFAI with the influential Bay Area photographer Linda Connor. This photograph was printed as part of a portfolio made by a group of graduate students at SFAI as a gift for Connor, an expression of gratitude to their teacher. At that time, SFAI hosted a vibrant community of photographers, including Linda Connor, Mike Mandel, Henry Wessel, Larry Sultan, Jack Fulton, and Reagan Louie. Yoshii-Buenger remembers Connor as an inspiring teacher and artist, and recalls that the atmosphere at SFAI allowed students great freedom in their work with photography. This atmosphere allowed Yoshii-Buenger to break out of the confines of any strictly defined genre of photography in favor of a freer way of practicing. Yoshii-Buenger later became a photography teacher herself, working with high school students for decades. This photograph is a layered tribute to the labor of Yoshii-Buenger’s grandmother, that of Connor as a teacher at SFAI, and to her own work as a photographer and teacher.
Jessica D. Brier, Deknatel Fellow in Photography, 2020-23
The information in this essay was gathered via a phone conversation with Janet Yoshii-Buenger conducted by the author on April 20, 2021.
