Sandy Sugawara and Catiana Garcia Kilroy: Show Me the Way to Go to Home

Show Me the Way to Go to Home is an immersive, visual journey through the incarceration camps that held 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War 2. Photographers Sandy Sugawara and Catiana Garcia Kilroy tell the story of each camp through original and archival photographs, personal stories, and government documents. It’s a frightening tale of a society that failed to protect its vulnerable.

Each camp’s story is printed on exquisite rice paper which is interwoven with dramatic landscapes. The design captures the multilayered feelings of anger, vulnerability, determination, cultural pride, and shared grief of those who lived in these camps. The book also contains an essay by Dr. Donna Nagata, Professor of Psychology at University of Michigan, who has conducted important research on the multigenerational consequences of the race-based incarceration of Japanese Americans. Today’s fragile and disturbing climate of intolerance makes it all the more urgent that this period of our history not be forgotten.

Sandy Sugawara is a Maryland-based photographer and journalist. After the death of her parents, Sandy turned her attention West, focusing on themes of family and memories through landscape. She has been photographing the incarceration facilities where Japanese Americans, including her mom and dad, were locked up during World War 2, capturing the sadness, pain, hope, strength and the range of other emotions present at these sites. Her photographs are held in public and private collections, and her work has appeared in a number of juried exhibitions around the country.

Catiana Garcia-Kilroy is a Washington, D.C.-based photographer and development economist. In her photography she seeks to recreate the experience of place, whether it is through single images of overlooked details or places, or in more elaborated narratives, linking landscape to the memory of personal stories and historical events.  In addition to her work on Show Me the Way to Go to Home, she is also working with Sandy on a project about the Crystal City Enemy Detention Facility, where descendants of nationals from the Axis nations, kidnapped by the US Government from Latin American countries, were detained for a prisoner exchange program.