Decades after their families faced incarceration in Japanese American internment camps, visual artist Marina Berio and author-advocate Shirley Ann Higuchi sat down for a conversation about memory, photography and the legacy of wartime imprisonment.
In partnership with the National Gallery of Art and For Freedoms — an artist residency at GW that emphasizes civic engagement in art — Berio presented her self-published work, “Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President,” on Wednesday night to a group of around 40 people at the Flagg Building. The piece itself arrived as a folded envelope containing a poster, a glossary, 15 selected photographs and a 13-page letter addressed to former President Franklin D. Roosevelt, rebuking his role in the U.S. government’s 1942 incarceration of her family and thousands of other Japanese Americans during World War II.
After Berio discussed her work, Higuchi, the daughter of former incarcerees and the president of the Bar Association of the District of Columbia, discussed her family’s history and the political parallels of government discrimination to modern day. She also spoke to the importance of keeping the stories of the internment camps alive through the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation — an organization aiming to educate the public about the incarceration of Japanese Americans at the internment camp at Heart Mountain.
Berio said she was moved to more deeply examine her family’s history of incarceration after visiting the West Bank in 2010. Confronted with checkpoints, warning signs and the visible architecture of restriction, she said she began thinking about how governments can turn systems of control against people. In response, she created a series of works drawn from photographic negatives she captured there, including chalk renderings of stark scenes — among them the exposed wiring of a discarded mattress repurposed as a makeshift fence.
“This trip helped me connect viscerally and emotionally to the idea of being closed down, which allowed me to access my family’s history of incarceration during World War II,” Berio said.
Berio said she started working on the piece in 2022, and began the now-published piece in the months leading up to President Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024, drawing parallels between Japanese American history and modern-day American politics.
She said the letter opens up to an unknown incarceree’s photograph of Heart Mountain Relocation Center, which depicts guard towers and barracks. Addressed to FDR, Berio writes that she cannot forgive him for signing Executive Order 9066, which authorized the forced removal of over 120,000 Japanese Americans to internment camps in 1942 — including her grandparents, her uncle and her mother.
“You incarcerated my family — people who loved me, hugged and kissed me, cooked for me, made up silly bedtime stories for me, sang to me, played with me, and taught me how to knit — and for that, I can’t forgive you,” Berio said, reading the letter.
As Berio read excerpts from the letter, she projected accompanying images on a large TV at the front of the room. Several of the 15 photographs from the envelope — including memos, letters, a guard tower and scenes of people inside the internment camp — appeared on the screen, punctuating her words.
When a photo of women smiling as they walked around the camp appeared, Berio said she wondered if the photo was staged or not, forcing her to pay attention to the background details, like a man standing on the roof of a nearby barracks and the camp being built around the women.
“The picture makes me feel queasy at the perpetuation of stereotypes of Asian Americans that it conveys when the history of resistance is unhinged, we are left with a pictorial record that overwhelmingly shows compliance and acceptance,” she said.
In the letter, Berio reflects on the absence of documentation inside the internment camps, noting how much history was lost because the United States treated their personal records as contraband. The photographs she included, however, highlight those who risked repercussions to capture daily life within the camps. At the close of her 20-minute presentation, she spoke about reading her grandfather’s War Relocation Authority forms, which offered a rare official record of those who were incarcerated.
“I know you are unconcerned by their pain, a truthful visual record of their one-time experience does not exist, but their suffering settles into my thoughts anyway, as I sit and have my page as they touched evidence, at least, of the administration and bureaucracy of the war,” she said.
Following Berio’s presentation, Higuchi shared family photographs with the audience, recounting stories of her parents, who were incarcerated as children at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center. She reflected on the subtle ways her parents carried their experiences, emphasizing how their behaviors revealed the weight of that history even though they rarely spoke about their time in the camps.
“My parents didn’t really talk about it much,” she said. “My dad on the left was at University of Michigan for a long time, and he was pretty much a workaholic, constantly working. And I do believe that the workaholic and perfectionism is a byproduct of his incarceration experience.”
Higuchi noted that the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation also hosts the Mineta-Simpson Institute, named for former Sen. Alan Simpson, who grew up in Wyoming and visited the camp as a child, and former U.S. Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta, who was incarcerated at Heart Mountain with his family. She said Simpson and Mineta worked across the aisle in Congress and helped advance the foundation’s mission of fostering dialogue, protecting civil liberties and preserving the history of Japanese American incarceration during World War II.
“They made this an open area where people can come and discuss different views with the idea that we’re coming to the best decisions when the best minds come together,” Higuchi said.
