Panel Discussion: Photography, Memory and Social Justice
Sat Feb 14, 2026 | 3:30–5 PM
Tamio Wakayama, Burnt cross at Freedom School, Pascagoula, Mississippi, c. fall 1964, 1964, archival inkjet print, Estate of Tamio Wakayama
Join us for a powerful conversation with Judy Richardson and Masaru Edmund Nakawatase, former staff organizers with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), alongside community advocate Kiyoko Judy Hanazawa and moderated by Dr. Desirée Valadares, Assistant Professor and affiliated faculty in Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies.
Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Enemy Alien: Tamio Wakayama, this panel explores documentary photography as a tool for social critique and cultural witnessing.
The discussion traces a lineage of socially engaged photography—from Depression-era America and the work of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange to Tamio Wakayama’s photographic documentation of Japanese Canadian internment and racial injustice. Centering Wakayama’s work, panelists examine intersections between the Japanese Canadian Redress Movement and the US Civil Rights Movement, highlighting photography’s role in preserving memory, expressing resilience and documenting social struggle.
Through a transnational lens, the panel considers how visual histories of resistance continue to inform movements for rights and redress and how past struggles shape contemporary activism and social justice efforts.
This talk is free for Experiences and Artist Circle Members and ticketed at the reduced price of $5 for Ideas Members and $10 for Access Pass Holders. For non-members, the talk will be $10 in addition to the cost of Gallery admission.
Registration is required. Space is limited. Seating is first come, first served. Priority will be given to those who register. Doors will open at 3 PM.
If cost is a barrier to you or if you have any access requests for this event, please reach out to learn@vanartgallery.bc.ca or call 604 662 4700.
This event is an initiative of the Gallery’s Centre for Global Asias and is being presented as part of our 2026 Celebrating Black Futures programming.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Kiyoko Judy Hanazawa is a community advocate who works with the Greater Vancouver Japanese Citizens’ Association and is a representative at Act2EndRacism National Network. She used to work for the BC Ministry of Children and Family Development and was a member of the British Columbia College of Social Workers.
Masaru Edmund Nakawatasee is a community organizer and longtime social justice advocate. Born in the Poston internment camp in Arizona and raised in Seabrook, New Jersey, he began his activism in the 1960s working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Atlanta. He spent more than three decades with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), serving as a community organizer, national staff member of the Third World Coalition and, from 1974 to 2005, as National Representative for Native American Affairs. Nakawatasee has continued his advocacy through board service with Asian Americans United and the Folk Arts–Cultural Treasures Charter School and through leadership in racial and social justice initiatives.
Judy Richardson is a documentary filmmaker, civil rights activist and educator. A graduate of Swarthmore College (1966), she was a staff member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), working in Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and at its national office in Atlanta during the 1960s. Her experiences in SNCC continue to ground both her film and education work. She most recently produced the Frederick Douglass visitor centre film for the National Park Service’s site at Cedar Hill in Washington, DC. She is currently working on four museum films, including those for the civil rights museums in Memphis and Atlanta. In 1968, she was a co-founder of Drum & Spear Bookstore, once the country’s largest African American bookstore. She was a researcher and the series associate producer on the landmark PBS television show Eyes on the Prize. With Northern Light Productions she continues to produce documentaries for PBS, the History Channel and museums. She co-edited the publication Hands on the Freedom Plow: Personal Accounts by Women in SNCC, a compilation of the testimonies of 52 SNCC women. She co-directed two National Endowment of the Humanities teacher institutes, co-hosted by Duke University, and focused on teaching grassroots movements in the South (1940-1985). She is a member of the SNCC Legacy Project board, was a Visiting Professor at Brown University, and has an honorary doctorate from Swarthmore College (PA).
Dr. Desirée Valadares is an Assistant Professor of Geography and an Affiliate Faculty in Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) at the University of British Columbia. Valadares is trained as an architectural historian, urban designer and landscape architect. Her research centres the preservation and heritage politics of former Second World War confinement landscapes, including prisoner-of-war and civilian internment camps in Hawai’i, Alaska and British Columbia. Her research engages questions of community memory, redress, land tenure and heritage preservation at wartime incarceration sites in Canada and the US. She draws insights from archival research and place-based research methods, including participation in annual pilgrimages, architectural drawing and photography, in addition to engaged methods such as landscape archaeology, gardening, salvage and recovery of built fragments of these landscapes.
