Jun Fujita: American Visionary

Jun Fujita: American Visionary

by Newberry Library

Jun Fujita: American Visionary, copresented by the Newberry Library and the Poetry Foundation, focuses on the extraordinary accomplishments of poet and photojournalist Jun Fujita. This exhibition presents an expanded version of Jun Fujita: Oblivion, first mounted at the Poetry Foundation in 2017, and explores Fujita’s poetry, photojournalism, landscape photography, and uncommon life and love.

Born outside of Hiroshima in 1888, Fujita came to Chicago in 1909, becoming the first Japanese American photojournalist. As an English-language tanka poet, he published regularly in Poetry during the 1920s; as a photographer, he captured many of the most infamous moments in Chicago history, including the Eastland Disaster, the 1919 race riots, and the St. Valentine’s Day massacre.

Throughout his work, Fujita put forward a vision of what “American” can mean, achieving unprecedented success in his profession despite the hostility, prejudice, and persecution he faced as a Japanese native.

OrganizerNewberry Library

Organizer of Jun Fujita: American Visionary

The Newberry is an independent research library that supports and inspires scholarship, teaching, and learning in the humanities. Our collection—some 1.6 million books, 600,000 maps, and 5 million manuscript pages—is a portal to more than six centuries of human history, from the Middle Ages to the present. We connect people with this history in the Newberry’s reading rooms, program spaces, exhibition galleries, and online digital resources.