In 1903, a Japanese immigrant named Frank Sakae Matsura moved from Seattle to Conconully, then to newly built Okanogan, from a cosmopolitan city steadily growing as a major trade and shipping center to what would have appeared to most city dwellers as the middle of nowhere. A handsome, impish extrovert, good old Frank quickly befriended seemingly everyone in the local communities. He also hauled quite of bit of photographic hardware to this apparent middle-of-nowhere; set up a photography studio and gift shop; and, as a beloved resident, proceeded to take thousands of photographs of its people, places, and events until his untimely, unexpected death caused by tuberculosis in 1913.
Matsura’s photographs were prized by the locals to whom he sold and gifted his work, and they gained limited recognition and circulation beyond: magazine illustrations used to entice potential homesteaders back east; celebrated submissions to the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle; scenes of industry and agriculture used in a 1911 Great Northern Railway advertising campaign; and the thousands of postcards sent by locals to family, friends, and others elsewhere.
After Matsura’s death, a substantial collection of his photographs, bequeathed to his friend Judge William Compton Brown, was donated as part of Brown’s estate to the Washington State University archives. However, thousands of fragile gelatin dry glass plates on which his photographs were recorded remained stored in a garage in Okanogan, undiscovered until the mid-1970s; the late historian JoAnn Roe selected and introduced some 140 of these photographs in an elegant, small-press book, Frank Matsura: Frontier Photographer, that was published in 1981.
Although it soon went out of print, the volume garnered sporadic attention for Matsura’s work over the next three decades. Since the 2010s, however, his photographs have started to appear with greater frequency and impact in small exhibitions throughout the Pacific Northwest, earning Matsura an ever-widening circle of admiration and appreciation.
Over the span of a near decade from 1903 to 1913, with unflagging enthusiasm and dedication, Matsura visited seemingly everyone and everywhere with his “magic box” and tripod in hand—sometimes with at least two, since several photographs portray Matsura posing with one of his cherished cameras. Hence, his photographic archive provides a comprehensive visual record of the region’s colonial settlement: infrastructural development including the founding of his adopted hometown, Okanogan, construction of Conconully Dam, installation of electricity and waterworks, planting of orchards, extension of the railroads, and arrival of automobiles. And he produced portraits—serious and playful, formal and casual—of Native peoples and settlers alike, adapting to the modernization of the Indigenous Plateau.