This week’s Wokepedia project was near and dear to my heart.  The Seattle Camera Club was a groundbreaking, interracial, gender-inclusive group of mostly Japanese-American photographers pioneering photography as fine art around the start of the previous century.  They were internationally respected, influential, amazing artists –including my own grandfather, Soichi Sunami.  But the club was broken up by the start of World War II, most of its Japanese-American members were deported to internment camps and the club, its members, and their work largely passed onto obscurity.

However, more recently the Seattle Camera Club has experienced a renaissance (due in no small part to the efforts of art historian extraordinaire, David F. Martin).  It’s time for Wikipedia to reflect that.

There was already a good article on the club as a whole, but relatively few members had their own pages.  I fixed that.  One key resource was a great website put together several years ago by singer Kathy Muir, who used the Camera Club’s art in one of her music videos.  Unfortunately that website recently went defunct.  Thankfully I was able to rescue a number of the pages using the Web Archive.  Many other member were documented well in other sources, so I was able to get all their pages reviewed and approved without too much struggle.  I did have one bobble, when I created a page planning on going back later and adding the citations.  By the time I went back it had already been deleted!  Undaunted, I recreated it, with citations this time, and managed to get it to stick.