Masumi Hayashi: Collaged Photographs 1976-2006

Masumi Hayashi (1945-2006) was best known for her technique of creating photo collages by suturing together images into a grid format. Exploring a range of subjects, Hayashi trained her lens on Rust Belt landscapes, EPA Superfund sites, Japanese American internment camps from World War Two, and decaying prisons. With these sites as her points of departure, Hayashi crafted images with multiple perspectives, creating panoramas where seams unabashedly cut across landscapes. Using a format typically associated with tourism, the panorama, Hayashi's images are instead attuned to the way social ills are expressed in space, extending views of landscape and infrastructure that exceed 360 degrees. This gesture of both expanding perspective and cutting up the visual field thus compels viewers to contemplate a landscapes making and the evidence of human intervention that is often left behind.