Henry Hiroshi Harada (1920 – 2018)

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About the Artist

Henry Hiroshi Harada was a southern California photographer who was part of the thriving community of Japanese-American photographers working in 20th Century Los Angeles. Born on November 8, 1920, in Yuma, Arizona, Harada was a Nisei (i.e. a second generation Japanese-American). By his teenage years, Harada was living in the Los Angeles area and attended University High School where he served as a yearbook photographer. In 1942, he was interned at Poston Concentration Camp, before securing a job in Ohio which facilitated his release from the camp. While in Ohio, Harada was drafted into the Army. In 1945, as he was on his way to Europe, Germany surrendered and Harada was reassigned to the language school at For Snelling, Minnesota, where he learned Japanese. He was assigned to the military intelligence service and was stationed in the Philippines and Japan. His body of work from this period includes portraits of US servicemen, Japanese prisoners of war convicted of war crimes, Japanese and Filipino civilians, landscapes, and cityscapes, both in the Philippines and Japan. After World War II, presumably with the support of the GI Bill, Harada studied photography at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles from 1947 through 1949, when he graduated. During this time, Harada also took on photographic assignments for design, fashion, architecture, and retail firms, including Dan Johnson Design and Morris of California. By 1950, Harada was living in the Little Osaka neighborhood of Los Angeles on Sawtelle Boulevard and the census from that year lists him as a professional photographer. He later worked in managerial roles in the photography departments of several defense contractors and in retirement, he taught photography at El Camino College. He died on December 21, 2018, in Gardena, California, at the age of ninety-eight.