The 2019 Lange-Taylor Prize: Chinen Aimi: Finding Ryukyu | LENSCRATCH

The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University recently awarded its twenty-seventh Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize to Japanese American artist and documentarian Chinen Aimi. Her winning proposal, Finding Ryukyu, combines text and drawings with 35mm black-and-white photographs to investigate her various histories as a child born on the island of Okinawa, Japan (part of the island chain that was the Ryukyu Kingdom), to “an indigenous Ryukyu (琉球) mother and a U.S. Marine father,” as she writes, “the colonized and the colonizer.”