AN ARTIST'S CAMERA CAPTURES THE LANDSCAPES OF TRAGEDY.

Byline: Phillip Zonkel Staff Writer

MASUMI HAYASHI finds beauty in the grotesque.

As a photographer, her camera captures benign and bucolic American landscapes that conceal tragic histories, such as abandoned prisons and toxic waste sites.

``It's important for me to make the image more interesting,'' Hayashi says. ``Beauty as beauty doesn't satisfy all the needs I have for an image. I want people to keep coming back.'' Her latest exhibit might just do that.

``Sights Unseen: The Photographic Constructions of Masumi Hayashi,'' at the Japanese American National Museum, is a survey of 30 landscape photo collages. The images comprise five bodies of Hayashi's work: abandoned prisons, Environmental Protection Agency Superfund sites, Japanese-American and Japanese-Canadian World War II internment camps, portraits and sacred sites in Japan, India and Nepal.

``She's taken particular sites that have meaningful and poignant stories behind them,'' says Irene Hirano, president of JANM. ``It can cause the viewer to think about what these sites mean today and what they meant at the time.''

Hayashi's panoramic photo collages include as many as 140 individual photographs and as few as five. On location, the Cleveland State University photography professor shoots the photographs beginning on the horizon line, moving her camera horizontally in a circular rotation. She then angles her camera upward and repeats the circular rotation and then downward and repeats the process.

The photo collages portray anywhere from a 100-degree to a 540-degree view of the interior space or landscape.

The photographs are then assembled in Hayashi's studio, where she plays with the images to create large-scale panoramas. By using multiple images, rather than a single photograph, Hayashi captures her subject's complexity.

``Each of the component parts shows a lot, but they're very abstract,'' says Karin Higa, director of curatorial and exhibition development and senior art curator at JANM. ``That becomes a metaphor for experience, which often is abstract.''

Those techniques perhaps catch the eye most dramatically in her pictures of Japanese internment camps.

She inaugurated her series of photographs at Gila River, Ariz. - one of 10 World War II internment camps in America and also her birthplace.

Hayashi, 57, began the decade-long project in 1990. While driving from her California home to Cleveland, she stopped in Arizona and looked for the former internment camp.

More than 120,000 people - by some estimations, two-thirds of them American citizens - were interned under Executive Order No. 9102, which established the War Relocation Authority and required ``all persons of Japanese ancestry'' to report for internment. These actions primarily took place along the Pacific Coast.

The fenced camps were arranged in blocks, each one containing 14 barracks, one mess hall and one recreation hall on the outer edges. Households were assigned space in the frugal 100-by-20-foot family structures, which were made of wood and tar paper.

Work groups manufactured camouflage nets and ship models used as training aids for naval personnel. Vegetables and fruit were cultivated for camp and commercial consumption, and livestock was bred and raised.

In June 1946, the camps closed.

Hayashi's photo-collage at Gila River, where 13,000 people were interned, shows the remains of concrete foundations starkly set against a large expanse of sky and barren landscape.

``Hayashi feels these photographs are linked to not only the civil-rights issues going on right now with America, but how what we're being told isn't what's necessarily happening,'' Higa says. ``One of the most important things about her work is that things are never as they seem.

``That's clearly the case with the camps and the EPA sites. It's basically a snow job.''

Hayashi went on to photograph the remaining American camps in Arizona, California, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado and Arkansas, as well as Canadian-Japanese relocation camps in Ontario and British Columbia.

Hayashi says, ``It was wrong for these camps to be made. There are several reasons the government made for putting these people in camps. One was for their own protection - except when they were in the camp, the guards were trying to keep them in, as opposed to keeping anyone from going in. That wasn't real.''

Hayashi was only 1 year old when the Gila River camp closed, but she says the photographs hold a significant personal value.

``It was also my history. My parents didn't talk about it in the sense that the government was wrong. They talked about it in the sense that we were doing what we were told to do and the government was doing the best that they could,'' she said with a chuckle. ``I'm going, 'I don't know. Wait, let's look at that.'

``I felt I could discuss (the camps) more as art than I could discuss it with my parents.''

But as her project progressed, Hayashi found herself arguing with people over content and its meaning.

``I had one friend come into my studio. I told him I was photographing the concentration camps. He assumed it was Germany, and I'm going, 'No, no, no. This was here.'

``It's a dirty part of our history that we don't want to look at,'' Hayashi says, ``but it's always there.''

SIGHTS UNSEEN: THE PHOTOGRAPHIC CONSTRUCTIONS OF MASUMI HAYASHI

Where: Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. First St., Los Angeles.

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday; through Sept. 1.

Tickets: $6 adults, $5 seniors, $3 students and children, free for museum members and kids under 5. Call [phone] or www.janm.org.

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Photographer Masumi Hayashi's work can be seen at the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles through Sept. 1.