The make-or-break moment for Yoichi Okamoto happened in Syracuse. In 1941, he was a young and talented Japanese-American photographer, working for The Post-Standard, when Japanese bombers attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States stepped into World War II.
Years later, Okamoto would occasionally reflect during visits to Syracuse on the instant barriers he faced, in every way. As his good friend Joe Ganley, the late Post-Standard columnist, once wrote with understated power of that moment in time and Okamoto: “Things got difficult on the job.”
What that meant – at a time when a wave of national fear and hatred would soon lead to the forcible internment of more than 100,000 Japanese-Americans, echoes of an approach to immigration enforcement being felt today – is that Okamoto ran into hostility on the streets while simply doing his work.
Yet this is a story, in the end, in which this city can take some pride. Okamoto’s friends did not abandon him. He became an historic White House photographer, an astounding result set in action at least in part by those friendships.
Seventy-five years later, it all leads to a display of his work in downtown Syracuse – an exhibit, if you want to go, now down to its final week.
For Larry Bousquet, a founding board member of The Central Current and the key figure in making this exhibit happen, all of it hinges on a simple premise that fits with the intense feeling after Election Day:
“Always,” Bousquet said of Okamoto, “he was working toward democracy.”
The photos are part of “Art in the Atrium,” in the Atrium Building at Hanover Square. The exhibit is open to the public until 8 p.m. tonight and Sunday, and then Wednesday through its last day next Sunday, Nov. 15 with hours below.
The images provide a timeline of Okamoto’s life, from his first role as a house photographer at the old Onondaga Hotel to his enduring work as official photographer for President Lyndon Johnson – including Okamoto’s compelling portraits of such giants as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Bousquet, a passionate photographer since childhood, was 14 when he met Okamoto. His mother, Anne Raleigh Bousquet, worked as a reporter for The Post-Standard before she married Bousquet’s dad. Anne’s older brothers, Pete and Bill, were reporters in the same newsroom, and they became close with this young Post-Standard photographer from Yonkers who had recently earned his degree from Colgate.
“He was a charmer,” said Frances Raleigh, Bill’s daughter, who remembers Okamoto well from childhood – and who traveled to Syracuse from her Cape Cod home for the exhibit opening.
In Syracuse, Okamoto first took a job as a photographer at the Hotel Onondaga, capturing images of guests in return for a small salary and a room where he could sleep – a space, Bousquet said, he promptly turned into a darkroom. His success and skill under pressure caught the attention of editors at The Post-Standard, where he was hired as a full-time photographer.
For a couple of years, Okamoto thrived. But the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor triggered both American entry into a world war and a national backlash against Japanese-Americans. Ganley put it simply: Okamoto was “ostracized.”
He attempted to enlist in the Army, was rejected – and was finally accepted, Bousquet said, after such advocates as Mayor Rolland Marvin and Post-Standard publisher Jerome Barnum interceded.
Years later, he would tell The Post-Standard how he never forgot the many Syracuse friends who stuck by him in those days, when – as in now – it took courage to stand against irrational hatred.
Serving with the U.S. Signal Corps, Okamoto was deployed in 1944 to Europe. For a time, in the still-segregated Army, he served as an officer with an all-Black unit. His photography skills eventually earned him another key break: As a captain in Austria, he became a personal photographer for Gen. Mark Clark, a role in which Okamoto witnessed the intense international effort to replace a defeated fascist culture with a self-sustaining democracy.
Among his many poignant images are photos of Holocaust survivors, newly freed and heading toward whatever home was left. After the war, Okamoto joined the U.S. Information Service, documenting the impact of the Marshall Plan on a young democracy – and helping to train a generation of young Austrian photojournalists.
He finally returned to the U.S., where his life changed again in 1961. He traveled with Johnson – then vice president – as a government photographer on a trip to Berlin. Two years later, after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Johnson, amid national shock and horror, took the oath.
The president remembered the quality of Okamoto’s work, and asked him to serve as what The New York Times described as the first official White House photographer. Okamoto agreed on one condition, as he later told LIFE Magazine: “Rather than just take portraits, I’d like to hang around and photograph history being made.”
Johnson agreed. Though the president was notoriously mercurial – at one point he fired Okamoto, forgot about it and soon wanted him back – the result of their agreement were magnificent images of Johnson’s family during intensely private moments, of a somber King and other civil rights leaders during intense negotiations, of Johnson – his presidency buckling amid the war in Vietnam – during moments of distress and grief.
All of that is on display in Syracuse, for another week, though Bousquet said there is hope the images will soon appear in other cities. The exhibit was curated by Hans Petschar, retired director of the photography archives at the Austrian National Library. He and Bousquet forged a fast connection after Pestchar created a traveling exhibition of Okamoto’s work, which did not include the Syracuse component.
Bousquet was 14 when he shook Okamoto’s hand, a moment Bousquet never forgets. It was at the home of Bousquet’s grandmother in Sedgwick, where Okamoto delighted Bousquet and his brother with some magic tricks – another of Okamoto’s skills.
Already fascinated by photography, Bousquet was aware of the magnitude of such a presence – and asked a White House legend for a fast critique of his own work.
“I thought: This is the greatest job on Earth,” Bousquet said.
While Okamoto died more than 40 years ago, Bousquet always felt the great photographer should be honored in Syracuse. Still, it was not until the pandemic – with ample time on his hands – that Bousquet thought: I need to get this going.
Through that process, he would meet Okamoto’s older son, Skip – who played a key role in the direction of the project before his death three years ago in a motorcycle accident.
Skip’s widow and grandson were at the Syracuse opening. The keynote speaker was Mark Lawrence, who served as the sixth director of the LBJ Presidential Library, which made its entire Okamoto archive available for Hannes Richter, designer of the Syracuse exhibit.
That display is down to six days. The gallery is open tonight and Sunday from noon until 8 p.m., Wednesday to Friday from noon to 6 p.m., and next Saturday and Sunday, Nov. 14 and 15, from noon to 8 p.m.
To Bousquet, the exhibit is worth seeing for multiple reasons. There is Okamoto himself, an extraordinary American story of guts and brilliance. There is the Syracuse angle, how a guy who started here – helped by some courageous Central New York friends – made his way through sheer brilliant resilience into an historic job in the White House.
Finally, there is the simple truth that every moment of Okamoto’s life, from the instant he joined a newspaper until the last time he used his camera, reinforced an American ideal.
Bousquet said the exhibit’s title wrote itself: “Photographer in the Service of Democracy.”
