Joseph Maida

Born Free, Born Equal

BORN FREE, BORN EQUAL illuminates the complexities of representation that both the medium of photography and our system of democracy embody. If the twentieth century asked if the personal is political, Maida now asks himself — and us — to consider if the political is ever divisible from the personal given its impact on our individual identities and our families’ stories, including those that have been tucked away, redacted, or erased.

It was not until the death of his beloved Aunt Katherine Takeshita, a nisei Japanese American from Hawaiʻi, that Maida learned the details of the family’s incarceration during World War II. This discovery prompted Maida to revisit Ansel Adams’s 1943 Manzanar archive in 2017 in the wake of President Trump’s Executive Order 13769. Through obscuring specific faces, names, ethnicities, and dates in Adams’s Manzanar photographs and documents, which were once controversial and are now publicly accessible through the Library of Congress, Maida’s 2018 book, Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal _______-Americans, draws parallels between Ansel Adams’s empathetic images of citizens incarcerated based solely on ethnic origin and the resurgence of legislation targeting women, religious minorities, BIPOC, and LGBTQ individuals.

Convoke Gallery is pleased to present a new limited edition portfolio by Joseph Maida issued on the occasion of his monograph, Born Free, Born Equal. This portfolio contains 10 photographic collages in a custom red clothbound clamshell box with gray lettering.

Joseph Maida

Born Free, Born Equal Portfolio

10 Photographic collages

24 x 18 inches (61 x 46 cm)

Edition of 12

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JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR

"By blindly accepting the Government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discrimi natory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu and merely replaces one “gravely wrong” decision with another."

JUSTICE RUTH BADER GINSBURG

"I grew up at the time of World War II. The irony was, we were fighting a war against racism and yet, by an Executive Order of President Roosevelt, people who had done nothing wrong—except they were of Japanese ancestry—were interned in camps far from their homes. That was a dreadful mistake."

CHARLOTTE COTTON

"Maida’s overlays and interventions onto the catalog’s original sequence amplify the prophetic nature of this historic story. It is both a sensitive reanimation of a still-resonant chapter in American history and a hard-hitting meditation upon photography’s complicity with its outplaying."