Chicago Renaissance

Jun Fujita (1888-1863) was a poet and photographer born outside of Hiroshima, Japan. As a teenager, he emigrated to Canada where he worked as a laborer and train porter in British Columbia. By 1909 he had made his way to Chicago, where he found employment briefly as an actor, and the more enduringly as a photographer for the Chicago Evening Post. In the twenties, Fujita's poems began appearing in Poetry, and in 1923 he published his only book, Tanka: Poems in Exile. Although Fujita is remembered for taking some of the most indelible and horrifying images of the early twentieth century, in his poems and private photography his central fascination was with the natural world. Writing about his relationship to wild flowers, Fujita notes: "I feel that moods are beyond the reach of the camera. But I feel words are too crude for the delicate moods of wild flowers. Whether I have succeeded in portraying the moods of these wild flowers I am not sure. I am trying."