Hiromu Kira

Photographer Hiromu Kira was born in 1898 in Waipahu, Hawaii and died in 1991 in Los Angeles, California. He was a founding member of the Seattle Camera Club and part of the artistic community of Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo.

Kira relocated multiple times in his youth. As a child, his parents sent him to Kumamoto, Japan, where he attended school until age sixteen. He then joined his family in Canada, and two years later, moved to Seattle. It was in Seattle that Kira first took up photography, but by his own admission, stopped after he grew tired of snapshots. In 1922, he attended a photographic salon sponsored by a local Japanese daily newspaper and was inspired to try art photography. While working as a shoe and sewing machine salesman, and later in a drugstore photography lab, Kira sent prints to national and international photographic salons, and established the Seattle Camera Club along with Dr. Kyo Koike and 39 other initial members.

Kira moved with his wife and two children to Los Angeles in 1926. He worked at Iwata Art Store on First Street, and became integrated into Little Tokyo’s artistic milieu, befriending many photographers from the Japanese Camera Pictorialists of California, but never becoming a member. He continued to hone his craft and his star continued to rise: in 1929 he had 96 works accepted in 25 exhibitions. A year earlier, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in Great Britain. By 1930 he had been profiled in multiple photography journals. He was best known for his still life prints.

In 1942, Kira and his family were interned at Gila River, Arizona. After the war, he worked as a photo editor for Disney, RKO Radio Pictures and Columbia, but did not exhibit work publicly.