The images, some of them, are almost suspicious in their anachronism. They date from the early decades of the 20th century, and were made in a place far from the cultural meccas of the time. Most are posed portraits, but instead of the typical (literally) statuesque dullness of that genre, the subjects in these photographs evince the humanity and spontaneity of an Instamatic snapshot. Whoever took these photos was able to elicit a remarkable degree of comfort and trust from their subjects, who included members of local Native tribes and ordinary townsfolk, as well as, often inventively, himself. His name was, at least in this stage of his life, Frank Matsura, and his unique life is the subject of the latest documentary by Emmy-winning Portland filmmaker Beth Harrington (The Winding Stream), Our Mr. Matsura.

Matsura emigrated from Japan to Seattle in 1901 at the age of 27 and two years later moved to tiny Conconully, Washington, arriving with a camera he had somehow acquired along the way. He set up shop and quickly became a popular figure, socializing with the area’s elites while capturing intimate images of a wide variety of locals. He later moved to Okanogan, the nearby county seat, and remained there for the rest of life, except for a sudden departure after, Matsura, said, he’d been conscripted into the Japanese army. He headed to Seattle, but returned several weeks later, saying only that he must have missed his boat. The town threw him a party before he left and welcomed him back rapturously.

Harrington first encountered Matsura’s work almost 25 years ago in an exhibit of Edward Curtis photos at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma. Curtis has been renowned as the most prolific visual chronicler of Native American people and culture. He “made beautiful images,” Harrington says, “but they’re somewhat controversial. He was trying to capture the mythological vanishing Indian as the government tried to suppress Native culture.” Matsura’s work was interspersed with Curtis’s and Harrington recognized something different in it. “This guy’s got a Japanese name,” she recalls, “and he’s in, it said, Okanagan County, which is pretty far away. What the hell is he doing there?”

The one existing published biography of Matsura, written to accompany a 1981 book of his photos, provided more questions than answers. Curiosity piqued, Harrington visited Okanagan, a town of less than three thousand in north-central Washington on the edge of the Colville Reservation. “I went to the Historical Society and I saw this little place on the planet that was preserving this guy’s memory,” Harrington says. “They really cared about him in a place that’s pretty rural, and not necessarily the place you would imagine a Japanese immigrant photographer’s work would be celebrated.” The project really began to percolate, like so many others, during COVID quarantine.

“I realized we could tell Frank’s story, but we could also tell the story of a small area whose institutions still uphold this guy’s memory,” Harrington says. This comes through in scenes showing present-day residents identifying their great-grandparents in Matsura’s photos. “A lot of us might have photos of our ancestors, but most of us don’t know who took them.” That said, there are plenty of things we don’t know about the man born Sakae Matsura, the son of a samurai who came of age in the period when Japan was experiencing its first real interactions with the outside world in decades. For instance, no one can say when he first became a shutterbug.

“There’s a compelling thread there that I didn’t put in the film,” says Harrington. “One of the first two photographers in Japan to open studios was Shimooka Renjō. He’s very much considered today the godfather of Japanese photography. He was also a Christian who lived in Tokyo and knew the uncle and aunt, also Christians, who raised Matsura after his parents’ deaths.”  The Christian community in Tokyo at this time was very small, so even though Renjō’s studio was only open when Matsura was very young, some experts see a possible connection there, despite a lack of hard evidence. “When you look at his early photos in Seattle, there are just a handful. To me, it suggests that he picked up a camera in Seattle.”

Why he chose to settle in such an isolated, rural environment also remains a mystery. One theory Harrington posited is that Matsura, who suffered from, and eventually died from, tuberculosis, sought out the clean, crisp air of Okanogan county as relief from the coal dust-filled air of Seattle. She doesn’t buy his story about being drafted, either. “From his diaries,” she says, referring to journals Matsura kept from the age of 19 to 21 [when he was still in Japan], “we know that he had gone down to their version of the Selective Service and got turned down. His diary entry says something like, ‘They said my lungs were good, but I was too short.’ And why would anyone reach out to a photographer in Okanagan, Washington, to go to the Russian front when there were probably photographers in Tokyo who they could send?”

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He apparently never left a record of what he did during the weeks he was away, prompting endless speculation. One storyline that Harrington suggests is that Matsura, having been in the area for around six months, wasn’t feeling it and decided to return to Seattle or even Japan. Needing an excuse for his departure, he invented the story about conscription. “Just before he leaves,” she continues, “they throw him a party. We know that. So, one of the stories is that he gets to Seattle and the Japanese-American community there says, ‘Are you crazy? Those white people back in Okanagan threw you a party? You don’t know how good you had it!”

It would be a mistake, the film makes clear, to dismiss Matsura as an unlearned folk artist. He moved in educated circles, and it’s likely he was aware of Curtis’s work, and perhaps even emulated to some extent his goal of leaving a record of a potentially vanishing way of life. At the same time, the photos’ liveliness conjures images of social gatherings at his studio that just happened to involve picture-taking. “It feels like there was a whole scene based around ‘It’s Friday afternoon and the sun’s still out—let’s go over to Frank’s and take some pictures,’” says Harrington.

Matsura’s empathy for his subjects, especially the Natives and the non-white immigrants, is palpable. He came from a society that was in rapid flux during the Meiji Restoration, and ended up in one that was also experiencing upheaval. In addition to that shared sense of otherness, Harrington says, he also “recognizes chaos when he sees it, and recognizes people trying to pull their lives together in the face of forces bigger than them. I suspect there was a lot of connection around that.”

In the decades since seeing Matsura’s photos for the first time, Harrington also worked on her documentary about the Carter and Cash families of country music, The Winding Stream. Then, following a trip to Japan in 2019, she was inspired to ramp up what became Our Mr. Matsura: “I reached out to Glen Mimura, a professor of Asian Studies and Media, who’s in the film and one of our advisors. So, I started to make some calls, but then of course COVID hit. Later, I was on a Zoom call with a bunch of film people and the head of the media program at the National Endowment for the Humanities, a wonderful man named David Weinstein. David knew me—I’d been on some NEH panels in the past—and he asked what I was up to.” Even before the gutting of federal arts funding under the current administration, Harrington says, “NEH grants were very rigorous and demanding. Carving out time to write an application ordinarily wouldn’t have happened, but because of COVID I was just sitting around. So, I started doing research on the phone. It’s not really how I like to do things. I like to meet people face to face. But I chipped away at it and got the first of two grants in 2021. By the end of 2021, we were in production, and we finished in April of this year.”

Our Mr. Matsura is only one part of a three-pronged attack celebrating its subject’s life and art. The Japanese American Museum of Oregon will be hosting an exhibit, Frank S. Matsura: Portraits from the Borderland, opening on September 26 and running through February 8, 2026. And the first comprehensive book on the topic, Frank S. Matsura: Iconoclast Photographer of the American West, was published earlier this month. Both were spearheaded, Harrington says, by another of the film’s advisors, Michael Holloman. “Michael’s an art professor at Washington State University, and a member of the Coville Confederated Tribes. He knew about Matsura a long time ago, and he was one of the first people besides Glen Mimura that I reached out to. He’s been a champion of the film, and he suggested that there should be an exhibit. I said, ‘Yeah, there should!’ but it’s really Michael’s baby. I can’t take any credit for it.” The book, published by Chronicle Books, includes essays by Harrington, Mimura, and two of the film’s other advisors, University of Leeds Art History professor Maki Fukuoka and Gonzaga University’s Director of Native American Studies, Laurie Arnold.

“My highest priority,” says Harrington, “was to elevate the profile of Frank Matsura, because I am just so taken by him and his work, and the power he has 112 years after his death, to still engage us. As a community-building figure, he’s somebody I would argue we need to emulate right now. The fact that there’s also an exhibit and a book makes me feel like we’re at a critical mass for Matsura. For so many years, I couldn’t find anything on him. And when I talked to people about him, I drew blank stares. So this is really exciting.”