Steve Ozone

My father was born in the United States, the son of Japanese immigrants. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, he and his family were forcibly ‘removed’ to an incarceration camp, a makeshift prison in the Owens Valley of California. Their crime was being of Japanese ancestry. They were released when World War II ended. Like many Japanese Americans, he migrated to Chicago because the American Midwest was more welcoming than the west coast. 

My mother’s father was a “Paper Son”. He was born in China. During the time of the Chinese Exclusion Act in the United States, he used fictitious documents that claimed he was born in Seattle in order to enter the country, work, and have a better life than he experienced in his impoverished community in rural China. 

These family stories that united my parents and shaped my experience as an Asian American led me to explore the immigrant experience through my series “Interrupted Landscapes of the Incomer” and “The Second Generation”. These portraits illustrate the duality of the perceived better life and experience of being the other.

The international spotlight was shown on Minneapolis after the murder of George Floyd in May of 2020, and my interest in othering and the social justice vocation of Gordon Parks became a focus in my work. Parks lived in Minneapolis and St Paul, Minnesota for seven years and traces of his footprints remain. For my latest series, “Retraced Steps”, I am making photographs in locations where Parks photographed (e.g., Harlem, Mobile, Chicago, and Pittsburgh) and in places I believe he would have been drawn to make photographs were he alive today (e.g., George Floyd Square, Springfield, Ohio and Parkland, Florida). I am hoping to bring my contemporary work into dialog with Parks’ social justice driven work, to maintain forward movement in the fight for equality and justice – for all.   

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Steve Ozone is open on Friday, Saturday & Sunday of Art-A-Whirl weekend.