By: Marina Berio
“Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President” is an indictment of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, in the form of an artist’s letter addressed to him six feet under at his final resting place in Hyde Park. Each lesson addresses a different aspect of the photographic record, and its efficacy or failure at relating the truth of the incarceration of over 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II.
Self-published in an edition of 250, “Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President” comprises five parts: a thirteen page letter plus three enclosures printed on onionskin paper; fifteen photographs printed as postcards with captions on the backs; a risograph art poster printed on blue paper with the colophon, glossary and other info on the back; a foldable barrack-shaped envelope with stamps of Japanese American artists and addressed to FDR in Hyde Park, with a landscape image of Heart Mountain camp shot by an incarceree printed on the interior; and a webpage containing all the source documentation and bibliographic references.