George Masa book pairs famed images with modern experiences

Wild Vision

George Masa book pairs famed images with modern experiences

The Sawtooth Mountains and Mt. LeConte spread out from the view at Charlies Bunion.

George Masa/Donated photo

BY HOLLY KAYS OUTDOORS EDITOR

The 1900s were just a few years along when a young man named Masahara Iizuka stepped on American soil for the first time. Around 26 years old, he’d arrived in California to pursue a career in engineering, having studied the subject at Meiji University back in Tokyo.

More than 100 years later, few people have heard of Masahara Iizuka, who never did become an engineer. But many people know the name George Masa, the identity Masahara later adopted. They also know his work — spectacular photos of the Southern Appalachians, a wild region on the cusp of change.

“It was just interesting to think about how intimate he was with a place like that,” said Brent Martin, author of the newly released book “George Masa’s Wild Vision: A Japanese Immigrant Imagines Western North Carolina.”

“I think that’s something most people would get from his photographs, is he was able to convey a certain intimacy with the landscape,” he added. “I really developed an appreciation of that, revisiting those places.”

In “George Masa’s Wild Vision” Martin, a poet, essayist and outdoorsman based in Cowee, pairs creative nonfiction inspired by visits to Masa’s old haunts with Masa’s crisp black-and-white landscape photography from the 1920s and 1930s. It’s an experiential ode, not a biography. Martin sees the work as an “interlude” between the 2019 Horace Kephart biography by George Ellison and Janet McCue — which also included research on Kephart’s dear friend Masa — and the Masa biography on which McCue and Paul Bonesteel, creator of the 2002 film “The Mystery of George Masa,” are currently collaborating, expected to publish in 2023.

“For me, it was more about, where are these places now? Where do these photographs take us? Where is the journey?” Martin said. “These places, 100 years later, where has it gone?”

ART AS ADVOCACY

George Masa first came to North Carolina in 1915, landing a job in the laundry room of the new Grove Park Inn. Nobody knows how he learned photography or accessed the equipment and darkroom space needed to hone the skill, but by 1918 he had left the inn to join Pelton Studios in Asheville as a partner, taking over the photography business a year later and renaming it Plateau Studios.

Despite his origins on the opposite side of the globe, his broken English, and the growing anti-Asian sentiment of the day, Masa found camaraderie with a blossoming community of people who loved the mountains and fought to preserve them. Masa was a frequent hike leader with the Carolina Mountain Club and fast friends with Horace Kephart, with whom he worked to advocate for and explore the national park, and to define the southern route of the Appalachian Trail.

Photography was Masa’s livelihood, but even as he paid the bills with promotional shots, news photography and film processing, he kept his artistic side alive with long disappearances into the mountains. He always lugged his big box camera along, coming back with spectacular images of the most rugged and hard-to-photograph places east of the Mississippi.

“He was creating art, but he was creating advocacy at the same time,” said Martin. “I guess photographers are still doing that today, to what effect I don’t know, but I think his images were pretty important for that era, for the outcome of places like Mt. Mitchell and like Chimney Rock.”

When Masa arrived in Asheville, the vast swaths of land now protected in the Pisgah and Nantahala national forests were still in private ownership. The push to establish the Great Smoky Mountains National Park had yet to begin, and Benton MacKaye had not yet proposed the Appalachian Trail.

“The landscape was in the midst of a great transition then, and it was one based on resource extraction,” said Martin. “I think Masa and Kephart and many other people in the Southern Appalachians at the time were in the midst of the realization that this is going, going, gone — so how do we work like hell to get the park established and work like hell to get a national forest system stitched together? And they did.”

PAST AND PRESENT

When Martin first began talking with Hub City Press founders John Lane and Betsy Teter about doing a Masa book, it was 2019 and the COVID-19 pandemic had not yet changed daily life the world over. He signed the contract to produce the book shortly before lockdown set in.

When restrictions lifted that summer, Martin started going everywhere that Masa

and his camera and been. Lockdown was over, but the pandemic was not — the fears and tensions that accompanied life in 2020 are present throughout Martin’s voyage. “It was impossible not to think about America 100 years after George Masa and think about his life 100 years ago and what was going on in the South, and juxtaposing those two worlds as part of the book,” Martin said. “That was sort of my journey with the book.” The first essay, about Martin’s hike to Masa Knob in July 2020, is printed alongside a photograph Masa took in the 1920s of two companions looking east from Newfound Gap. Today, one of the park’s most popular overlooks, Newfound Gap boasts an enormous parking lot, concrete sidewalks and the two-tiered stone Rockefeller Memorial honoring the biggest donor toward the park’s cre-

George Masa sets up his camera during a 1931 trip to what is now the Shining Rock

Wilderness. GSMA photo ation. When Masa was there, it was a gravel pullout on an unpaved road so primitive it wasn’t passable by car. Masa and Kephart tried but got stuck. The had to walk to a nearby Champion Fiber lumber camp to get help. “We’re in the midst of global chaos today, but I rest in a sanctuary of wildly diverse and indifferent forest,” Martin writes as the narrative takes him to nearby Charlies Bunion. “After 10 or so minutes, the crowd subsides and I ease out to the outcrop. My view is to the north. Mount Kephart lies just to the west. To the southwest, Masa Knob, diminutive in comparison to the higher, more prominent Mount Kephart, lies softer, more rounded, and unobtrusive. Just to the southeast are the Sawteeth, a F