When the landscape photographer George Masa died in 1933, the Asheville Citizen-Times described him as “a little Japanese man of art and mystery.”[1]

George Masa was born as Masahara Izuka in Osaka. He came to the United States sometime in his twenties, studied at the University of California, and eventually made his way east to Asheville, then a rapidly-growing town known for its health resorts and timber/pulpwood industry. The Western North Carolina Railroad reached Asheville in 1880, and the population more than tripled in the next ten years, from 2,600 to 10,000. By 1910, the population had reached 18,000. Masa arrived in Asheville in 1915 to work at the Grove Park Inn, a luxury hotel.

Around 1919 he left to work in photography. He collaborated with Horace Kephart, another transplant to western North Carolina, to document and promote the region’s natural beauty. Masa took some of the first professional landscape photographs of the surrounding mountains, including Mt. Mitchell and Grandfather Mountain. Horace Kephart contributed maps of hiking trails and local-color stories. Their work, along with the sustained organizing efforts of local citizens in Knoxville and Asheville, led to the establishment of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in 1934.[2] Both men served on state-appointed nomenclature committees for the Park.[3]

The years that Masa worked, 1915 to 1933, were pivotal for the Smokies. They went from an unknown region of commodity production, valued mostly in board-feet of lumber, to a region valued for its scenic beauty and its people’s supposed isolation from mainstream industrial America.

Kephart wrote, “The mountains proper are free not only from foreigners but from negroes as well.” It appears in both his 1913 and 1922 editions of Our Southern Highlanders. A rather hand-wavey definition of “mountains proper” I say, since his friend and collaborator was a foreigner and Asheville was most definitely mountainous. People like Kephart made some parts of the mountains hyper visible to the rest of the nation, while erasing their complexities. George Masa was a casualty of this erasure. So were the Cherokees and African Americans who lived in the region, and any white mountaineers with modern lifestyles that didn’t fit the image.

Around the same time as Masa was being erased out of the mountains by his friend Kephart, he was subject to scrutiny from others. Fred Seeley, manager at the Grove Park Inn, wrote to the Department of Justice to warn of Masa’s suspicious activity. Seeley was also president of the local American Protective League chapter. It wasn’t a great time to be visibly Japanese in America. California passed an Alien Land Law in 1913, prohibiting “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from owning land in the state. Eight other western states passed similar laws between 1913 and 1925. Native-born white Americans considered Asians of all nationalities a monstrous threat to American culture, a yellow peril at worst, and a mystery at best.

The 2013 documentary on Masa’s life reveals a few more details that were not available to his obituary writers in 1933. Still, his early life in Japan and arrival in America are riddled with contradicting dates and missing records. Only in Asheville, did his story really coalesce. The documentarians call Masa selfless in his dedication to art and saving the environment and lament the lack of information on his early life.

Against this (understandable) hunger for crumbs of biographical information, I suggest that we already know Masa through the photographs that he created. A photograph of the Chimney Tops is not a birth certificate or a visa or a hospital intake form, but it is a form of self-expression. Perhaps Masa preferred to be known that way. Perhaps he came to America for some goddamn sense of control over his narrative, to be a self-made man. In this light Seeley’s tip-off constitutes a deep spiritual violation as well as a potential breach of labor laws.

Letter from Fred Seeley to the Department of Justice. Source: Bonesteel Films, “The Mystery of George Masa”

George Masa at Biltmore Estate, photographed by Julia Etta Brookshire Lynch. Source: North Carolina Collection, Pack Library, Asheville NC. Reproduced online at NCPedia.

Chimney Tops photographed by George Masa

Unspecified site in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park photographed by George Masa. Source: Smoky Mountain Living, “An Eye For Mountains.”

Masahara Izuka became George Masa, and George Masa became the “Asheville Photo Company” and “Plateau Studios.” He retreated into the virgin forests of North Carolina and turned his cameras on the mountains and streams, rarely himself.[4] Photography is a particularly good medium for disappearing. A photographer attracts attention not for his corporeal self, but for his unique ability to make people look somewhere else. In this last bit of Eastern wilderness, there was plenty for city-dwellers to look at. Masa’s camera produced more than photographs. It produced an invisibility cloak.

I wanted to call George Masa subversive at first, because that’s a common term of praise for people whose accomplishments defy societal expectations. Certainly I admire him for surviving as an immigrant in a hostile nation. I admire him for landing in Asheville with no family or expat community to receive him, for finding a line of work with autonomy and dignity, for gaining a degree of respect in the white-dominated field of conservation. There are superficial geographical similarities between his migration story and mine, though my family had far more support.

For all Masa’s unconventional, even subversive life, his work was used to advance conventional beliefs about nature and progress. Photographs produced by George Masa, Jim Thompson, and others working in the mountains, gave the wider public an impression of empty land ready for taking. They bolstered the testimonies of government officials — the Forest Service’s first survey of Southern Appalachia in 1905 under-counted the population of mountain communities.[5] In a 1925 hearing of the Committee on Public Lands for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, senator Zebulon Weaver said, “you would take in no community there. It is just a vast wilderness of undeveloped forests.”[6] As for the few people who did live in the park, they should “enjoy their new dignity being objects of interest to millions of tourists.”[7] Unlike Masa, they would be in front of the camera.

Masa did not live to see the park established in 1934. “At his death from influenza and complications, he was between 45 and 50, his friends believe. George never talked about himself, and no one knew his age.”[8] After Masa’s death, the legacy that he had worked so hard to build fell apart. Asheville photographer Elliot Lyman Fisher purchased thousands of Masa’s slides and reprinted the images under his own name.[9] The guidebook on the Great Smoky Mountains National Park that Masa co-authored with George W. McCoy was reprinted without his name.[10] Few outside the local conservation and hiking communities remembered him.

George Masa was buried in Asheville’s Riverside Cemetery in an unmarked grave.[11] A marker was added in 1947. A peak in the national park was named “Masa’s Knob” in 1961.

He was a photographer.

[1] “George Masa’s Funeral is Held at Church Here,” Asheville Citizen-Times (Asheville, NC), June 24, 1933.

[2] Calvin Coolidge approved the park in 1926, after which the states began purchasing land for the park. It was officially established in 1934 after reaching land-acquisition quotas and dedicated in 1940.

[3] Bonesteel Films, “The Mystery of George Masa.”

[4] Masa also took photos for the Biltmore Estate, the Eastern Band of Cherokee, and newsreels, but he is best-known for his landscape photography.

[5] It reported the population of Cataloochee, NC as 30 families “scattered through the mountains.” The actual population was over 700 individuals.

Margaret Lynn Brown, The Wild East (Gainesville: University Press of Floriday, 2000), 50.

[6] Committee on Public Lands, “Shenandoah, Great Smoky Mountains, and Mammoth Cave National Parks hearings before the United States House Committee on Public Lands, Sixty-Ninth Congress, first session, on May 11, 1926.” page 14

[7] Bruce J. Weaver, “What to Do With The Mountain People?” in The Symbolic Earth, 162.

[8] “George Masa’s Funeral is Held at Church Here,” Asheville Citizen-Times (Asheville, NC), June 24, 1933.

[9] Fisher claimed that he was merely ‘preserving’ Masa’s slides.

Virginia T. Lathrop, “The Little Jap,” Our State, September 1953.

[10] Bonesteel Films, “The Mystery of George Masa.”

[11] Ibid.