<Begin Segment 33>

MN: Now Archie, right after you got out of camp you started to help your father with the studio. Did you ever think about going to college?

AM: Well, I wanted to go, but my father's business was so busy and we had to hire extra helpers to be able to do all the work that he was getting. Oh, we were getting so many weddings. In those days people used to come to the studio to take the portrait and then I would go out to take all the snapshot pictures and group pictures and even the portraits at the church, but most of the people used to came, used to come to the studio to take the portrait, which was real good for us because that way I don't have to take all the equipment out. But then more and more people started to take pictures at the church, so I started doing all that type of thing at the church for the wedding portraits. And nowadays I think, I guess most of the people take, have their wedding portraits taken at the church, so now they, yeah, it's changing quite a bit nowadays, the way people have the wedding pictures taken, because they'd rather have the church background and things like that, so, and it's hard for them to come to the studio and put their, all the gown on at the studio, so the trend is going, having the photographer going to the church instead of the bride and groom coming to the studio. So in that way we were getting limited to how we could take pictures. There were times I used to go to two, three weddings at the church taking the portrait, but it's, as I got older it was getting too hard for me, so, well, my son's started to help, so that kind of helped, but anyway, the trend has changed quite a bit, especially now, it being digital, which makes things much easier. You don't have to carry all those film holders and thing like that. You just take the little, what is that, you call that... I forgot what you call that. It's such...

MN: Memory, memory card?

AM: Memory card, yeah. You could get by with just a memory card.

MN: What do you think about the quality of digital cameras?

AM: Well it's getting much better. It's amazing how you could get by with just such a small camera and little memory card instead of carrying boxes of film holders and things. It's gotten so much easier. And then we used to carry about three, four lenses around all different focal length; now you can get just, get by with just one digital camera which would have all these different focal length lenses on this one lens, you can change the focal length, make it into telephoto, wide angle, whatever. So in that way it's a lot easier.

MN: Now, actually, I wanted to ask you, when your father and you, your family were moving back from Manzanar to L.A. and you were talking about you had to bring all this equipment. What camera equipment, you had lights and maybe camera bodies, what were the equipments that you had to bring back?

AM: Well, during the time that we were in Manzanar, like I told you before, my father wanted all of his equipment, so in order to get the equipment he went to talk to the Evacuee Property people in Manzanar and this man thought of an idea in telling them that my father's equipment's in this storage company and this company is about to go bankrupt so you have to get everything out in order to save my father's equipment, so everything was sent to Manzanar from the storage company.

MN: What was in that storage company? What did the storage company send over?

AM: All the lighting equipment and big studio cameras. There were huge things, so it took quite a bit of space, so when he got all that into Manzanar my father had to move the studio in Manzanar to one of the big kitchens in Manzanar. There were, the kitchen was built out of two barracks stuck together into one big hall, so we had to use, get one of those places to be able to use all the equipment. And the reason for that is because my father was able to start the studio in this small building, which was just a little ironing room. It's a very small barrack, and so he was able to get by with that, but when the, all the equipment came he had to move his studio to one of the empty barracks because as people were leaving Block 14 was becoming vacant, so they didn't need the kitchen anymore. So Block 14 happened to be right next to Block 20 where we lived, so my father had everything moved over there and had a big studio in the kitchen so he was able to use some of his equipment that he got from the storage company.

MN: So it sounds like a lot of the lightings were really big.

AM: Yeah.

MN: And did you have, like, an enlarger or anything like that?

AM: Oh yeah, big enlarger.

MN: Not like, not like what they used to use recently.

AM: No, it's a huge thing and he, my father had a chance to buy one of the biggest enlargers around, which must've weighed about a thousand pounds. And so we still have that in San Gabriel, but nowadays, because we don't have any more film, we use digital, so that enlarger's not much in use anymore. But my father was so proud of having that enlarger because it was a photographer's dream to have one of those enlargers, and so even though my father's gone we still have that enlarger because he was so happy with it.

MN: Wow, that's like a museum piece.

AM: Yeah, it is.

MN: Now, when did you start taking over your father's business?

AM: It was after we, my father reopened his studio in Little Tokyo, after the World War II, around 1970, I guess, and my father had already retired then and he was getting pretty old, so he couldn't, he didn't want to have to work that hard anymore. And things are a lot more, well, took a lot more energy to do the business because before, when he used to take wedding pictures, it was strictly portrait, but then, like I was telling you that people wanted, young people want their snapshot taken during the ceremony and thing, so it took a lot more energy and time. So that was the time when I started taking all those snapshots and things for my father, and then later on I started taking portraits, too, because my father couldn't get around that much anymore. And then we had to take portraits at the church, too, which made it a lot harder for my father, so I started doing that, and eventually, when he was about seventy years old he kind of had to retire because it was getting too hard for him.

MN: Now, you and Take have two sons, Alan and Gary, and they have also gone into photography.

AM: Yes.

MN: When did you have your sons take over the photography business?

AM: It was around... [asks wife] what year was it, Take?

TM: Wasn't that when we went to San Gabriel? '85?

AM: Oh, yeah, 1985 when we, when we moved to San Gabriel, because we were planning to rebuild a building on First Street, which never happened because we kind of settled down in San Gabriel. And then my son took over and my two boys were helping there. Of course, Gary, the older one, he decided to go on his own, so he did.

MN: And he has his own studio in Gardena?

AM: He moved to Gardena, yes.

<End Segment 33> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.