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MN: I want to touch a little briefly a little more about your brothers and sisters, sister. You mentioned Robert before and that he had gone to art school and then taught at the art school. And then he had a color lab.

AM: Yes.

MN: Can you tell us about that and how he helped your father's studio?

AM: Yes, he had a color lab in the studio first. He, we set up a color lab at the studio in Little Tokyo, but it was getting so busy for him and it was taking more, it would have taken more space, so he decided to go on his own. So he converted his big double garage into a darkroom, eventually added a little building next to the garage and built a color lab in there. And he was doing all of our work for us. He, he was making such beautiful prints, and he knew exactly what, how we wanted printed and things like that because he was with us all the time. So he did that and he, of course, he's retired now, but yeah, he was very good with making his own, own, well, making his equipment and things. Of course, when he had the addition structure built he had a carpenter do it, but then lot of the things inside, the equipments and things, he could build himself, he did it himself, so he would, he made the things just the way he thought was best, so it was really quite a nice color lab.

MN: Was it unusual for, like, your father, someone like your father to be able to do color at that time?

AM: Well, my father started to try to do some color work before all this happened, but he could not do the, lot of the things because technically it was too difficult to do until they started making the equipment, photographic supplies where people could do it themselves, Eastman-Kodak developed things, so when that happened that's when my brother came into the picture and he decided to make his own color lab. And for a while he was doing it at the same studio where we worked together, and we were able to buy equipments that he needed, and then as things got bigger and bigger, more and more, he decided to go on his own because he needed more space, so he started his own color lab.

MN: You know, I've seen some photos in, in camp that your father did in camp and someone had put some color paint, I think, on it?

AM: Yeah.

MN: Who was doing that?

AM: My mother was doing the coloring. What they do is, they call that color tinting of a black and white picture, and what my father did was he would make a black and white print and then have it toned to a brown color, and then my mother would come in with the color and put the color over the tinted photograph, which was kind of, instead of black and white it's kind of brownish color. And that's how most of the color pictures were being done. They used, my father used to do it for portraits and sceneries and things like that. And my mother, in fact, was doing color tinting just on her own before she started helping my father at the studio, so she used to do it at home. And there was a photographer who would take scenery pictures and then have, have somebody color for him, and he would sell it like that. So my father, my mother had a lot of experience in coloring the photographs, so when my father started to do his portraits in color my mother used to help quite a bit in that way. And then when the color film and things like that came out, then my brother started doing all that because he knew so much about color printing.

MN: Now, when your mother was doing the, the painting of it, did your father tell her what color to make a kimono or was that something she chose?

AM: Sometimes, if it's a kimono or something like that, the customer would leave the kimono so my mother could see the color and she would go by that. But most of the time, when it's just the face, my mother had enough experience where she could color the face to the right color, so in that way my mother was quite clever with that.

<End Segment 37> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.