ICP’s Incubator is located on ICP’s ground floor. The space is free and open to the public during café and museum hours.
In The Camps America Built, photographer Haruka Sakaguchi (b. 1990, Osaka, Japan) brings together portraits, landscape photography, personal testimony, and historical documents that reflect on the legacies of Japanese American incarceration during World War II.
After Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, over 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—two-thirds of whom were U.S.-born citizens—were forcibly displaced from their homes and incarcerated in government-run concentration camps across the country. Since the end of the war, former incarcerees and their descendants have been making "pilgrimages" to these sites in search of healing and closure.
In this project, Sakaguchi documents the ten camps as they stand today and the families who journey back to them. Each sitter is asked to handwrite a letter: for former incarcerees, a letter to their younger self when they were incarcerated, and for descendants, a letter to a former incarceree they are commemorating. As the United States marks its 250th anniversary, the project explores a critical question: what does it mean to be American?
To see more from The Camps America Built go to thecampsamericabuilt.com
About The Artist
Haruka Sakaguchi (b. 1990, Osaka, Japan) is a freelance photographer based in New York City. Her work explores themes of cultural memory and intergenerational trauma, often tracing overlooked histories through intimate portraiture and long-form documentary practice.
Her projects have taken her around the world—from documenting atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to photographing former incarcerees and descendants of America’s WWII concentration camps, to creating satirical portraits of Hollywood actors typecast in stereotypical roles. In recent years, she directed Loyal American, a short film produced in partnership with the National Geographic Society, expanding her storytelling into moving image.
Haruka’s clients and collaborators include National Geographic, The New York Times, TIME Magazine, The New Yorker, Smithsonian Magazine, and The Washington Post, among many others. Her photographs have been exhibited internationally, including at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Osservatorio Fondazione Prada in Milan, and Photoville in New York and Los Angeles. She is the recipient of the 2025 CENTER Socially Engaged Award, a 2023 National Geographic Storytelling Grant, a 2021 Duke Archive of Documentary Arts Collection Award, and the 2020 Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award for Photo Essay. She was also recognized by Pictures of the Year International (POY) as a finalist in 2021.
Through her documentary practice, Haruka seeks to honor lived experience while fostering dialogue about the legacies we carry forward.
Haruka Sakaguchi is the 2026 ICP Infinity Award honoree for Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism Award.
About the ICP Incubator Space
ICP’s Incubator Space is a new exhibition program designed to highlight the work of emerging photographers who are responding in real time to the world around us. ICP will present a rotating selection of projects by imagemakers experimenting with and pushing boundaries around the documentary tradition. ICP’s Incubator Space is curated by Sara Ickow, Associate Director of Exhibitions at ICP.
Header image: Haruka Sakaguchi
