In 2002, filmmaker Beth Harrington visited Tacoma’s Washington State History Museum during a road trip and saw an exhibit of Edward S. Curtis’ photographs. It included work by some of his lesser-known contemporaries, and one, Frank Matsura, “just leapt out at me,” Harrington said. His work “had a completely different character.”
Matsura’s charisma and deep connection to his subjects illuminates his black-and-white photographs. A Japanese immigrant, Matsura created images of people he knew, even posing playfully alongside his subjects, a varied mix of white settlers in Okanogan, Washington, and Indigenous people on the Colville Indian Reservation.
From 1903 to 1913, Matsura lived and worked in Okanogan County, dying there at age 39 from tuberculosis. Beyond those details and the thousands of images he left behind, little of his life was documented. But over a century later, the communities he photographed still remember him fondly.
“Frank Matsura is just somebody that you fall in love with,” Harrington said. The documentarian moved to the Northwest from Boston in the early 2000s, but it was nearly two decades before she could tackle Matsura’s enigmatic legacy. In 2025, she completed a feature-length documentary, Our Mr. Matsura.
“The idea behind the title is that everybody has a point of entry,” Harrington said. “Everyone thinks they have a little window into who he is. And there’s a collective sense of who he is because of those little impressions.”
Last September, Douglas Woodrow was one of about 300 people who gathered at the restored Omak Theater for a screening of the film.
“I grew up in Okanogan,” Woodrow told High Country News, “and the local newspaper would post pictures of the past, usually by Frank Matsura.” As a kid in the late 1950s, Woodrow biked to the locations of these old photos and was “astounded” by the changes, imagining the majestic three-story Bureau Hotel, which burned down in 1924, as having provided “a bit of elegance in an otherwise dusty little town.”
When Woodrow returned to Okanogan decades later, he reconnected with “Frank.” (Matsura’s contemporary fans almost always call him by his first name.) While volunteering with the Okanogan County Historical Society, Woodrow found “a literal shoebox” of unprocessed Matsura photographs that, when sequenced, depicted the 1910 construction of the Conconully Dam, an early Bureau of Reclamation project on Salmon Creek. “That just lit me up,” he said. Presenting those photos to community groups became Woodrow’s first Matsura project.
His fascination led him to Tokyo, where he visited Matsura’s birthplace with his friend and fellow enthusiast Tetsuo Kurihara, a Japanese photographer who originally met Woodrow in Okanogan on a research trip. Back home, Woodrow worked hard to preserve Matsura’s legacy, erecting an interpretive site near his former studio and spearheading a walking tour of 21 mural-sized photographs.
“His social mobility was extraordinary,” Woodrow said. Matsura photographed everyone in town: “He was included in just about everything that happened in town, by all the social strata” — tribal members, newly arrived white businessmen, miners and saloon-goers.
Randy Lewis, a Wenatchi (P’Squosa) elder and member of the Confederated Tribes of Colville Reservation, is one of the many descendants of Matsura’s subjects who appear on-screen in Our Mr. Matsura. Lewis has been a part of community efforts to screen the film regionally, helping host one “barn screening” in Winthrop, Washington, that was followed by a salmon bake. His family story illustrates how the world Matsura captured endures today.
The film features a photo of Lewis’s great-uncle, Sam George, with his family in a buckboard wagon — “the F-250 of the time.” Lewis told High Country News that the photo hung in the family house when he served as caretaker in George’s final years.
“Everyone thinks they have a little window into who he is. And there’s a collective sense of who he is because of those little impressions.”
“He’d be sitting there staring at that picture,” he said. Looking at the photo, he told Lewis, “kept his mind going”: He’d use it to recall the name and birthday of everyone in the wagon.
Sam George was 108 when he died. His birth in 1860 predated the 1872 formation of the Colville Indian Reservation, and during his long lifetime he witnessed its reduction, the allotment era and arrival of gold-seekers and homesteaders. He and his family, including Lewis, followed traditional seasonal fishing, maintaining a platform at Celilo Falls until The Dalles Dam’s construction inundated the site in 1957, destroying one of richest fishing grounds on the continent.
Matsura came to the reservation during a cultural shift, when, Lewis said, “both cultures,” Native and settler, were evolving. “We were into a new century, and he was capturing that. It wasn’t the death toll of the Indians. It was life going on.”
Our Mr. Matsura is as much about Okanogan County as it is about Matsura. Harrington shows the isolated, rugged nature of a landscape that remains, much as it was when Matsura arrived.
“It is a beautiful country,” said Jean Berney, a longtime rancher and farmer just outside Conconully, a place she describes as “off the beaten track for a lot of people.” An enrolled member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, Berney married into a non-Native cattle-ranching family and soon built up her own herd, gaining a national reputation as a conservation-minded rancher dedicated to the 4-H program.
Her land was once the site of The Conconully Naturpathy (sic) Institute, locally known as Casselmann’s Sanitarium. Casselmann, a German immigrant, treated tuberculosis patients starting in 1906. Many believe that Matsura was a patient; the dry climate may have been part of what drew him to the region.
Berney often wonders about Matsura’s journeys across this rocky landscape. “Did he ever talk to Dr. Casselmann about his condition? How long was he sick? We wonder about Frank and everything that happened a long time ago, and we can’t ask,” she said.
Our Mr. Matsura joins a growing body of literature about the photographer, including the work of dedicated volunteers at the Okanogan County Historical Society as well as Michael Holloman, a tenured art professor at Washington State University. In 2023, Holloman co-curated an exhibition of Matsura’s work for Spokane’s Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture and, in 2025, published the book, Frank S. Matsura: Iconoclast Photographer of the American West.
“We need people to be like Frank right now,” Holloman, an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Indian Reservation, said, “to engage multiple communities and be able to find life, vibrancy, in a world that is in transformation and change.”
Wide release of Our Mr. Matsura was slated for The American Experience until last summer, when federal funding cuts ended the long-running PBS show. Still, Harrington believes the film will find its audience through festivals, streaming and special screenings, like the one last fall in Omak — though the road will be much harder.
“We need people to be like Frank right now, to engage multiple communities and be able to find life, vibrancy, in a world that is in transformation.”
“There’s a lot of worthy things that we can’t put a dollar value to,” she said, “These stories … we’re poorer for them when we don’t have them.”
In Omak, Harrington was thanked for “mirroring” the kind of trust Matsura built with his subjects in the community over a century earlier. But the filmmaker was quick to return the compliment.
“The story is not just about Frank and his charisma and his incredible body of work,” she said. “It’s about the way people uphold his memory and still talk about him 112 years after his death.”
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This article appeared in the February 2026 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Chronicler of a community.”
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