The story of Frank Muramoto begins very similarly to many other Japanese immigrants to the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. He was born Muramoto Denichi on December 1, 1884, in southern Japan. In 1903, at the age of only nineteen, he joined the steady flow of many other young, single men migrating from Japan to the Americas, seeking work. The majority planned to eventually return to Japan with their savings. While many did just that, others instead laid down roots in America. Muramoto was one of them.

Through his early twenties, he traveled across the United States working a series of manual jobs—railroad labor in Wyoming, farm labor in Texas, even household servant work in the Midwest—but by 1911 he was seemingly looking for something more permanent. That year, now going by the name Frank Muramoto, he enrolled in the Illinois College of Photography. 

After graduating a year later, Muramoto moved to Pueblo, where in 1915 he founded his own photography business alongside Tsume Manabe, a fellow Japanese immigrant and alumnus of the Illinois College. However, within the year, Manabe had moved away. Muramoto became the sole proprietor of De Luxe Photography Studio, which he would own and operate until his death in 1958.

Professional photography was a competitive field, but Muramoto’s passion for his craft set him apart from his contemporaries. From his extensive catalogue, much of which wasn’t even paid work, it’s clear that he saw photography as more than just his career. It was something he pursued as art, as a way of preserving memories, and a way of connecting with the world around him—a very modern attitude not always shared by other photographers in the 1910s and 1920s. 

By his family’s accounts, Muramoto took his cameras with him everywhere. It was a time when cameras were very bulky, inconveniently heavy, and surprisingly delicate all at once, and Muramoto lugged upwards of fifty pounds of equipment to take his snapshots.

Photography evolved a lot during his four-decade career, and Muramoto’s studio (despite its small size and relatively remote location) was always on the cutting-edge. He was an early adopter of new techniques and technologies, including color film. In the 1930s he recorded home movies at great personal expense, seemingly for no reason other than to experiment. These are some of the earliest home movies in our state’s history, and some of the oldest surviving depictions of Colorado in full color.

As an immigrant from Japan, raising a family in southern Colorado during the first half of the twentieth century, Muramoto had a unique perspective and captured images few others would have been able to record. His work doesn’t just include the typical studio portraits and industrial photography that were common in his time, it also shows the community around him—the daily lives of Japanese immigrants and other immigrant communities in southern Colorado.

This visual record of life in Pueblo, almost literally through the eyes of an immigrant, is unbelievably valuable. It’s an often-overlooked piece of history that reveals intimate details from the lives of the more than 400 hundred Japanese Americans living in Pueblo—almost one in fifty people in the city by 1910. Most lived in the Bessemer or Peppersauce Bottoms neighborhoods, and worked on farms or at the steel mill, smeltery, or food packing plant. They built a close-knit community, attending the same churches and gathering for neighborhood events and trips out into the mountains. But while other immigrant communities did much the same and persisted in Pueblo, the Japanese American community dwindled and is little remembered today.

Throughout Muramoto’s life in Pueblo, his community dwindled. By 1940, there were fewer than fifty Japanese Americans living in the city, a number which included Frank Muramoto and his family of five. After a 1921 flood that ravaged the city left many unemployed, and many more lost their jobs during the Great Depression. Some relocated to Denver, while others went farther afield. The once large and strong community was reduced to a small handful of families, many of whom moved away as well in the coming generations—including Muramoto’s own descendants.

We are extremely lucky to be able to see a few hundred tiny snippets of their lives, the community they built, the celebrations they held, and the people they knew and cared for, through the lens of one of their own community’s members. Frank Muramoto’s photography is an almost priceless gift he left all of Colorado, and he did it all just by being himself.