Emiko Omori
| Emiko Omori | |
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Omori in 1983
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| Born | 1940 California, USA |
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| Known for | Documentary films |
Emiko Omori (born 1940) is an American cinematographer and film director known for her documentary films. Her feature-length documentary Rabbit in the Moon won the Best Documentary Cinematography Award at the 1999 Sundance Film Festival and an Emmy Award after it was broadcast on PBS that same year. One of the first camerawomen to work in news documentaries, Omori began her career at KQED in San Francisco in 1968.
The youngest of three sisters, Omori was born in California to parents of Japanese descent. In 1942, the family was uprooted from their small but prosperous vegetable farm in Oceanside and taken to the Poston internment camp in Arizona where Americans of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated after the attack on Pearl Harbor. The family was released in 1945, shortly before her fifth birthday and returned to Oceanside. Her mother died a year later. Omori later said of her childhood and young adult years:
I totally rejected everything Japanese and didn't want to have anything to do with it. Of course, the internment camps didn't help. The Japanese language was violently and adamantly suppressed, and we were 'discouraged from congregating'. So, for a long time. I wanted to be the total opposite.
Omori studied film at San Francisco State University, graduating in 1967. She began her career in 1968 at KQED in San Francisco working on the station's newly launched program Newsroom and became one of the first camerawomen to work in news documentaries. She started off as an editor but after two weeks began filming for the show. A year later she organized the San Francisco branch of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians. She became a freelance cinematographer in the 1970s and worked on several documentaries on aspects of African-American culture.
Omori first met tattoo artist Ed Hardy in 1974 when she visited Tattoo City, his original San Francisco studio, and received a small tattoo. It was the beginning of a collaboration that has lasted for over 30 years, spurred her own interest in tattoo art, and led to an awakening of her interest in her Japanese heritage. She began filming Hardy at work over the next several years. The resulting half-hour documentary, Tattoo City, premiered at the Castro Theatre in 1980. Part of the film depicted Hardy's creation on Omori's back of a traditional Japanese tattoo based on the fable of the pearl diver Princess Tamatori. In 2010 she directed, filmed, and narrated the feature-length documentary, Ed Hardy: Tattoo the World, a retrospective of Hardy's life and work. She also co-produced and wrote the 2002 PBS television documentary Skin Stories which explored the cultural significance of tattooing in Hawaii, New Zealand, Samoa, San Diego and Los Angeles.
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