HARD to believe now but there was a time when photography was ephemeral, brief, fleeting. If prints or negatives were lost or disappeared, the picture was gone.
Not now, of course, but a generation of press photographers such as   Mayu Kanamori have lived through this transition over the past 20 years. And it has given her much to think about. 
As the digital revolution began in the late 1990s, Kanamori was in the northern WA town of Broome, taking portraits of people with a mixed indigenous- Japanese heritage, as she was of Japanese heritage herself and intrigued by this largely undiscussed aspect of our heritage.
And it was then she first happened across the story of Yasukichi Murakami, a shopkeeper and adventurer, who had made his way from Japan to WA in the late 19th century, ending up in Broome where he ran a bustling general store. He was also an avid photographer, running a studio as well, and was also a successful entrepreneur and inventor.
In the 1930s, Murakami moved to Darwin and really began to concentrate on his photographic work. He became a huge success but when World War II broke out, like many other Australians of Japanese heritage, he was interned. He died in the camp in 1944, his legacy lost with the pictures that simply vanished when he left.
Intrigued by his story, Kanamori began to look into it and eventually penned the theatre work Yasukichi Murakami: Through A Distant Lens, which shows at Riverside Theatres next week.
"He couldn't take his photographs with him and when he died in the internment camp, they went missing, and so for me, it was a metaphor for the collective national amnesia about the Japanese in Australia, so I went out to look for them and that became the basis of the story," Kanamori explains.
Using photographic projection, video, music and soundscape, the two-person work tells Murakami's story through the eyes of an onstage version of Kanamori (Arisa Yura), who is researching Murakami's (Japanese-Australian actor Kuni Hashimoto) life. It has toured Darwin and Broome and some of Murakami's descendants have attended.
"Because of the internment and his photographs being lost, it really gave the Murakami family a chance to feel their ancestor's work was acknowledged," Kanamori says.Yasukichi Murakami: Through A Distant Lens, Riverside Theatres, Parramatta; $25-$39, 8839 3399, riversideparamatta.com.au