Dan Lamberton is a retired Walla Walla University professor and former Humanities Washington speaker who has recently finished an in-depth study of Japanese photographer Frank Matsura.

In the early 1900s, Mr. Matsura emigrated to Washington and settled in Okanogan County. There, he embedded himself in a community of Native people and homesteaders, documenting the community that welcomed him.

Frank Matsura's photographs reveal not only photographic mastery, but also an intimate decency toward the region's citizens. His humor, his soulfulness, his accuracy, are unmatched among photographers of the early 20th-century west.