LORA JO - AUTHOR & PHOTOGRAPHER

Rainier Marie Rilke said in Letters to a Young Poet that art is good if it is born of necessity and has its roots in the deepest place in your heart. 

I am the daughter of a garment worker. I wanted to tell the story of the kids of immigrant women whose overworked mothers were absent for most of the waking hours of their young lives. By telling my own story, I tell theirs also.

My first story crystalized one night in 1989 as I lay in a tent, writing by the beam of a flashlight, during a three-week trek in the Helambu-Langtang region of Nepal. 

Thereafter, I eked out a story or two once a year, simply because the memories were painful to recall.  It took over ten years to write the short stories in Earth Passages.

Becoming a photographer was pure serendipity.  My husband at the time handed me his camera during a rafting trip through the Grand Canyon.  I was surprised by the quality of my first few rolls.

At first, I was fascinated with trees, particularly trees that pushed through granite, gripped onto hillsides and cliffs, or scraped out a life in dry desert.

After studying and re-studying these pictures, I realized that I was photographing my early childhood.

My photos are about my surviving my childhood –of growing up in an impoverished family of eight, in a federal housing project in San Francisco's Chinatown.  Here, in the second most densely populated area of the country, at the age of 10, I even caught tuberculosis from a classmate at the age 10, a disease mostly eradicated in the rest of America.

Green Tree Among Hoodoos, the cover photograph, is a metaphor about young living things surviving harsh, barren environments.

Thus, photography is an inner journey to reach the deepest part of me. I had to photograph just as I had to write my childhood stories. 

I was inspired to publish this unlikely mixture of childhood stories and nature photographs because while the stories were painful to write and read, the photographs heal.

Earth Passages may be ordered at:  http://www.asiabookcenter.com

LORA JO - LAWYER, ACTIVIST, & COMMUNITY ORGANIZER

A garment worker at age 11 and a union organizer for eight years in the garment and hotel industries, Lora Jo Foo became an attorney representing low wage workers in sweatshop industries. 

Lora Jo litigated numerous groundbreaking cases on their behalf. She co-founded Sweatshop Watch and the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum. 

In 2002, Lora Jo published her first book, Asian American Women: Issues, Concerns and Responsive Human and Civil Rights  Advocacy.  

1995 - addressing a session at the United Nations 4th World Women's Conference. Beijing

Lora Jo stopped litigating in 2000 to return to her roots as an organizer and to school where she received her Masters in Public Administration from Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2002. 

Most recently she was the organizing director of a major California union. In 2004 and 2008, she was the National Voting Rights Protection Coordinator for the AFL-CIO in Washington, D.C.

Lora Jo photographs extensively throughout the world, exhibiting her collection in galleries and at fine art fairs in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she makes her home.

Lora Jo's signed photographs are now available for purchase in 8" x 10" print, matted to 11" x 14".  They are mounted on archival nonbuffered ragboard."  Please visit: http://www.asiabookcenter.com