Photographer and designer Jerry Takigawa has been a social and environmental advocate since 1969. In his series False Food, Takigawa speaks to the issue of plastics pollution specifically of the Albatross of the Midway Atoll who mistake plastic debris for food and literally starve to death.

Takigawa’s series, False Food, is featured in the Main Gallery at the Griffin Museum April 9 through June 5, 2015. An opening reception with the artist takes place on April 9, 7-8:30 p.m. Jerry Takigawa will give a gallery talk and tour of False Food at 6:00 PM. The talk is FREE.

“[False Food] is a way of taking an overwhelming environmental problem and finding a way to make it personal,” says Takigawa. “I have become acutely aware of the abundance of plastic in my life and in my world. The albatross have provided me with a new awareness of the web of life.”

Takigawa continues, “Creating these images helps me to integrate the tragedy of the [Albatross] with a sense of hope—hope that by telling and re-telling the story—observers may be inspired to act, not to turn away.”

“Jerry Takigawa doesn’t hit us over the head with preachy dialogue on the perils of plastics pollution in the artworks of False Food. Rather, he connects us with the issue more subtly,” says Paula Tognarelli, executive director of the Griffin Museum of Photography. “Through their quiet cadence, Takigawa’s photographs provoke further enquiry into the context of the source materials used. What a paradox it is to discover that such beauty points to the devastation of our oceans caused by industrial civilization,” says Tognarelli. “The photographs of False Food communicate a sense of preciousness as art objects, as well as articulating the dearness of our natural resources.”

Takigawa received a BFA, with an emphasis in painting, from San Francisco State University in 1967. He studied photography under Don Worth. While living in the San Francisco Bay Area, he utilized his art and design skills to help develop a pilot VISTA program (Volunteers in Service to America) in Oakland, California. In 1982, he became the first photographer to receive the Imogen Cunningham Award for color photography. Takigawa has served as past-president of People in Communications Arts (PiCA), a trustee for the Monterey Museum of Art, and currently serves as president for the Center for Photographic Art.

Takigawa’s work is in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the Library of Congress, the Monterey Museum of Art, The San Francisco Foundation, the University of Louisville, Syntex Laboratories Inc., The Monterey Vineyard, the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, the Imogen Cunningham Trust, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

In honor of Earth Day on April 22, 2015 the museum will be open to the public for FREE all day.