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11-06-2006, 04:08 PM
November 6, 2006
Photographs of an Episode That Lives in Infamy
By DINITIA SMITH / NYT
During the winter of 1942, in the first heated months of America’s war with Japan, the United States government ordered tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, to report to assembly centers throughout the West for transfer to internment camps. The infamous episode has been widely chronicled in books and memoirs, as well as in famous photos by Ansel Adams.
But now close to 800 new images from the period by the photographer Dorothea Lange have been unearthed in the National Archives, where they had lain neglected for a half-century after having been impounded by the government.
Adams portrayed the internees in the now-infamous camp at Manzanar, Calif., in heroic poses, lighted against the backdrop of the majestic Sierras mountains. Lange’s images — nearly a hundred of which are being published for the first time — tell a starkly different story.
The pictures in “Impounded” (W. W. Norton) bear the hallmarks of Lange’s distinctive documentary style. (She is best known from her photographs of migrant farmers in the Depression for the Farm Security Administration.) Seemingly unstaged and unlighted, the pictures of the internees compress intense human emotion into carefully composed frames.
“They tell us that conditions in the camps were much worse than most people think,” said Linda Gordon, a historian at New York University who edited the book with Gary Y. Okihiro, a historian at Columbia University. Both also contributed essays.
Lange’s work unflinchingly illustrates the reality of life during this extraordinary moment in American history when about 110,000 people were moved with their families, sometimes at gunpoint, into horse stalls and tar-paper shacks where they endured brutal heat and bitter cold, filth, dust and open sewers.
In his essay Mr. Okihiro describes the atmosphere in which the deportations took place. He quotes from an editorial in The Los Angeles Times from the period: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched — so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents — grows up to be Japanese, not an American.” Yet, Ms. Gordon said, “The U.S. government had deliberately suppressed reports from F.B.I. and military intelligence that concluded that Japanese-Americans posed no security risk.” The War Relocation Authority hired Lange to document the internments, possibly to demonstrate that the detainees were not being mistreated and international law was not being violated.
But at nearly all of the 21 locations Lange visited, the government tried to restrict her. At the assembly centers and at Manzanar she was not allowed to photograph the wire fences, the watchtowers with searchlights, the armed guards or any sign of resistance. She was discouraged from talking to detainees. At one point she was almost fired when one of her photographs appeared on a Quaker pamphlet denouncing the internment...
full article (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/06/arts/design/06lang.html)
Photographs of an Episode That Lives in Infamy
By DINITIA SMITH / NYT
During the winter of 1942, in the first heated months of America’s war with Japan, the United States government ordered tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry, two-thirds of them American citizens, to report to assembly centers throughout the West for transfer to internment camps. The infamous episode has been widely chronicled in books and memoirs, as well as in famous photos by Ansel Adams.
But now close to 800 new images from the period by the photographer Dorothea Lange have been unearthed in the National Archives, where they had lain neglected for a half-century after having been impounded by the government.
Adams portrayed the internees in the now-infamous camp at Manzanar, Calif., in heroic poses, lighted against the backdrop of the majestic Sierras mountains. Lange’s images — nearly a hundred of which are being published for the first time — tell a starkly different story.
The pictures in “Impounded” (W. W. Norton) bear the hallmarks of Lange’s distinctive documentary style. (She is best known from her photographs of migrant farmers in the Depression for the Farm Security Administration.) Seemingly unstaged and unlighted, the pictures of the internees compress intense human emotion into carefully composed frames.
“They tell us that conditions in the camps were much worse than most people think,” said Linda Gordon, a historian at New York University who edited the book with Gary Y. Okihiro, a historian at Columbia University. Both also contributed essays.
Lange’s work unflinchingly illustrates the reality of life during this extraordinary moment in American history when about 110,000 people were moved with their families, sometimes at gunpoint, into horse stalls and tar-paper shacks where they endured brutal heat and bitter cold, filth, dust and open sewers.
In his essay Mr. Okihiro describes the atmosphere in which the deportations took place. He quotes from an editorial in The Los Angeles Times from the period: “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched — so a Japanese-American, born of Japanese parents — grows up to be Japanese, not an American.” Yet, Ms. Gordon said, “The U.S. government had deliberately suppressed reports from F.B.I. and military intelligence that concluded that Japanese-Americans posed no security risk.” The War Relocation Authority hired Lange to document the internments, possibly to demonstrate that the detainees were not being mistreated and international law was not being violated.
But at nearly all of the 21 locations Lange visited, the government tried to restrict her. At the assembly centers and at Manzanar she was not allowed to photograph the wire fences, the watchtowers with searchlights, the armed guards or any sign of resistance. She was discouraged from talking to detainees. At one point she was almost fired when one of her photographs appeared on a Quaker pamphlet denouncing the internment...
full article (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/06/arts/design/06lang.html)