Discover Nikkei

https://www.discovernikkei.org/en/interviews/clips/1442/

Joining WRA Photographic Section

First I worked in the community hospital, worked a little bit as an orderly there. And then there was a opening in the x-ray department and so they were asking groups around the hospital if they were interested in working in the x-ray department. And I figured this has a little bit of photographic possibilities there. So they hired me and I started to learn how to x-ray, you know, people. I worked there for oh, maybe half a year or so.

And during that time I became friends with the Heart Mountain Sentinel, the newspaper group, and one of them was Bill Hosokawa, and a fellow named Von Maaco, he was the director of the newspaper. And I was hanging around there a little bit.

And then one day a WRA photographer. Actually, there were two: Tom Parker and Charlie Mace, were up in Heart Mountain, in order to photograph different situations. And also, they told Von Maaco they were looking for someone to work in the photographic lab in Denver developing film. So they hired me and I moved from Heart Mountain to Denver. Where the WRA had their laboratory. And it was the only laboratory for WRA in the country. Not Washington DC, but in Denver. So I was hired as a darkroom technician.


Heart Mountain Heart Mountain concentration camp photography United States World War II World War II camps Wyoming

Date: December 3, 2009

Location: California, US

Interviewer: John Esaki

Contributed by: Watase Media Arts Center, Japanese American National Museum

Interviewee Bio

Hikaru Carl Iwasaki (b. 1923) grew up in San Jose, California, developing his interest in photography while working on his high school newspaper and yearbook. With Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, the Iwasaki Family was sent to the Santa Anita Assembly Center and then to a concentration camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming—where he was forbidden to have a camera. He was given a job as an X-ray technician in the hospital where the head of the camp newspaper took notice of his abilities and recommended him for work as a photographic darkroom technician with the War Relocation Authority photo unit in Denver, Colorado. Within a year, Iwasaki had become a WRA photographer, traveling freely around the country, assigned to document hundreds of Japanese Americans who had left camp and begun resettlement in various regions of the U.S. After the War, Carl began a long career as a photographer for Life, Time, Sports Illustrated, People, and many other national publications. 

He passed away on September 2016 at age 93. (September 2016)

 

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