Having surveyed the landscape of Nikkei long-term care choices in Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Sacramento and San Jose, I turned my attentions to Seattle, the last stop on my reporting tour. Although Japanese immigrants began arriving in Seattle in the late 19th-century, its Nihonmachi population has always been small …
I woke on the morning of March 11 to an email from a friend saying she had just heard about a massive quake in Japan and she hoped that my relatives and friends there were safe. It was the first of many such emails and phone calls I received in …
Read Part 10 >> Part Two: Dorothea Lange When Lange arrived at Manzanar in 1942 to take photos for the WRA, she was already famous for her 1930s documentary photos of the rural poor, part of her work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Her best known work, the bleakly …
Read Part 9 >> It was not until I looked at an online version of the 1944 Born Free and Equal (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/anseladams/ ) that I felt the full impact of Adams’s message. This original version includes several landscapes omitted from a 2002 reprint (Spotted Dog Press, Inc., Bishop, CA), including his majestic …
Read Part 8 >> Walking a Fine Line In Born Free and Equal, Adams struggled to walk a fine line between advocating for the imprisoned Japanese while not leaving himself vulnerable to charges of disloyalty. The Nisei, too, walked that line, balancing hurt and anger with a desire for approval …
Read Part 7 >>Adams, Paul Strand, and the Nisei Point of ViewHammond also defended Adams’s style against critics who found his photographs lacking in pathos or without political context. Karin Becker Ohrn, for example, in 1977 favorably contrasted Lange’s photos of concentration camp prisoners, who appeared “less controlled even slightly uncomfortable,” …
Read Part 6 >>Born Free and Equal: Differing InterpretationsIn the late 1970s three graduate students in the UCLA Fine Arts Program created an exhibition and book called “Two Views of Manzanar,” which included photographs by Adams and Miyatake. Graham Howe, who along with Patrick Nagatani and Scott Rankin, opened the …
Read Part 5 >>Ansel Adams: Gifted Pianist Turned Master PhotographerBy the time he arrived at Manzanar in October 1943 for the first of four working visits, Adams was a successful and famous photographer. He had helped launch the short-lived but important organization of West Coast photographers Group f/64, had exhibited …
Read Part 4 >>History Recast as Art: Documentary and Fictional Accounts of Exile and BanishmentThose views were shaped in turn by artistic, literary, documentary and nonfiction accounts of the Japanese American war experience. Born Free and Equal was forgotten amid the post-war building boom as a curtain of silence descended …
Read Part 3 >>The Photographic Documentation of ManzanarAs Fujikawa, Alinder and Hosoe all noted, photographs of the World War II prison camps can be just as misleading as the rosy accounts of those who were imprisoned. So much so that the writer and lawyer Gerald H. Robinson titled his examination …
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