Life at a Japanese Internment Camp: 25 photos of racial incarceration by Ansel Adams

BY: DANIEL WATERBORNE

Photos by © Ansel Adams

In February 1942, President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, resulting in 110,000 Japanese-Americans being forcibly relocated to internment camps. Following Pearl Harbour, Japanese-Americans were stripped of their rights and were held subject to a blanket shame for simply looking like the enemy.

Manzanar, a town cradled by the Sierra Nevada in California became one of ten national internment camps. For four years, Japanese Americans lived between barbed-wire fences under the watchful eye of prison guards. In 1943, Ansel Adams made his first trip to Manzanar upon invitation from the warden to photograph life inside a Japanese internment camp.

What he found was community solidarity rising out of the injustice of racial segregation. He would later publish a book titled, Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans in 1944. A haunting collection of portraits that capture a spirit that would not succumb to the shadows of guard towers—these portraits capture the face of resilience.

Ansel Adams was prohibited from capturing images of barbed-wire fences that might later be used to embarrass the United States on the world stage. Adams used wide-framing in landscapes to document history as it was.

In 1965, upon donating his work to the Library of Congress, Adams stated “The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and despair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment.”