15
The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 15 | Issue 3 | Number 1 | Article ID 5008 | Feb 01, 2017 1 Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the Japanese American Internment Linda Gordon Abstract: While Dorothea Lange has long been widely known and acclaimed for her photographs depicting the impact of the Great Depression on farmers and laborers, her documentation of the Japanese American internment was long impounded by the US army. This article tells the story and shows some of the signature images contained in her documentation of the internment as well as explaining their long suppression. Shortly after Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of Japanese Americans in 1942, the War Location Authority hired photographer Dorothea Lange to document the process. I strongly suspect that whoever made the decision knew little about her previous work, but learned that she had worked for the federal government and that she lived in California, where most of the internees lived. She is now recognized as one of the greatest American documentary photographers, even a major influence on the very definition of documentary photography, but in 1942 very few knew her name. Lange spent her first fifteen years as a photographer, approximately 1920 to 1935, doing studio portraiture in San Francisco. At this she was extremely successful, and became the preferred photographer of the city’s artistic and wealthy elite, including the Levi-Strauss family and artists such as composer Ernest Bloch; she was then married to prominent artist Maynard Dixon, and she socialized with artists, bohemians, and her wealthy clients. When Diego Rivera made his first visit to the US in 1930, he fell in with that crowd and Lange loaned her studio to Frida Kahlo. In 1935, restless and bored with her studio photography, she took a job with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) of the Department of Agriculture. Her assignment was to document the impact of the depression on farmers and farmworkers; these photographs were widely published as a means of building support for President Franklin Roosevelt’s agricultural policies. These photographs, however, then appeared without the name of their creator. Since then, however, she has become most famous for this work: her photographs of migrant farmworkers and sharecroppers have been so widely published that those who do not know her name almost always recognize her pictures. She has been the subject of many major museum exhibits. Several dozen art books feature her photographs and they also appear as illustrations in hundreds of books, magazines, even advertisements. (Since the bulk of her work was done for the federal or California state government, it is in the public domain and anyone can use it gratis for any legal purpose whatsoever.)

Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

  • Upload
    others

  • View
    5

  • Download
    0

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Page 1: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 15 | Issue 3 | Number 1 | Article ID 5008 | Feb 01, 2017

1

Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the JapaneseAmerican Internment

Linda Gordon

Abstract:

While Dorothea Lange has long been widelyknown and acclaimed for her photographsdepicting the impact of the Great Depressionon farmers and laborers, her documentation ofthe Japanese American internment was longimpounded by the US army. This article tellsthe story and shows some of the signatureimages contained in her documentation of theinternment as well as explaining their longsuppression.

Shortly after Franklin Roosevelt ordered theinternment of Japanese Americans in 1942, theWar Location Authority hired photographerDorothea Lange to document the process. Istrongly suspect that whoever made thedecision knew little about her previous work,but learned that she had worked for the federalgovernment and that she lived in California,where most of the internees lived. She is nowrecognized as one of the greatest Americandocumentary photographers, even a majorinfluence on the very definition of documentaryphotography, but in 1942 very few knew hername.

Lange spent her first fifteen years as aphotographer, approximately 1920 to 1935,doing studio portraiture in San Francisco. Atthis she was extremely successful, and becamethe preferred photographer of the city’s artisticand wealthy elite, including the Levi-Straussfamily and artists such as composer Ernest

Bloch; she was then married to prominentartist Maynard Dixon, and she socialized withartists, bohemians, and her wealthy clients.When Diego Rivera made his first visit to theUS in 1930, he fell in with that crowd andLange loaned her studio to Frida Kahlo.

In 1935, restless and bored with her studiophotography, she took a job with the FarmSecurity Administration (FSA) of theDepartment of Agriculture. Her assignmentwas to document the impact of the depressionon farmers and farmworkers ; thesephotographs were widely published as a meansof building support for President FranklinRoosevelt’s agricultural policies. Thesephotographs, however, then appeared withoutthe name of their creator. Since then, however,she has become most famous for this work: herphotographs of migrant farmworkers andsharecroppers have been so widely publishedthat those who do not know her name almostalways recognize her pictures. She has beenthe subject of many major museum exhibits.Several dozen art books feature herphotographs and they also appear asillustrations in hundreds of books, magazines,even advertisements. (Since the bulk of herwork was done for the federal or Californiastate government, it is in the public domain andanyone can use it gratis for any legal purposewhatsoever.)

Page 2: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

APJ | JF 15 | 3 | 1

2

Dorothea Lange Photographing in SanFrancisco, 1942

Until 2006, almost no one knew of herphotographs of the Japanese internment. Thesewere also commissioned by the federalgovernment, but had never been published as acollection, and approximately 97 percent ofthem have never been published at all.1 Theirneglect resulted from US Army censorship:once the brass saw the photographs, theyquickly impounded them for the duration of thewar, and afterward placed them in the NationalArchives.2 US Army Major Beasley actuallywrote "Impounded" across some of the prints(luckily, not on the negatives). In the course ofwriting Lange’s biography, I found thesephotographs and published, with co-authorGary Okihiro , a se lect ion of them inImpounded: Dorothea Lange and the CensoredPhotographs of the Japanese AmericanInternment (W. W. Norton, 2006).3

The photographs were impounded because theywere unmistakably critical. They unequivocally

denounced, v isual ly , an unjust i f ied,unnecessary, and racist policy. (Thatperspective is readily visible if you comparethem to the photographs of Ansel Adams,published in 1944 as Born Free and Equal, ofwhich more below.) Lange’s photographiccritique is especially impressive given thepolitical mood of the time--early 1942, just afterJapan bombed Pearl Harbor. Hysterical fears offurther Japanese attacks on the west coast ofthe US combined with a century of racismagainst Asians, including Chinese, Filipinos,Indians as well as Japanese, to create asituation in which, as Carey McWilliams, laterto become the editor of The Nation, remarked,you could count on your fingers the number of"whites" who spoke publicly against sendingJapanese-Americans to concentrationcamps.4 Even liberal Dr. Seuss (TheodoreGeisel) contributed a racist anti-Japanesecartoon.5

In her years as a studio photographer, with anelite clientele, nothing suggested that politicsor political radicalism interested her. She wasan ardent New Dealer and deeply admiredFDR, but never a protester. Still, her life in SanFrancisco was slightly more multicultural thanwas typical among whites. Immersed in the

Page 3: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

APJ | JF 15 | 3 | 1

3

city’s bohemian art world, she had eaten inChinatown restaurants, where most white SanFranciscans feared to go, and drunk wine inItalian cafes at a time when most native-bornwhite Americans drank only beer and whiskey.But in her studio work Lange had almost neverphotographed nonwhites until she married PaulSchuster Taylor, a progressive professor ofeconomics at UC Berkeley. His major researchsubject was agricultural labor, and he was therare economist who actually talked with andlistened to his subjects as well as collectingdata about them. He was the only Anglo scholarto study Mexican Americans in the 1920s, andwas one of the few Anglos to question theinternment from its beginning.

Operating like an ethnographer, Taylorcollected the immigration and work histories ofhis subjects and became a staunch ally off a rmworker o rgan i z ing s t rugg les .Coincidentally, he had been carrying a cameraand making pictures to illustrate his researchsince 1919, and in 1927 when he undertook amassive survey of Mexican labor in the US, hemade photographs part of his data,6 so when hesaw some of Lange’s work he appreciated itsquality. It was Taylor, well connected toprogressives in the Department of Agriculture,who got her the FSA job; working with her inthe field, he educated her about the exploitiveand even brutal treatment of migrantfarmworkers, especially African Americans andother "nonwhites" of Mexican and Filipinobackgrounds. She learned from Taylor andfrom the evidence before her eyes how diverseracisms intensified and naturalized theexploitation of labor, and permeated regionalcultures. Taylor and Lange divorced theirspouses and married each other in 1935,creating a personal, professional and politicalpartnership that lasted to the end of her life in1965.

Lange’s most famous photo, sometimes calledMigrant Mother, became the most widelyrecognized photograph in the US, but it created

a false impression of her focus. Still today manythink of Lange as a photographer of the“Okies,” white victims of drought and duststorms who migrated west to work in theagricultural fields. In fact, this group compriseda very small part of Lange’s subjects. Thegreater part of her work focused on southernsharecroppers, both black and white, andfarmworkers employed by the vast corporatefarms of the west coast. There is a reason forthis misimpression: the FSA distributed almostexclusively photographs of whites, on thepremise that only white victims of theDepression could evoke public sympathy.

Looking back now at Lange’s FSA work, we cansee her represent ing these var iousfarmworkers as citizens and as uniqueindividuals. The common denominator amongthese photographs was respect. Her images ofsharecroppers and migrant farmworkers hadno less gravitas than her portraits of SanFrancisco’s symphony conductors andcorporate executives.

This vision is directly relevant to this story:Lange’s crit ical take on the Japaneseinternment flowed directly from her experienceof racism in California’s agriculturalemployment.

Shortly after Lange’s job with the FSA ended,Imperial Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. MajorCalifornia media and political leaderspresented the Japanese enemy in racial ratherthan ideological terms. Very little of thiscommentary remarked on the politics ofImperial Japan, and almost all argued orassumed that the danger was in Japanese“blood.” Rumors, almost all false, of spies,sabotage, and potential attacks circulatedwidely. A few authenticated attacks -- forexample, in February 1942 submarines shelleda Santa Barbara oil refinery; in June asubmarine shelled the Oregon coast; inSeptember a plane dropped 2 incendiary bombsnear Brookings, Oregon -- escalated the fear-

Page 4: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

APJ | JF 15 | 3 | 1

4

driven hysteria, although no one was hurt anddamage was minimal. Moreover, the executiveorder calling for evacuation came out beforeany of these attacks occurred. Military leadersratcheted up the anti-Japanese fever. GeneralDeWitt, head of the US Army’s WesternDefense Command opined that "The Japaneserace is an enemy race and while many secondand third generation Japanese born onAmerican soil, possessed of Americancitizenship, have become `Americanized,’ theracial strains are undiluted .... The very factthat no sabotage has taken place to date is adisturbing and confirming indication that suchaction will be taken ..."7 That kind of hystericalillogic went largely unchallenged.

In February 1942 FDR ordered the internmentof Japanese and Japanese Americans on theWest coast,8 regardless of their citizenship, andthe War Relocation Authority (WRA) wasestablished on March 18 to organize theirremoval. The WRA then hired Lange todocument the program photographically. TheWRA was then headed by Milton Eisenhower,brother of Dwight, who had previously workedfor the Department of Agriculture; he mightwell have been acquainted with Paul Taylor andLange’s reputation as the FSA’s most in-demand photographer had probably reachedhim. Therein lies an irony. No doubt she hadreceived an enthusiastic recommendationbecause her work had so perfectly promotedthe Department of Agriculture’s 1930s agenda;the WRA probably expected the same now butdid not get it.

Lange was eager for the job, and Taylor waseager for her to do it. He was already amember of a University of California/Berkeleyfaculty committee questioning the necessity forthe internment. He may have wantedinformation available only to someone admittedto the internment camps. Did she know inadvance that she would be a subversiveemployee, I wonder? Apparently no one everasked her that question, and there is no written

evidence. When I interviewed her assistant inthis work, Christina Gardner, I suggested thatperhaps the government had not expected herpictures to be so critical—to show the losses ofpeople forced to leave jobs, schools, andproperty, or to show the miserable conditionsin the camps. Gardner responded, "what elsewas there to show?"9

Stil l , Lange’s will ingness to show thehumiliation and suffering of the internment isremarkable for another reason. She adoredFDR, not least because she too lived with adisability created by childhood polio. But it wasthis President who had ordered the internment.So her visual denunciation represented not onlycourage but also what must have been a painfulintegrity in flouting a Roosevelt policy.

Lange began by photographing the rounding upof Japanese Americans in California, not aneasy task because many of them were rural,operating often as truck farmers. So Langedrove throughout the Bay area and California’svast Central Valley. Then she went to thetemporary "assembly centers," where interneeswere housed until the long-term camps wereready. Finally, and in late June-early July of1942, she worked at the Manzanar camp. Thenshe was fired and her photographs impoundedfor the duration of the War. She was requiredto turn over al l negatives, prints andundeveloped film from this work. "I had to signwhen I was finished, under oath, before anotary."10 Afterward the films were quietlyplaced in the National Archives in Washington,rather than with the bulk of her governmentphotography in the Library of Congress. As aresult few knew they were there—Lange herselfdid not know this for many years.

In her previous documentary work, Lange’sphotographic technique required putting hersubjects at ease. She introduced herself asworking for President Roosevelt; she talkedwith her subjects, asked questions. She nevertried to get "candid" pictures of unaware

Page 5: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

APJ | JF 15 | 3 | 1

5

subjects as FSA photographers Ben Shahn andWalker Evans did, and she never photographedindoors because she did not like how flashbulbs made her subjects look. I suspect thatshe exaggerated her limp in order to appearunthreatening, and worked deliberately slowly;like all good portrait photographers, she knewthat most people tense up in front of a camera,so she wanted them to loosen up, even to forgetthe camera and become invo lved inconversation. A good portrait, she remarked,required that her subjects relax into their“natural body language.” She never used 35-mm cameras, which are held in front of youreyes, but large, heavier cameras, held at waistlevel; by looking down at a waist-high camerato see her image, she could spend most of thetime looking at and talking with her subjects.She used the heavier cameras she had beenaccustomed to: a Zeiss Juwell, a ground glasscamera, urged upon her by Ansel Adams, and aGraflex, her old favorite for studio work but tooheavy to carry around for any length of time.

Lange with Zeiss Juwell camera

These were view cameras, with negative sizesof 4" x 5" or so. The assistant would see thateach camera was always loaded with film sothat Lange could switch cameras quickly.

She had to modify this approach radically,however, in this job because she had tonegotiate conflicting constraints. First, in the1930s she had been working for a governmentcommitted to relieving suffering; now she wasdocumenting a suffering created by thegovernment in an operation she came toconsider odious. Second, she could not becompletely open with her supervisors. Third,the WRA imposed restrictions on what shecould photograph: no talking with internees, nopictures of barbed wire fences or watch towersor armed guards, no photographs of theinterior of the barracks in which the interneeslived, nothing hinting at resistance. Thus herusual masterful documentary method wasn’tpossible in this job.

On top of all that, she faced considerableharassment in trying to do the job. She was thevictim of divided authority and conflictingopinions within the federal government aboutinternment policy, and the obstacles she facedsuggest that some authorities quickly tried toforce her to quit. The WRA had hired her, but itwas the Army that policed the round-up and thecamps, and the military police (MPs) threwevery possible impediment in her way as shetried to do her job. She was constantlyfollowed. Despite weeks of visiting office to getdocuments authorizing her entry, she was oftenarbitrarily refused access to what she wassupposed to photograph.11 Or MPs wouldrepeatedly demand to see her credentials,making her lose precious time.12 Her assistantsuspected that this made the internees morewilling to cooperate with Lange. (Oddly, theMPs never asked her assistants for credentials,

Page 6: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

APJ | JF 15 | 3 | 1

6

suggesting that their motive was not concernfor security.) At the same time the WRAbureaucracy hassled her over mileage records,gas receipts, and made her account for everytelephone call.

Lange developed a particularly adversarialrelation with Major Beasley (referred to bysome as Bozo Beasley13), who tried to catch herin various infractions. Once she gave aphotograph to Caleb Foote, a leader in thepacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, who usedit as the cover of a pamphlet denouncing theinternment. Discovering this, Beasley thoughthe had good cause to get rid of her. Luckily forLange, a congressional investigating committeehad also published the picture, thus putting itinto the public domain.14 Another stroke ofluck: Beasley thought he had caught her out inholding back a negative, but when he called herin and demanded that she produce the missingnegative, she showed him that it was filed justwhere it ought to have been.15

Why did they hire her if they were so nervousabout a photographic record? Christina Pageremembered being bewildered that the MPswere so uncooperative when Lange wasworking for the government. But of course"government" was divided--if the Army brass incharge had been consulted, Lange wouldprobably not have been hired. Lange’s ownretrospective explanation was, they wanted arecord but not a public record, that the armybrass believed that a photographic record couldprotect against fa lse a l legat ions o fmistreatment and violation of internationallaw. Photography carried the risk, however, ofdocumenting actual mistreatment.16 A measureof how important it seemed to prevent such acalamity was that the internees were forbiddento have cameras. One pr ize-winningprofessional Japanese American photographer,Toyo Miyatake, once student and assistant toEdward Weston, smuggled a lens, a groundglass and a film holder into Manzanar. There hebuilt a camera box from scrap wood, disguised

i t as a lunch box, and photographedclandest inely . 1 7 We owe much of ourunderstanding of camp life in later years to hisinitiative and courage.

Toyo Miyatake, Manzanar Internment Camp

Because she was not allowed to enter thebarracks, she made fewer pictures of womenthan of men in the camps, since men were moreoften outside. Once she managed a quick viewinside the two rooms shared by Mr. Konda,below, his two sons and his married daughterand her husband. (Making this photographrequired her to violate her no-flash-bulbpolicy.)

Page 7: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

APJ | JF 15 | 3 | 1

7

Dorothea Lange, Mr. Konda and daughter, SanBruno Temporary Assembly Center, 1942

He is flatter, less complex than most of hersubjects, and not just because he is not lookingat the camera; Lange produced many portraitsin which her subjects look away without losingtheir aspect of thoughtfulness or inner tension.Mr. Konda looks, simply, depressed. Of coursehis depression is more than adequatelyexplained by the cell in which he lives and theprison surrounding the cell and the humiliationsurrounding it all, but Lange was not typicallysatisfied with mere condemnation. She usuallyavoided expressing her convictions throughcreating the most painful images possible butpreferred to picture the nub of humanresilience that somehow survived even inoppressive contexts.

Part of Lange’s narrative strategy was to followindividuals through the internment process,which allowed her to demonstrate the terribleeconomic and emotional losses the interneessuffered. She was able to identify particularfamilies through Paul Taylor’s connections,which included not only farmers he had studied

but also several younger Japanese Americanswho were his students—until they had to dropout and report for interment. One such familywas the Shibuyas of Mountain View, a town atthe southern end of San Francisco Bay. Shemade individual portraits of each familymember, showed them at work weeding,photographed their upscale house andmanicured garden as well as their commercialfields, which were as meticulously tended andas c lear o f weeds as the ir lawn. Shephotographed daughters playing with their dogon the front lawn, the entire family posed infront of the white colonial-style house. Thecaptions detail the achievements of the family.For example: "Mountain View, California.Ryohitsu Shibuya, successful chrysanthemumgrower, who arrived in this country in 1904,with $60 and a basket of clothes, is shownabove on his farm in Santa Clara County,b e f o r e r e m o v a l . H e g r e w p r i z echrysanthemums for select eastern markets.Horticulturists and other evacuees of Japaneseancestry will be given opportunities to followtheir callings at War Relocation Authoritycenters where they will spend the duration."18

Dorothea Lange, 1942. Daughters of Shibuyafamily in their front yard, Mountain View,Santa Clara County, California

Page 8: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

APJ | JF 15 | 3 | 1

8

Lange devoted hundreds of photographs todisplaying the respectability, Americanism,work ethic, good citizenship and achievementsof these people now being treated ascriminals.19 Her message was verbal as well asvisual; she wrote captions for her photographsso as to underline the Americanness of hersubjects. For example: "Six children in thefamily were born in the United States. The fourolder children attended leading CaliforniaUniversities."20 "Madoka Shibuya, then 25, wasa student at Stanford Medical School when thispicture was taken on April 18, 1942."21 "Oldestson of the Shibuya family who graduated fromthe College of Agriculture, University ofCalifornia, in 1939, with a degree in PlantPathology."23 She featured children readingAmerican comic books, saluting the flag,playing baseball; housewives who could havebeen Betty Crocker; teenage boys dressed oh-so-cool and young men in their army uniforms.This approach makes me uncomfortablebecause it seems to imply that these peoplewere “deserving,” as opposed to someunspecified others who might not be. Itsuggests that you have to earn human rightsthrough good behavior. But in refusing to showunbeautiful, unconventional, or down-and-outpeople, she was abiding by principles thatcharacterized all her photography. Theseincluded individualizing every subject, amethod derived from her years as a portraitphotographer; and showing them as thoughtful,often contemplative, conveying what I havecalled visual citizenship. At a time when peopleof color were overwhelmingly portrayed asstereotypes in white media, these were at thetime radical democratic images.

Dorothea Lange, Tenant farmer, ChathamCounty, North Carolina

She had two explanations for this: first, shebelieved that everyone was attractive once theyrelaxed into their “natural body language;”second, because she saw a photograph as acollaboration between photographer andsubject, the subject has every right to berepresented as attractive. (In the latterargument she prefigured some recent criticaltheory about photography, notably in AriellaAzoulay’s The Civil Contract of Photography(MIT Press, 2008).

But it was more diff icult for Lange toemphasize the upbeat when she began tophotograph the round-up and the camps.Instead, she managed an artistic approach thatcharacter i zed a l l her documentaryphotography: her images of suffering andunhappiness are nevertheless beautifulcompositions, and these compositions attractthe viewer and make it possible to really see,rather than to glance and look away. One suchc o m p o s i t i o n a l t h e m e , w h i c h w a ssimultaneously a leitmotif of life in the camps,was the queue.

Page 9: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

APJ | JF 15 | 3 | 1

9

Dorothea Lange, Tanforan TemporaryAssembly Center, 1942

The internees had to spend hours waiting inline. They line up for their preliminaryregistration, they wait in chairs, they standwaiting before tables at which officials askquestions, fill out forms, receive instructions.Their scant belongings--they were only allowedto take what they could carry--also form queueson sidewalks and dirt roads. They wait forbuses or trains to carry them away. They lineup to be assigned to their quarters, to collectthe straw that they had to use to createmattresses. They line up for toilets and laundryfacilities, they wait in line for their meals.

Dorothea Lange, San Francisco, 1942Dorothea Lange, San Francisco, 1942. Aman just about to board a bus to anassembly center.

A second theme: tagging people, as if they werepackages. The tags do not bear their names buta number: the head of each family received anumber with a tag for each member of thefamily.

Father is 107351A, mother 107351B, children

Page 10: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

APJ | JF 15 | 3 | 1

10

C through F from oldest to youngest,grandmother 107351G, and so on. Lange istak ing us in to a brave new wor ld o frationalization and control, featuring theindustrial and technological forms ofdomination described most influentially byFoucault. We see now that what is being stolenis not only farms and education and businessesand jobs but also personal identity. Individualsare registered, numbered, inoculated, tagged,categorized, and assigned. They are herded,segregated, exiled, inspected, billeted,surveilled.

Despite being infuriated, Lange mostly retainedrestraint and self-control, as did her subjects,and it is precisely this commitment to thediscipline her craft requires that makes thephotographs so compelling. She offeredoccasional humorous observations, albeitdrenched in irony. In a private notebook shewrote, "As an old man lines up his baggage forthe inspection, an alarm clock begins to ring[somewhere inside his bundles]. A young girljumps off the bus in her brave new clothes allsmiles, sees a friend up above, yells, `Hi, how isit?’ The other replies `awful’ and the smilefades ..."23 Occasionally the brutality of thisethnic cleansing, and the pain it caused,overwhelmed her. Lange’s friend and assistantChristina Page recalled how once " ...someJapanese farmer had driven his truck to townand a friend was going to take it back for himand his dog, a great big dog ... As the farmergot out of the truck and headed toward thetrain, the dog knew what was going on and thedog began to howl with a super-human,ungodly, just horrible screaming howl that wasjust the most heart-broken -- it was just anexpression of the whole evacuation.... And canyou imagine what it did to the owner of thatdog?... And the M.P.s kept running aroundsaying `Shut that dog up! shut that dog up!’ Imean nobody in that whole area could stand it.And finally the man that was supposed to drivethe truck back to the farm couldn’t stand it anylonger and he didn’t watch the train depart--he

jumped in the truck and drove the dog off."24

Ansel Adams photographed at Manzanar a yearafter Lange did, producing work that, bycontrast, reveals much about Lange’sperspective. He tried to walk a cramped line,opposing anti-Asian racism but avoidingopposition to the internment.25 Adams’ pictures,primarily portraits--surprisingly for a landscapephotographer--emphasized the internees’ stoic,polite, even cheerful "making-the-best-of-it."26 His subjects were almost exclusivelyhappy, smiling. His goal was to establish theinternees as unthreatening, Americanized,open--scrutable rather than inscrutable.27

Ansel Adams photograph, 1943

By making mainly individual portraits, hemasked collective racial discrimination. Theresultant hiding of the internment’s violation ofhuman r ights was not an unintendedconsequence of this goal, but an expression ofAdams’ patriotism. He believed that "the acridsplendor of the desert, ringed with toweringmountains, has strengthened the spirit of thepeople of Manzanar.... The huge vistas and thestern realities of sun and wind and spacesymbolize the immensity and opportunity ofAmerica ..."28 In November 1943 the Office of

Page 11: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

APJ | JF 15 | 3 | 1

11

War Information asked him for permission touse his photos “`showing American kindness toJapanese ... urgently requested from our Pacificoutposts to combat Japanese propaganda whichclaims our behavior is monstrous.’”29 "It wasobvious to me that the project could not be oneof heavy reportage with repeated description ofthe obviously oppressive situation. Withadmirable strength of spirit, the Nisei roseabove dependency ... This was the mood andcharacter I determined to apply to theproject."30

Ansel Adams did not invent this observation;this positive attitude did characterize many ofthe internees and their fortitude deserveshonor--although it was also an attitudecondemned by more militant internees. Langeand Chris Page also noticed the patience31 ofthe internees, including even the children, andthey also considered this a characteristic traitof the Japanese culture. Indeed, twenty yearslater she remained amazed at the lack ofvengefulness on the part of some JapaneseAmericans she knew, such as Dave Tatsuno; "Idon’t understand those people," she said.32

Some part of the differences between Lange’sand Adams’s photography came from thetiming of their photographic work: by 1943,when Adams went, Manzanar was workingbetter, and the internees had done far more tobuild their own culture. But more of thedif ference came from their pol i t icaltemperaments. Lange’s willingness to defy heremployer, to resist the authoritative decision ofa president she so much admired, wascompletely in character. Adams and Langewere friends, and because her photographs hadbeen impounded she encouraged him to makehis public; this was before she had seen them, Isuspect. Twenty years later she was very hardon him, or at best patronizing:

That’s Ansel. He doesn’t have much senseabout these things. He was one of those at thebeginning of the war who said--they’d had

Japanese in their home always as house helpand that was characteristic of his household--hesaid he saw the point. `You never get to knowthem,’ and all this. He gave the regular line,you know, but he wasn’t vicious about it. He’signorant on these matters. He isn’t acutelyaware of social change. It was far for him to go,far. He felt pretty proud of himself for beingsuch a liberal ... on that book.... He doesn’tknow how far short it is, not yet.33

Yet Lange offered no images of resistance. Thismay have been overdetermined, because thearmy would not let her near any evidence of it,and because she did her work so early in thedevelopment of the camps. The closest shecame to signs of resistance was in privateconversations with people she knew wellenough that they trusted her to keep theircomments off the record.34

Sequestering these photographs deprived notonly their author but also Americans as awhole. To evaluate this loss, we need toconsider the formative role of the visual inconstructing the common understanding of theinternment--and of all racisms and patriotichysterias. Photography heavily influencedpublic opinion on these matters, and theDepress ion and World War I I per iodrepresented a major leap upwards in thatinfluence. In fact, the construction of Japaneseand Japanese Americans as an internal enemywas itself partly a visual process. A cartoon ofthe Japanese face was imprinted on the publicthrough posters, graffiti, atrocity films,cartoons and caricatures. The epicanthic eyefold and prominent teeth in particular becamevisual tropes for a despised, allegedlyuntrustworthy, and now enemy "race."It musthave been bitter for Lange to see these monthsof intense and passionate work confiscated,seemingly erased. The work was physically andemotionally draining.

Page 12: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

APJ | JF 15 | 3 | 1

12

The War Department (as the Department ofDefense was then called) even sought to teachwhites how to distinguish people of Japanesedescent from those of Chinese descent, as thisimage from Life Magazine shows.

The racist images were part icular lyauthoritative to a public only just beginning tobe saturated with photographic images. Giventhe long background of anti-Japanese racism onthe west coast, photography both intensifiedand reshaped racial categories, molding"Japanese" as a "visual field" signifyingdisloyalty and treachery.35 American patriotismbecame racialized—as white. Lange’s emphasisby contrast was on how “American” were theJapanese-Americans—as in this witty and ironicphoto of hip teenagers imprisoned atManzanar.

I have often wondered whether Lange’s

Page 13: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

APJ | JF 15 | 3 | 1

13

images—directly countering that anti-Japaneseracism—would have made an impact had theybeen distributed at the time.

This essay is an abridged and revised version ofmy introduction to Impounded: Dorothea Langeand the Censored Images of Japanese AmericanInternment (NY: W. W. Norton, 2006), whichcontains 117 of these photographs.

Related articles

Linda Gordon, Internment Without Charges:Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images ofJ a p a n e s e – A m e r i c a n s(https://apjjf.org/-Linda-Gordon/2260/article.html)

Teresa Goudie, Blood-Sacrifice in the Politics ofa Nation-State: Japanese-Americans in Hawaii

D u r i n g a n d A f t e r W o r l d W a r I I(https://apjjf.org/-Teresa-Goudie/2588/article.html)

A. Wallace Tashima, From the Internment ofJapanese Americans to Guantanamo: Justice ina T i m e o f T r i a l(https://apjjf.org/-A.-Wallace-Tashima/1948/article.html)

Mark Selden, Remembering ‘The Good War’:The Internment of Japanese-Americans and theAtomic Bombing in U.S. History Textbooks(https://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/1943/article.html)

Gary Okihiro, Japanese Americans and theMaking of US Democracy During World War II(https://apjjf.org/-Gary-Y.-Okihiro/1657/article.html)

Linda Gordon is a University Professor of the humanities and Professor of History at NewYork University. She is the author of the Bancroft Prize-winning The Great Arizona OrphanAbduction (http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/GORGRE.html) and other books dealing withthe history of controversial social policies, such as birth control and protection against familyviolence. Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro are the editors of Impounded: Dorothea Lange and theCensored Images of Japanese American Internment(http://www2.wwnorton.com/catalog/fall06/006073.htm).

Notes1 Richard Conrat, one of Lange’s assistants and protegés, together with his wife MaisieConrat, produced Executive Order 9066,which included 27 of her photographs, published as areport of the UCLA Asian American Studies Center in 1972.2 I have been unable to determine the legal basis and form of this suppression--that is, whomade the decision, how it was decided and communicated, and under what authority. But myhunch is that in this wartime situation, army officials felt authorized to make many censorshipdecisions unilaterally. As late as 2006, when Impounded appeared, the government was stillreluctant to use Lange’s photographs, well after the internment’s wrong had been recognizedand apologized for. For example, the National Park Service’s website on Manzanar thenincluded 91 photographs, of which 8 are Lange’s: none were among her most significant andonly one was at all critical.3 My biography is Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (W. W. Norton, 2009).

Page 14: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

APJ | JF 15 | 3 | 1

14

4 McWilliams oral history, on line at Sunsite, UC Berkeley, “Japanese-American Relocation.”Incidentally, the African American response was more divided. Crisis, magazine of theNAACP, published a scathing denunciation of the internment: Harry Paxton Howard,“Americans in Concentration Camps,” Sept. 1942, vol. 49n #9, pp. 281-302.5 It is available on-line here (http://www.uwm.edu/~margo/govstat/20213cs.jpg).6 Historian David Gutiérrez is typical of today’s scholars of Mexican Americans in hisjudgment that Taylor’s were "the most sensitive and penetrating studies of evolving MexicanAmerican-Mexican immigrant relationships ..." David Gutiérrez, Walls and Mirrors (Berkeley:University of California Press, 1995), p. 64.7 Personal Justice Denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internmentof Civilians (Washington, DC, 1982), p. 6.8 At this time almost all Japanese Americans lived on the west coast.9 Author interview with Christina Gardner, July 9, 2004.10 Suzanne Riess, interviewer, “Dorothea Lange: The Making of a DocumentaryPhotographer,” transcript, University of California Regional Oral History Office, Berkeley,1968, p. 189.11 Dorothea Lange to Dan Jones, 7/13/64, John Dixon personal collection; Riess, pp. 189-94.12 Gardner interview.13 Karen Will, interview with Tom Bodine, who worked at the time for the American FriendsService Committee, here (http://vm.uconn.edu/~ww2oh/tb2.htm).14 Caleb Foote to Al Hassler of Fellowship of Reconciliation 8/8/42, JDC papers; Hearingsbefore the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, US House ofRepresentatives, 77th Congress 2nd Session, pursuant to H.Res. 113, part 29, p. 11804K; HMinterview with Caleb Foote, 9/3/98.15 Gardner interview.16 It is important to keep in mind that in the 1940s there was no widespread awareness of howphotographs could be doctored; but there was plenty of awareness of selectivity and point ofview in photography.17 “Toyo Miyatake,” unpub. manuscript, collection of Joy Rika Miyatake (his greatgranddaughter).18 National Archives, caption to Lange photograph #537530.19 In this respect Ansel Adams’ later photographs at Manzanar were similar, although in otherrespects quite different.20 National Archives, Lange photograph #53603721 National Archives, Lange photograph #53747522 National Archives, caption photograph #53643023 Personal typed notes, April 1942, Paul Taylor papers, Bancroft Library, University ofCalifornia Berkeley.24 Richard Keith Doud interview with Christina Gardner, Archives of American Art,Smithsonian Institution, transcript, p. 26.25 Ansel Adams papers, Box 1, UCLA, passim; Adams to Nancy Newhall, 1943 nd, in MaryStreet Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman, eds., Ansel Adams: Letters and Images 1916-1984(Boston: Little Brown, 1988), pp. 146-8.26 Ansel Adams, Born Free and Equal (NY: U.S.Camera, 1944).

Page 15: Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of the …Dorothea Lange Photographing in San Francisco, 1942 Until 2006, almost no one knew of her photographs of the Japanese internment

APJ | JF 15 | 3 | 1

15

27 Elena Creef points out Adams’ disproportionate photography of young girls, as if heinstinctively wanted to picture the least threatening internees. Elena Tajima Creef, ImagingJapanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (NY: NYUPress, 2004), pp. 21-2.28 Ansel Adams, Born Free and Equal (2nd ed., Bishop, CA: Spotted Dog Press, 2001), p. 13. Inhis autobiography, which is more critical of the internment, Adams defensively apologizes forthis statement; Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Little Brown, 1988), p.260.29 Estelle Campbell to Ansel Adams 11/22/44, quoted p. 209 from an unpublished paper byNicholas Natanson, in Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona.30 Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Little Brown, 1988), p. 260, quotedin Karin Higa and Tim B. Wride, "Manzanar Inside and Out: Photo Documentation of theJapanese Wartime Incarceration," in Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900-2000,eds. Stephanie Barron et al (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), p. 324. Adamswrote to Imogen Cunningham, “... my main interest is to put over the idea to the sentimentalman in the street (if there are any) and stay clear of the professional `socially aware’ crowd.”Adams to Imogen Cunningham, nd, in Imogen Cunningham papers, Archives of American Art,Smithsonian Institution.31 In Japanese, the word is gaman, or endurance.32 Riess, p. 193.33 Riess, pp. 190-91.34 Christina Gardner to author, 7/04.35 John C. Welchman, "Turning Japanese (in)," Artforum International vol. 27, 4/89, 152-6;Emily Medvec, introduction to Born Free and Equal: An Exhibition of Ansel AdamsPhotographs (Washington, DC: Echolight, 1984).