MANZANAR Historic Resource Study/Special History Study

CENTER PHOTOGRAPHY

Although the WRA had not formalized a policy governing the photographing of its relocation program, three of its official agency photographers visited Manzanar to take photos of its operations during 1942. Clem Albers visited in the camp in early April, just after the first large groups of evacuees began arriving and almost two months before the WRA took over administration of the camp from the WCCA. Francis Stewart visited the center in late May and early June 1942 and was at the site when the WRA took over administration of the camp on June 1. Later in February 1943, he would return to the center to take more photographs. In late June-early July 1942, Dorothea Lange traveled to the center to take photos. Selected photographs taken by Albers, Stewart, and Lange were published in Stone S. Ishimaru, War Relocation Authority, Manzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California: 1942-1945 (Los Angeles, TecCom Productions, 1987). The entire collection of their photographs may be found in Record Group 210 of the Still Picture Branch at Archives II of the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland. [11]

Of the three official photographers, Lange was the most noted, having achieved professional recognition for her documentation of migrant labor conditions during the Depression while working for the Farm Security Administration. Because of her reputation as a social activist with liberal political leanings, her WRA photographs were scrutinized closely by military authorities and many were impounded. Working from an "antagonist" position, Lange took photographs that were intended to reveal the injustice of evacuation and relocation. In April 1942 she began her WRA work in northern California by photographing the "normal life" of Japanese American families who had been in America for several generations, emphasizing their contributions to American society. Lange wanted her photographs to reveal the "pattern of mass blame" and its physical, psychological, and social effects on the evacuees during evacuation, as well as the process of transforming the assembly and relocation centers from spartan barracks into livable dwellings. From Lange's perspective, the environment of Manzanar, with its climatic challenges posed by heat, dust, and extreme cold, epitomized the oppression of its residents. Although few of her photographs were published during the war because they were seen as advocating an "unacceptable view" of evacuation and relocation, they were reinterpreted during the late 1960s and 1970s as providing a "true" picture of those events. In 1972, for instance, many of her photos were selected by Maisie and Richard Conrat for an exhibit and book of pictures, entitled Executive Order 9066: The Internment of 110,000 Japanese Americans (Los Angeles, California Historical Society, 1972). The traveling exhibit was presented, under the joint sponsorship of the National Archives, the California Historical Society, and the Japanese American Citizens League, at the Whitney Museum in New York, the Corcoran in Washington, the De Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, and a Tokyo department store. [12]

Although Albers, Stewart, and Lange visited Manzanar during 1942 to take photographs, it was not until January 2, 1943, that the WRA issued Administrative Instruction No. 74, describing regulations and procedures for photography in the relocation centers. The instruction provided that it was "the intention of the War Relocation Authority to document its program as fully as possible by means of photographs." The "major part of such documentation" would be "in black and white still photographs," but to "a lesser extent photographic documentation " would also "include color stills and movies." Photographs would be used "not only for documentary purposes, but also for information to be made available to the public and to the evacuees." Responsibility for the agency's photographic documentation program was assigned to the photographic section in Denver, Colorado, an office responsible to the chief of the reports division in the Washington office.

According to the instruction, WRA photographers would visit all relocation centers and will make photographic records of activities, "giving approximately equal attention to all" elements of the centers' operations. WRA photographers would "at all times observe the right of privacy of the individual." They would take photos of "industries within relocation centers making goods and articles for the armed forces, as a necessary part of documentation." However, such pictures would not be used for any "purpose other than documentation without approval of appropriate officials of the Army or Navy." WRA photographers were forbidden to take photographs "of personnel, equipment, or installations of military forces at relocation centers, unless special permission to do so is secured from appropriate officials of the Army."

Although the WRA placed "no restriction or prohibition on possession or use of cameras in relocation areas," it would observe "restrictions and prohibitions of other agencies of the government, such as the War Department and Department of Justice." Under regulations of the Western Defense Command, cameras were regarded as contraband for persons of Japanese ancestry within the areas of that command. Thus, photographs could "be taken in those centers only by official photographers of WRA, or by persons, not excluded by the applicable regulations, who are granted special permits by the Project Director or by the Director of WRA." Department of Justice regulations prohibited the possession or use of cameras by Japanese nationals anywhere in the United States.

Under the terms of the WRA instruction, evacuee-established cooperative associations in the relocation centers could establish photographic services. If such a service was established, however, "the prohibition against the use of cameras by alien evacuees, which is applicable to all relocation centers, or by any evacuee where the relocation center [such as Manzanar] is within the Western Defense Command, must be observed."

The reports officer in each relocation center would be provided with a camera "for taking photographs, with the objective of enabling him to photograph significant events and activities at the center when no official photographer is present, and also to render certain limited photographic service to the evacuees," such as family photographs at funerals.

Film of all official WRA photographs were to be sent undeveloped to the photographic section's laboratory in Denver. One file print of each exposure was to be sent to the chief of the division in Washington for clearance. Photographs not suitable for publication, because of subject matter, would be "designated for impounding, and negatives of such photographs" would "be forwarded to Washington." "All existing prints of such photographs" would "be destroyed." If approved, one file print would be made by the photo laboratory for its use, and one print would be sent to the relocation center in which it was taken. Photos would be released for publication by the reports officer at each center or by the chief of the reports division in Washington. [13]

During the fall of 1943, Ansel Adams, recognized as one of the finest landscape photographers and most exacting printers in the history of American photography, was requested by Project Director Merritt to travel to Manzanar to "interpret the situation as it had developed in time." Adams had wanted to contribute to the war effort, but he was too old for military service. Thus, he welcomed the opportunity to photographically document the relocation center. He had been upset by the disruptive effect the evacuation and relocation program was having on the lives of evacuee friends, but he "would not say the operation as a whole was unjustified." He noted that "the fact remains that we, as a nation, were in the most potentially precarious moment or our history — stunned, seriously hurt, unorganized for actual war." Adams did not consider the evacuation as a threat to democratic principles, he saw Manzanar as "only a wartime detour on the road of American citizenship, . . . a symbol of the whole pattern of relocation — a vast expression of a government working to find suitable haven for its war-dislocated minorities." Thus, he took some 200 photographs (at present the photographs are in the Ansel Adams Collection in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress, although copies of some are also in the aforementioned Record Group 210) that would be organized in exhibit form by the Department of Photography of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in November 1944 and published in a book entitled Born Free and Equal (New York, U.S. Camera, 1944). The subtitle of the book, "Photographs of the Loyal Japanese Americans at Manzanar Relocation Center," emphasized his efforts "to record the influence of the tremendous landscape of Inyo on the life and spirit of thousands of people living by force of circumstance in the Relocation Center of Manzanar," While the "people and their activities" were his "chief concern," there was "much emphasis on the land" and the influence of the camp's natural environment throughout this book. Adams stated in the foreword:

This book in no way attempts a sociological analysis of the people and their problem. It is addressed to the average American citizen, and is conceived on a human, emotional basis, accenting the realities of the individual and his environment rather than considering the loyal Japanese-Americans as an abstract, amorphous, minority group. This impersonal grouping, while essential to the factual study of racial and sociological problems, frequently submerges the individual, who is of greatest importance. . . .

Adams wanted "the reader to feel he has been with me in Manzanar, has met some of the people, and has known the mood of the Center and its environment — thereby drawing his own conclusions — rather than impose upon him any doctrine or advocate any sociological action." He claimed that he "intentionally avoided the sponsorship of governmental or civil organizations, not because I have doubts of their sincerity and effectiveness, but because I wish to make this work a strictly personal concept and expression." Adams hoped that the "content and message of this book will suggest that the broad concepts of American citizenship, and of liberal, democratic life the world over, must be protected in the prosecution of the war, and sustained in the building of the peace to come." As an apologist for the evacuation, he thus used his photos to demonstrate the success of the evacuation and relocation program and to emphasize the successful adaptation of the evacuees to life in the camp. He hoped his photographs, including close portraits of evacuees, small business, industrial, and agricultural activities, family groupings, and social activities, would reassure Americans outside the camp that the people of Manzanar were now worthy of equal status, and could make valuable contributions to any American community. [14]

The best source of photographs for documentation of Manzanar is the Toyo Miyatake Collection. Miyatake, a 47-year-old photographer who had operated a photograph studio in Los Angeles since the 1920s, was evacuated, along with his family, to Manzanar in 1942. As a professional photographer, it was perhaps more his instinct than any historical motive that initially made him smuggle his lens and film holder into the camp along with the few personal belongings that he and his family were allowed to take. Although prohibited to take photos, Miyatake collected pieces of wood and various plumbing fixtures, and with the help of a carpenter friend, he secretly built a crude wooden box camera. Attached to the back was his one 4-inch x 5 -inch sheet film holder, while his lens, fitted to the front, was focused by rotating it on the end of a threaded drain pipe. Superficially, the camera looked like a lunch pail, enabling his clandestine photographic documentation to continue. Ordering film by mail from his supplier in Los Angeles, Miyatake began what he called his "historic duty." After some nine months, he was caught by the camp police in early 1943 and obliged to explain his conduct to Project Director Ralph P. Merritt. Notwithstanding Miyatake's violation of military regulations, the director concurred with the evacuee's explanation that his photographs represented a history he was compelled to record — his own. As a concession to the military rule forbidding Japanese Americans the right to take photographs, Merritt allowed Miyatake to set up pictures of his choice, but a Caucasian appointed staff member would trip the shutter. As camp life "normalized" in early 1943, this restriction was relaxed and Miyatake was allowed to send to Los Angeles for his studio and darkroom equipment. Later that year, he establish a fully equipped photo studio at Manzanar that was operated by Manzanar Cooperative Enterprises. Thus, he became the unofficially appointed camp photographer. Miyatake was also permitted to travel to the Poston and Gila River relocation centers to take photos, some of which were published in Allen H. Eaton's Beauty Behind Barbed Wire (New York, Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1952). Selected photographs from the Miyatake Collection were published in Graham Howe, Patrick Nagatani, and Scott Rankin, eds., Two Views of Manzanar: An Exhibition of Photographs by Ansel Adams, Toyo Miyatake (Los Angeles, Regents of the University of California, 1978) and in Atsufumi Miyatake, Taisuke Fujishima and Eikoh Hosee, eds., Toyo Miyatake Behind the Camera; 1923-1979, trans. by Paul Petite (Tokyo, Bungeishunju Co., Ltd., 1984). Miyatake's collection of more than 1,000 photographs of Manzanar (presently housed at the Toyo Miyatake Studio operated by his son, Archie Miyatake, in San Gabriel, California) depict the growth and quality of life in his community, showing agricultural growth, artistic involvement, professional acumen, and typical life scenes during the 1943-45 period. [15]