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Dorothea Lange's Censored Photographs of the Japanese American Internment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 March 2025
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.
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- Copyright © The Authors 2017
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Notes
1 Richard Conrat, one of Lange's assistants and protegés, together with his wife Maisie Conrat, produced Executive Order 9066, which included 27 of her photographs, published as a report 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, who made the decision, how it was decided and communicated, and under what authority. But my hunch is that in this wartime situation, army officials felt authorized to make many censorship decisions unilaterally. As late as 2006, when Impounded appeared, the government was still reluctant to use Lange's photographs, well after the internment's wrong had been recognized and apologized for. For example, the National Park Service's website on Manzanar then included 91 photographs, of which 8 are Lange's: none were among her most significant and only one was at all critical.
3 My biography is Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (W. W. Norton, 2009).
4 McWilliams oral history, on line at Sunsite, UC Berkeley, “Japanese-American Relocation.” Incidentally, the African American response was more divided. Crisis, magazine of the NAACP, 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.
6 Historian David Gutiérrez is typical of today's scholars of Mexican Americans in his judgment that Taylor's were “the most sensitive and penetrating studies of evolving Mexican American-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 Internment of 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 Documentary Photographer,” 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 Friends Service Committee, here.
14 Caleb Foote to Al Hassler of Fellowship of Reconciliation 8/8/42, JDC papers; Hearings before the Select Committee Investigating National Defense Migration, US House of Representatives, 77th Congress 2nd Session, pursuant to H. Res. 113, part 29, p. 11804K; HM interview 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 how photographs could be doctored; but there was plenty of awareness of selectivity and point of view in photography.
17 “Toyo Miyatake,” unpub. manuscript, collection of Joy Rika Miyatake (his great granddaughter).
18 National Archives, caption to Lange photograph #537530.
19 In this respect Ansel Adams' later photographs at Manzanar were similar, although in other respects quite different.
20 National Archives, Lange photograph #536037
21 National Archives, Lange photograph #537475
22 National Archives, caption photograph #536430
23 Personal typed notes, April 1942, Paul Taylor papers, Bancroft Library, University of California 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 Mary Street 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).
27 Elena Creef points out Adams' disproportionate photography of young girls, as if he instinctively wanted to picture the least threatening internees. Elena Tajima Creef, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (NY: NYU Press, 2004), pp. 21-2.
28 Ansel Adams, Born Free and Equal (2nd ed., Bishop, CA: Spotted Dog Press, 2001), p. 13. In his autobiography, which is more critical of the internment, Adams defensively apologizes for this 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 by Nicholas Natanson, in Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona.
30 Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams: An Autobiography (Boston: Little Brown, 1988), p. 260, quoted in Karin Higa and Tim B. Wride, “Manzanar Inside and Out: Photo Documentation of the Japanese 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. Adams wrote to Imogen Cunningham, “… my main interest is to put over the idea to the sentimental man 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 Adams Photographs (Washington, DC: Echolight, 1984).