Photos by Ansel Adams and Commentary by John Hersey
This is a beautifully packaged book that tells the shameful story of how American citizens of Japanese descent were treated during WWII. Torn from their homes and businesses, stripped of their possessions, and confined in concentration camps in the least hospitable deserts in the US.1 It still stuns me that a presidential term as progressive and humanistic as Roosevelt could participate in such a thing. The Germans on the East Coast didn’t face such a humiliating and economically devastating interment.
And I think it was a shock to members of Roosevelts own cabinet and to many of the photographers who had participated in the great work for the WPA during the depression. Even the second camp commander of Manzanar seemed to disagree with it: he invited his friend, Ansel Adams, and allowed Dorothea Lang, Life magazine and other news photographers to visit the camp and see for themselves.
Adams published a photographic book called, Free and Equal, about the camp and the people who lived there and created something out of the nothing they were given, maintaining their pride in a situation beyond their control. Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes, under whose jurisdiction the camps fell, gave two copies of Adams’ book to Roosevelt, encouraging him to close the camps, seconded by Attorney General Francis Biddle. When the copywrite the of Free and Equal expired, Adams did not renew it, giving the negatives and prints to the Library of Congress, to make it a part of the historical record, with hopes we would learn from it.2
This book also features photographs from Toyo Miyatake, a professional photographer who was interred with his family in Manzanar. He could store his photographic equipment outside but not bring it into the camp because Japanese people weren’t allowed to own cameras or take pictures during the war. When he was caught with a smuggled camera in the camp, the director allowed him access to the rest of his equipment. Miyatake could set up the camera to capture the shot but then a white guy had to press the button to actually take the picture.
None of the photographers – white or Japanese – were allowed to photograph the stark reality of the camps: no photos of guards, barbed wire, guard towers. But, being professionals, they knew how to sneak them in, or imply their presence through shadow and inference.
This book, published in 1988, combines Adams and Miyatake’s work with the personal stories of individual Americans uprooted from their homes, dispossessed, and exiled to the desert near Death Valley. It tells of how they made tar paper shacks into homes, organized themselves, and tried to find purpose and humanity in an inhumane situation. Illustrated by the photographs, we see kids, American kids, playing; American teenagers listening to records and reading comic books; American parents trying to keep a brave face; American farmers growing food and tending chickens; American adults organizing democratic order within the camps. The only thing these Americans have in common is that they are of Japanese descent.
When the camps emptied after the war, the buildings were scoured from the earth, swept away, with just photographs and memories of the people who lived or worked there to recall them. There is a memorial to Manzanar out there in the desert. When my husband and I visited Death Valley last fall, we were going to visit it on our way to Reno but got turned around somehow – many roads were closed from flooding, and GPS doesn’t work so well in DV – and missed it.
Some Americans believe that it’s wrong to talk about the mistakes we’ve made in the past, the shameful things that the many have done to the few, as if it makes us less of a nation to be looked up to, or it makes people descended from those in power at the time feel bad or ashamed of themselves. I disagree. My father’s family fought on the wrong side of every war fought by people of European descent on American soil. (Well, except for WWII.) I am not proud that my ancestors fought for the confederacy. But I do not feel personally ashamed because I am not them and would not make the choices they made. At the same time, I feel it is important that we understand the mistakes we’ve made in the past so that we avoid making them again in the future. And we can’t do that if we cover up what we’ve done wrong in the past.
I worked with a professional project once that was so painful for all involved, that they didn’t want to do a retrospective. The project team felt betrayed – understandably – and the leadership team felt lied to. Having listened to both sides as an objective observer, I could see the root causes and insisted on a retrospective. But no one wanted to share or listen or change their behavior – it was too painful to look back; and they didn’t trust that anything would change. Those that did participate, dug in their heels and refused to take responsibility for their actions or lack thereof. Part of the reason was that this organization didn’t have the practice of conducting retrospectives on little things, on projects that went well, or okay, or had small problems – so when a big problem came along, transparency wasn’t part of their practice.
I want more for my country, for my nation, for the place that I live. I want the U.S. to be a place where we look with eyes wide open at the problems that we’ve faced and say, Never Again, instead of trying to whitewash them or rebrand them, or call them fake news.
A country that admits its faults and works to correct them and prevent them from recurring is a nation to be admired, a nation that can move forward, can implement new ways of doing things that gets it back to being the kind of nation that people feel good about living in. There’s so much obsession with the idea of going back to another time – but that’s only because that time has been whitewashed, the sadness and bad decisions papered over with nostalgia. We can make those happy memories again in the future, but only if we’re willing to learn from the past, and create a better future.
Change+Management 