Born Free and Equal: Ansel Adams and Japanese Americans

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Part III

"From the harsh soil they have extracted fine crops. They have made Gardens glow in the firebreaks and between the barracks. Out of the jostling dusty confusion of the first bleak days in the raw barracks they have modulated to a democratic internal society and a praiseworthy personal adjustment to conditions beyond their control."

Ansel Adams

One of the above concentration camps, Manzanar" is now a national historic site. Manzanar is located in the Owens Valley of California 225 miles north of Los Angeles. On a clear day, you can see Mt. Whitney in the distance. It operated as an Internment Center from March 22nd, 1942 to November 21st, 1945. At its height it held 10,046 people. Of these, 174 men wound up serving in the US military. In 1942, there was a riot at the camp and guards shot two of the detainees. This incident, and the fact that Manzanar was close enough to the Pacific Coast to be located within the Western Restrictive zone meant it was probably the most closely guarded of all of the internment camps. The area gets, on an average, of 5 inches of rain per year. In 1943, inmates were divided into "loyal" and "disloyal" groups. According to the National Park Service's web site, "Eight watchtowers were completed on the perimeter by August 1942, and a five-strand barbed wire fence around the central area was completed by the end of the year. A military police compound with 13 buildings was located beyond the southeast quarter of the relocation center central area, south of Bairs Creek and west of U.S. Highway 395."

Adams published his book Born Free and Equal in 1944 (after which it promptly sank like a stone) at the invitation of Ralph Merritt, who was the director of the Manzanar camp itself in 1943. Toyo Miyatake, who had been a student of Edward Weston, and who was now an internee himself, was the official camp photographer. In the 1980s, Toyo's son Archie Miyatake was instrumental in bringing the book back into print.

All of Adams' photographs, the original prints and negatives, have been archived and placed online by the Library of Congress.

Part IV

Manzanar was the site of one of the most serious civil disturbances to occur at the relocation centers, the "Manzanar Riot" or "Manzanar Revolt." The revolt erupted in December 1942 following months of tension and gang activity between Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) supporters of the administration and a large group of Issei and Kibei. Many of the evacuees did not regard the young JACL leaders, whom the administration relied upon, as representatives. Aliens were excluded from positions of importance in the relocation center administration, and from the better-paying jobs. Public meetings turned into shouting sessions; there were beatings, and death threats against the pro-administration Nisei were common. Recycling and garbage collection trucks with Kibei crews flying Black Dragon flags tried to stop work at the camouflage net factory, threatened workers, and even attempted to run people over. An incendiary blaze was set in late November at the co-op store, which was seen as a symbol of JACL collusion.

--- An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites by J. Burton, M. Farrell, F. Lord, and R. Lord

Looking through the 242 photographs on the Library of Congress site, at page after page of smiling children, clean cut young men and women (some in American military uniforms), at shops, sporting events, centers for arts and craft, looking at all of these people posed in idealized settings (Adams was using an 8 x 10 view camera, after all, not a 10D with a 17-40 zoom lens), all under the grand romantic landscapes Adams made famous, you don't come away with a good impression of Adams at all. Keeping in mind that he was invited to the camp by the director (basically the chief jailer) Ralph Merrit, you almost get the sense that Adams is being used by the government as a stooge, a patsy, that his tremendous talent is being used to whitewash one of the most obscene events in American history. Indeed, I remember a made for TV movie from the 1970s called "Holocaust" where one of the characters (a painter played by James Woods) is interred in the "Theresienstadt Ghetto," a showplace designed to convince the world that the Nazis were treating the Jews humanely, that they were being interred for their own protection (a ludicrous justification also used by the Roosevelt administration for its imprisonment of the Japanese) and not because of the racism of their captors. After every inspection by international groups, the mask would come off and Theresienstadt would revert to its brutal reality as a Nazi concentration camp. Closer to home, one can imagine the guards at Gitmo showing international inspectors how well our prisoners (who are being held without charge) are being treated, that they are being given meals appropriate to their religion, allowed to read the Koran, that their quarters are clean and well-made. Then I can imagine these same guards, after the international inspectors leave, saying something like "OK you towelheads. Back in your fucking cells you terrorists." I wonder what would happen if James Nachtwey or Anthony Suau or Bradford Washburn were invited to Gitmo to photograph the camp. I wonder what they would emphasize. How they would try to sneak a little bit of the truth past public opinion.

The problem with Adams is that everything he touches turns lyrical. Reading through his famous trilogy on photography, The Camera, The Negative, and you find wood picket fences, photos of public buildings, factories, homeless men, and you realize that there's no way you could transform such ordinary material into such substantial looking beauty. But as much talent as Adams had as a photographer, part of you wonders if he was really the person suited to photograph Manzanar, to document the internment of Japanese Americans, to make a record of such a sordid and ugly reality. The political activist in you doesn't want to see smiling children playing baseball under the Sierra. He wants to what a real photojournalist with a Leica M6 would have brought away if he had somehow been able to sneak himself into the evacuation centers, record the looks of proud, middle-class men and women as they were tagged, lined up, searched, and frogmarched into captivity. He wants to see people being stripped of their freedom, broken down, dehumanized, beaten.

He wants to see this.

But then you realize that what that part of you wants to see, "the looks of proud, middle-class men and women as they were tagged, lined up, searched, and frogmarched into captivity, people being stripped of their freedom, broken down, dehumanized, beaten," is exactly what every racist wants to see happen to people who don't look like himself. Indeed, the funny thing about images is the way they're almost completely neutral. What you come away with depends on what you bring to it. The same photograph of a black man being lynched that would horrify a liberal Democrat would make a skinhead giggle with joy. Photographs of angry Palestinian children burning American flags, playing with guns, looking full of rage usually make a leftist activist think "look what the Israelis and Americans have done to these innocent children. Look what they've been driven to." Show that same photograph of those same angry Palestinian children to a right-wing Republican, a Bush supporter, a member of the Little Green Footballs or FreeRepublic crowd and the most likely reaction is "look at those nasty little brown monsters. They need to be punished some more."

Look at the faces of the nice, churchgoing white Christians here. Do you see any moral outrage in their faces? Any sense that they know what's going on in front of them, even though it is in fact going on in front of them.

My reaction to this photo is to want to find a gun and run through the streets killing every white person I meet. Somebody else might be profoundly saddened. A 15 year old neo-nazi skinhead would probably get some idiotic grin on his face and think it was cool. Images alone don't provoke any kind of moral response that wasn't already there.

 

Part V

I believe that the acrid splendor of the desert, ringed with towering mountains, has strengthened the people of Manzanar. I do not say they are conscious of this influence, but I'm sure most of them have responded, in one way or another, to the resonances of their environment...The huge vistas and the stern realities of sun and wind and space symbolize the immensity and opportunity of America --- perhaps a vital reassurance following the experiences of forced exodus.

Ansel Adams

Or do they? For Adams, photography wasn't only about documentation, about recording what was there. It was about transforming the reality in front of your eyes into what you could visualize in your imagination. It was about poetry or, more accurately, it was about a kind of visual music. It was about creating something that didn't exist as much as it was about taking a snapshot of what did.

What Adams has photographed at Manzanar is not a concentration camp, a place where people are humiliated and put down because of their race. What he's photographing is his own visualization of an ideal assimilated, Asian American culture, a people who will eventually overtake the white trash who put them there and wind up as programmers, doctors, lawyers, musicians, while the descendents of the white trash who called for their internment go to Nascar races and watch TV.

Indeed, Adams' really isn't concerned with the politics between different factions at Manzanar. We have no idea if he sympathized with the kind of young hotheads who rioted in 1942 or if he would have thought it justified that the internees would have felt less than loyal to the United States. For him that didn't matter. For him, most of the Japanese Americans in the camp were loyal Americans who simply wanted the opportunity to be loyal Americans and he recorded the way they built a small town in the midst of their captivity. He visualizes this small town as something that probably never existed in New England or in the Midwest, some utopia elevated by the grandeur of the mountains in the distance.

In his idealized images of the camps prisoners is the perfect triumph over the racists who locked them up, the site of men and women with yellow skin and Asian features more American than you or I.