Photographs of Manzanar

Manzanar was one of ten relocation centers formed by an executive order issued by President Roosevelt in early 1942, just a few months after the attack on Pearl Harbor. About 110,000 people of Japanese descent were interned in these camps; of those, over 60% were native born American citizens. There were no charges of disloyalty, no trials, and no hearings. While the internment is almost universally recognized today as unjust, at the time it was strongly supported by most Americans, especially on the west coast. In 1983 a commission established by the US Congress called the internment "unjust and motivated by racism rather than real military necessity" and reparations were paid. The US Supreme Court never explicitly ruled the internment unconstitutional.

The following is from the Library of Congress website:

"In 1943, Ansel Adams (1902-1984) photographed the Manzanar War Relocation Center at the suggestion of its director, his good friend and fellow Sierra Club member, Ralph Merritt. Adams wanted to contribute to the war effort while at the same time show the loyalty of the Japanese-Americans interned at Manzanar, located in Inyo County, California, approximately 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles. In 1944, some of these images were published in [Adams's] book Born Free and Equal. The book had a limited circulation, perhaps due to the political climate of war-time America. When offering the collection to the Library, Adams said in a letter, 'All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use...The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and despair by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment.'

"Beginning in 1965, Adams gave 241 original negatives and 209 photographic prints to the Library. Adams printed the photographs in the 1960's. By this time, his outstanding darkroom style produced prints with rich tonalities. The Library's Duplication Services does not attempt to duplicate [Adams's] printing style. Adams often cropped his images and his prints are frequently much darker than those printed by the Library's Duplication Services, so patrons ordering prints will not receive ones exactly as Adams would have printed them."

There are 244 images in this collection on the LoC site, and all of them appear in this book, along with his original captions (complete with misspellings). The notation "[in book]" at the end of a capton indicates that the image was in Born Free and Equal.