notes.husk.org/likes images.

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One reason we keep repeating atrocities is a large swath of the population refuses to accept our history. Dorothea Lange’s photos are that history. 

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Lange’s body of work is unique among the photographers who documented the Japanese internment, because she created photographs around the San Francisco Bay Area before and during the round-up (called “evacuation”) and later documented life in the camps (called “resettlement”).

Calisphere (featuring the University of California’s archive) has 6,867 photos from the internment. There are about 850 Lange images in the collection. There are various places online to see curated selections of these photographs, but having the source archive, with the original captions on the print’s verso side intact, is essential. 

Lange was working for the government doing the round-up, but her portraits reveal empathy and the captions provide some editorial commentary. The government expected her to show that life in the camps wasn’t too terrible, what they saw in the photos (and read in her captions) made them bury the archive for decades.

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caption:  A close-out sale–prior to evacuation–at store operated by proprietor of Japanese ancestry on Grant Avenue in Chinatown. April 4, 1942.

With Lange’s portraits of Japanese-Americans, you see a direct line of empathy to her Depression-era portraits. But the archive also has many topographical observations from San Francisco, signage and newspapers warning the Japanese of their imminent departure, newly vacant Victorians and Japanese restaurants given over to “new ownership.” She notices details as small as a sign giving away kittens in the window of a home of a Japanese family. One of the most famous photos from the evacuation shows a Japanese-owned business in Oakland protesting with a large sign that reads: I AM AN AMERICAN.

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After seeing city life in San Francisco, the Manzanar camp looks especially wind swept and isolated. Up to this point, nearly every photographer working in the Sierras had treated them as a scenic wonder, but in the background of Lange’s photos from Manzanar, they are an impassable barrier to the residents’ previous lives.

Other places online to see these photographs:

• A curated selection from a 2017 NYT Lens blog post (RIP)
• Excerpt from the American Masters documentary  on Lange (“Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning”) about her internment photographs
• Library of Congress selection of War Relocation photos (277 total, 79 by Lange)
• Oakland Museum of California holds the Lange archive and has a dedicated site to her work, with a page about the internment photographs
• 2016 NPR Code Switch segment about the photographs
• Manzanar National Historic Site’s selection of photographs (including Ansel Adams)