Curating Visual Memory: Photographic Representations of Identity in Japanese American Concentration Camps

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1 Curating Visual Memory: Photographic Representations of Identity in Japanese American Concentration Camps Catherine Ann Collins, Willamette University, USA Abstract Elizabeth Edwards (2001) argues that photographs are little narratives that reflect specific visual experiences and at the same time have the potential to respond to and evoke the larger narratives of a culture. This essay explores a specific experience the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII in violation of the U.S. Constitution and the photographs circulated to tell the story of the internment. I am particularly interested in the types of identities that these photographic representations reveal about the internees, two-thirds of who were American citizens, and the implicit judgments they render about the conditions of incarceration. The essay investigates how photographs by Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange work to inscribe a particular history and judgment of Japanese Americans, and thereby curate a memory of America s past. Introduction On December 4, 1941 Japanese planes attacked Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, sinking most of the U.S. naval fleet stationed in the Pacific. Over the next six weeks, largely fueled by the mass media, a war hysteria combined with race prejudice escalated on the West Coast of the United States, especially in California. The Secretary of War and the Commanding General of the Western Defense Command recommended to President Roosevelt that all persons of Japanese heritage living in Oregon, Washington, California and Western Arizona should be excluded from these areas for national security reasons. Their arguments assumed "ethnicity ultimately determines loyalty" (Personal Justice Denied, 1997, p. 6). Based on this recommendation, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 which declared the West Coast a military zone thereby compelling Japanese Americans to leave the area. The War Relocation Authority decided the best course of action was to exclude, remove and incarcerate in internment camps Japanese Americans persons living in this area. Notices of relocation gave these individuals about one week to close their homes and businesses and report for transport. Each person was allowed to carry what he or she could manage. They were not told where they were going or for how long. Government propaganda said it was for their protection, but arriving in the permanent camps they discovered barbed wire fences and guard towers with guns facing inwards. They were interned until the end of the war when they were given train or bus fare to return to their homes, many of which were no longer there. The communities were hostile to their return with signs declaring, "We don't want any Japs back here ever!" Bank accounts frozen in 1942 remained frozen until the 1950s in many cases. President Gerald Ford finally rescinded Executive Order 9066 in President Jimmy Carter commissioned a report on the interment which, in 1980, concluded that "race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership" (Personal Justice) and not national security were the reasons for the internment. Public Law mandated an apology and redress of $20,000 to be paid to each internment survivor (finally paid in 1990). The United States Congress and President Ronald Reagan issued formal apologies for violations of civil rights of Japanese Americans unjustly interned from

2 This essay explores a specific experience the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII in violation of the U.S. Constitution and a specific place the internment camps, 10 in number, located in isolated parts of the United States and housing 120,000 Japanese Americans, two-thirds of who were United States citizens, and the visual memory markers of this act in the form of photographs, with limited circulation for decades after the internment and now displayed in memorial museums attached to the internment camps, on internet sites established to tell the story of the internment, and in community memorials dedicated to preventing the erasure of this shameful part of the nation s past. I approach the historical fact of internment and the construction of memory through photographs from a rhetorical perspective, assuming that messages, whether verbal or visual are not neutral accounts of history, but are highly partisan. In writing about language, and this includes the visual, Kenneth Burke argues that to name something, to bring something forward for our attention will "give us the cues as to how we should act toward these objects" (1965, p. 177). In other words, identifying something as worthy of our attention is "per se to suggest a program of action" toward it (Burke, 1965, p 177). Photography as Little Narratives The history of photography reveals that almost from its inception photographs have been thought to have evidentiary value, of capturing the "having-been-there" of the image. Susan Sontag states it bluntly: "Photographs furnish evidence" (1977, p. 5) and Caroline Brothers contents they are perceived as "bearers of truth" (1997, p. 161). They do not tell the whole story, however; the choice of what to preserve in taking a photograph is already a judgment to leave out surrounding objects that might contextualize the story differently. So, "[p]hotographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire" (Sontag, 1977, p. 4). Does the photographer capture what he or she believes to be a representation of reality? In this case I want to explore the photographs of the Japanese American internment and explore how we should read these, in Elizabeth Edwards' (2001) term, little narratives, that reflect specific visual experiences yet at the same time have the potential to respond to and evoke the larger narratives of a culture. A host of questions emerge in examining the photographic record of this shameful part of American history. Do the internment camp photographs serve an ideological function? Do they sanitize the reality of internment? Can we trust that the Japanese American identity represented by these images is a preferred identity of the internees or the projected identity of the photographer? Are the images of place so censored that the little narratives fail to represent meaningfully the place of internment or the space of America s failure to guarantee civil rights to all? Sontag argues, "despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographs do is no exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth" (1977, p. 6). The closest analogy to meaning in photographs comes from discussion of war photography the injured and dead in combat. Brothers warns us about assuming that what we see is transparent: "representation of injury and death are rarely transparent" instead they are "controlled, disguised or interpreted according to a brace of cultural assumptions, and muted so as not to offend" (1997, p. 175). Photographs are mediated by aesthetic choices, censorship, the relationship between the subjects and the photographer, and the context in which the images are read by viewers. What we can say, however is the photographs contribute to the public memories we create about 99

3 the internment. I use the term public memory in the sense of Edward Casey who sees it as both attached to a past (typically an originating event of some sort) and acts to ensure a future remembering of that same event (2004, p. 17). Public memory is open, contestable; it serves as an encircling horizon (Casey, 2004, p. 25): it is not a nebulous pursuit that can occur anywhere, it always occurs in some particular place (p. 32). In this case the preserved internment camps, interpretive centres, museums and memorial sites. But Massey (1994 reminds us, place is always in process, changing as the needs of the present change. That specific place can be circulated in news media or on the Internet through photographs that give the public access to the places of internment and the broader space of America s violation of civil rights. Although answers to the questions posed above may be elusive, as a beginning we can discover shared motifs in the photographic record that we have and explore how these motifs are consistent or divergent from the other forms of representation of life in the internment camps. Photographic Motifs How might we categorize the images taken of the internment camps? In examining the work of Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange, professional photographers commissioned to record the history of the internment, several shared motifs become apparent: a focus on setting, especially the landscape of the camps; how the camps magnify the interruption of the lives of Japanese Americans on the West Coast; and a constructed identity for Japanese Americans. In part, these motifs may be a result of restrictions placed on the images that Adams and Lange were allowed to produce. Adams and Lange were both invited to record the internment: Adams was a personal friend of the director of Manzanar who was a fan of his work. Lange had been invited by the Farm Security Administration to photograph the Depression and her success with that project led the War Relocation Authority to commission her to photograph the internment process. Restrictions placed on official photographers limited the kinds of images that could be created; both were told they could not take photographs of the barbed wire fences, the guards or guard towers. Jasmine Alinder (2011) reminds us: photographs have long been deployed to establish categories and hierarchies that justify structures of power...[the government] cultivated an image of Japanese Americans as releasable and as deserving of the same rights as other Americans. Yet the image of Japanese Americans as fit for participation in American civic life outside of the concentration camps hinged implicitly on its opposite pole: the purportedly dangerous, disloyal Japanese American. (p. 2) The photographic record the government wanted would not include displays of resistance. It would emphasize the American-like identity rather than the foreignness of this group. Gordon contends that the majority of Lange s photographs have never been circulated because they didn t tell the story the government wanted to tell. Danitia Smith, writing for The New York Times notes, But at nearly all of the 21 locations Lange visited, the government tried to restrict her. At the assembly centers and at Manzanar she was not allowed to photograph the wire fences, the watchtowers with searchlights, the armed guards or any sign of resistance. She was discouraged from talking to detainees. At one point she was almost fired when one 100

4 of her photographs appeared on a Quaker pamphlet denouncing the internment (6 November, 2006). Photographic censorship obviously made it easier for the government to claim they were protecting Japanese Americans from a growing race prejudice that could threaten the internees. Government propaganda films went as far as to claim that the internees were not incarcerated: they were free to leave the camps at their choosing. While it is true that volunteering for military service, proving you had a job away from the West Coast of the United States, or receiving permission to attend college assuming one had the necessary funds (remember bank accounts were frozen from the initiation of E.O. 9066) could get one out of the camps, for the majority of internees, however, the camps were designed to incarcerate them. We have a few photographs taken surreptitiously by internees that more fully capture the camp experience, including the work of Toyo Miyatake. As an internee, he was forbidden to use a camera. Alinder (2011) argues the camera was regarded as a kind of visual gatekeeper that determined who was fit to be part of the body politic and who should be cast out (p. 3). Gatekeeping power was kept from Japanese Americans, except for those who were serving in the armed forces who visited family in the camps while on leave. As recognized loyal Americans, they were able to take family snapshots. Miyatake smuggled a lens and film holder into camp and built a wooden box camera. One of his photographs defies the restricted subject matter of the camps. It is strikingly different from Adams images and the relatively few photographs taken by Lange that have been published. Boys Behind Barbed Wire is one of the most frequently reprinted images of the internment and replicates the images of restrictive camp life that are central to drawings and painting produced in the camps and recreated after the camps were closed. These are the kinds of images not allowed in the official photographs Adams and Lange created. Image 1. Boys behind barbed wire. Photo by Toyo Miyatake, copyrighted by Archie Miyatake. Retrieved from 101

5 Three motifs tell the story of internment, although each suggests a different judgment of what was happening and demands a different program of action. The Setting: Sublime and Oppressive Better known for his landscape photography, it is not surprising that the Sierra Nevada Mountains figured prominently as a backdrop for Adams' outdoor shots of Manzanar. For some the beauty of the mountains and sky hide the bleakness of the barracks and become the basis for a claim that the camps were set in a nature that would inspire any internee. Sublime nature would make up for any restrictions imposed by camp life. Alternative readings use images such as this one to argue that the isolation and natural barriers made escape from the camps seem futile. Like all memory markers, verbal and visual, alternative readings are possible. Image 2. Manzanar street scene, clouds, Manzanar Relocation Center, California Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Ansel Adams, photographer, [reproduction number, LC-DIG-ppprs-00284] What is remarkable to me is the lack of physicality evoked by the images that Adams took of Manzanar. Aden et. al. (2009) argue that places evoke meanings for us partial as a result of how we sense our experiences (p. 320). Adams Manzanar is not the place I visited last July with a temperature of 112 degrees in mid-afternoon, with the land parched and cracked. The majesty of the mountains in Adams work eclipses the harsh reality of a dry, dusty, and hot terrain that saps one s energy. Note a different narrative of the landscape in the image I shot: bodily experiences, moreover, help concretize our memories of places; they translate the bodily experience into an emotional one (Aden, et.al., 2009, p. 320). 102

6 Image 3. Parched earth at the entrance to Manzanar, July In a letter accompanying the donation of his negatives and prints to the Library of Congress, Adams said, 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 dispair (sic) by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment" (Ansel Adam's Photographs). The photograph of farm workers demonstrates the remarkable success incarcerated Japanese Americans had in turning a harsh and barren desert into a productive agricultural enterprise. Gordon (2006) argues that Adams found it necessary to apologize for saying that harsh conditions strengthen the internees (p. 34). Some have argued that his work glossed over the depravations that defined camp life. 103

7 Image 4. Farm, farm workers, Mt. Williamson in background, Manzanar Relocation Center, California Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Ansel Adams, photographer, [reproduction number, LC-DIG-ppprs-00370] Surprisingly, the majority of Adams photographs of the camps are portraits. Adam's images are optimistic; his subjects are most often smiling. Although Adams and his proponents explain that his familiarity with his subjects is reflected in their ease and hence tendency to smile when he photographed them in the camp, and this was not just fodder for the WRA propaganda effort, others have argued that Adams failed to capture the trauma of incarceration. Adams gives a face to the previously faceless enemy. The stereotypic U.S. propaganda image of the Japanese at that time is aptly captured in Sam Keene s film, Faces of the Enemy that includes the following declaration about Japanese soldiers: He and his bother soldiers are as much alike as prints off of a photographic negative (1987). Adams changes this stereotype through portraits that individualize his subjects. In addition he shows the internees in work and relaxation that could be equally enjoyed by white America. This then is the vital community and the hard work to overcome adversity and injustice that Adams claims characterizes his depiction of Japanese Americans. Like Adams, Lange also records the productivity and Americanism of the internees. The Camps: Lives Interrupted Dorothea Lange's images generally depict lives interrupted. She is best known for her documentary photographs, funded by the Farm Security Administration, of migrant workers and poverty during the Depression of the 1930s. The Depression photographs were commissioned to show farm workers in a positive light, as Americans who should be helped to get back on their feet. "American documentary was never neutral or apolitical, but an exhortation to action" (Gordon, 2006, p. 11). Because of her earlier success as a documentarian, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) commissioned her to document the Japanese American internment; she began by photographing the roundup and evacuation and followed through with photographs of the temporary relocation centers and main concentration camps. Linda Gordon contends 97% of the images she created have never been published; suppressed by the government, one marked Impounded by one of the censors: consequently, her documentation of the internment is largely unrecognized by the public (2006, p. 5). Lange's images tell a different story than Adam's photographs. She captures some of the oppressiveness of the sites, especially the temporary relocation centers. Her image of the horse stalls at Tanforan, each one housing a family are a shameful reminder of what was done to innocent citizens and resident aliens. 104

8 Image 5. Tanforan Race Track Horse stalls San Bruno, California. Dorothea Lange, Lange captures the inhumane treatment internees receive in the camps (e.g. children kneeling on hard floors to do school work because chairs or benches were not provided). One major visual trope is the line; evacuees lined up with their luggage waiting to be evacuated; lines of internees being given identification tags, lines waiting for food in the mess hall, for toilets, for showers. Public waiting, a lack of privacy and individuality, captures the interruption in the lives of thousands crammed into hastily built, poorly supplied concentration camps. Image 6. People of Japanese ancestry arriving at Tanforan Assembly Center, a former racetrack in San Bruno, CA. New York Times 6 November Retrieved from Image by Dorothea Lange. Rather than exclusively emphasizing the hard conditions, Lange also followed families and documented their "respectability, Americanism, work ethic, good citizenship, and achievements of these people now being treated as criminals" (Gordon, 2006, p. 28). One of the families was the Mochida family photographed with their identification tags, another 105

9 visual trope of displacement and life interrupted. These are the lives interrupted, displaced by the internment. Displacement, however, was not the symbol that the WRA sought to publicize. The memory captured in Lange s photographs makes the government less a caretaker and more an oppressor. Lange s images that challenged the WRA s desired narrative of the internment were excluded. American Identity: Fitting In, Embracing Their Place of Origin, Proving Their Loyalty Numerous photographs illustrate children fitting in with the all-american stereotype playing baseball and football, enjoying dances, forming bands, hanging out with one another. Both Lange and Adams created images of children reading comic books, getting haircuts, just acting like typical American children. Image 7. Ansel Adams: Football Practice Retrieved from There are also images that illustrate loyalty to the nation children saluting the American flag illustrated below, Japanese American boys who are in uniform returning to visit their families who are incarcerated. Lange's photograph of the school children in San Francisco saluting the flag was taken a month before the incarceration of Japanese Americans, including some of the children in this photograph. Along with similar shots, images of Japanese American children saluting the flag are displayed in museums, interpretive centres, and on Internet coverage of the internment. Their circulation argues implicitly that Japanese American children are American and express their loyalty just as other American children do. As a visual trope, these photographs demand reconsideration of race prejudice, indicting the violation of civil liberties even young children suffered. 106

10 Image 8. Dorothea Lange photograph of children in San Francisco Photo credit: Museum of the City of San Francisco Although fewer in number, there are photographs that focus on the Japanese heritage of the internees: girls dressed in kimonos for Girl's Day, boys engaged in Kendo practice, Shinto shrines fashioned of used wood, and beautiful Japanese rock gardens. Especially important to Issei, one's Japanese identity was often downplayed because of issues of loyalty and prejudice. Before the formal evacuation, Japanese American homes were searched for items like swords, photographs, and flags from Japan. When discovered, these relics of Japanese identity were regarded as sufficiently subversive that they warranted the arrest of the male head of household. So, displaying one s Japanese heritage would have been perceived as risky. Fitting in, being as American as possible becomes the narrative told in the majority of photographs from this time and from the camps. Conclusion Photographs, as is the case for all communicative messages, are not neutral. Symbolic expressions, whether words or images, carry with them, in Kenneth Burke's terms, a program of action: do this as a consequence of your understanding, believe this, value in this particular way. Sontag addresses this directly when she concludes, "There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera" (1977, p. 7). That aggressiveness, the imposition of a standard or judgment gets extended as the photograph is used as a representation of a particular reality. With the recent controversy in the United States over the plans to auction off Japanese American concentration camp art one former internee wrote the auction house that it was inappropriate to sell an image of his mother used by the War Relocation Authority who "took the photo as propaganda to misrepresent, as a happy event, the racial tragedy it perpetuated" (Himel, 2015). He argued that his mother was a unjustly incarcerated, her likeness used without her permission to express a sentiment she did not hold, and "To profit from these items is a second injustice. I wonder how the consignor and you justify to yourselves this second exploitation of my family's, and our people's, suffering" (Himel, 2015). The problem is that Adams and Lange both create little narratives that make America s actions in the early to mid 1940s unremarkable. Images of children and adults enacting the 107

11 American dream, working hard, and demonstrating loyalty to the nation are not the oppressive images of the Nazi concentration camps the images we recall when we think of oppression and ultimate violation of civil rights. Alinder argues, Adams intended his positive representation of Japanese Americans to counter dehumanizing images then current in U.S. popular media and war propaganda (2011, p. 20). Lange s images that show a more restrictive living situation were impounded until the circulation of over 100 of her collection of 800 images in From what both artists have said, their intention was not to hide the inappropriateness of Executive Order 9066 and the War Relocation Authority s incarceration of Japanese Americans without regard to due process and other civil rights guaranteed American citizens. Given restrictions on what they could record, both photographers give individual faces to an otherwise depicted faceless enemy and threat posed by Japanese ethnicity. Nonetheless, these images do not demand condemnation of the suspension of civil liberties of Japanese Americans and the incarceration of this population in American concentration camps. Adams and Lange s photographs remain the most prominent record of what happened between 1942 and 1946 with respect to Japanese Americans. Roland Barthes noted, The number of readings of the same lexical unit or lexia (of the same image) varies according to the individual including his or her different kinds of knowledge practical, national, cultural, aesthetic invested in the image (1977, p. 46). Unfortunately, the more positive the images of camp life, the more difficult it is to accept alternative readings to what the viewer sees in the image. Because photographs are assumed to have evidentiary value, these little narratives do not significantly challenge the larger and more familiar heroic narrative of U.S. involvement in World War II. Museums and memorials continue to display these largely positive images and organize their exhibits around the three motifs identified. Unfortunately the program of action that they initiate is likely to be limited to one of increasing one s knowledge of a largely unacknowledged part of American history, but not extended to action to prevent similar violations in the future. That broader program of action would necessitate a response of indignation to trigger a larger, careful examination of U.S. actions toward any group identified as enemy. If the message received is that lives were unfairly interrupted rather than the more pointed recognition that this nation strategically violated the civil rights of 120,000 individuals based on a stereotype of race, then extending these little narratives is less likely. German Americans and Italian Americans did not receive comparable treatment then: the link between their loyalty and their ethnicity was not as complete as it was for Japanese Americans. Since 9/11, Muslim Americans have been suspected of similar disloyalty, and public discourse about the violation of their civil rights suggests that our nation s history of gross mistreatment of Japanese Americans has not prevented similar racial/religious prejudice from trumping civil rights for this new group of enemies. I posed a number of questions at the beginning of this essay: Do the internment camp photographs serve an ideological function? Despite what Adams and Lange hoped to accomplish, restrictions limited the images they were allowed to construct. Those images that were circulated and continue to be re-circulated served the ideological purpose of the War Relocation Authority. Do they sanitize the reality of internment? Yes. The images create an American identity, hard working, domestic, enjoying similar occupations and pastimes as the majority of Americans, Japanese Americans are different from the stereotyped enemy. The negative interpretation of this constructed identity is their victimhood is largely left unsaid. In its absence internment interrupts lives but is not an horrific violation of Japanese American 108

12 civil rights. Can we trust that the Japanese American identity represented by these images is a preferred identity of the internees or the projected identity of the photographer? No, we can trust that the Japanese sentiment expressed in the term shikata ga nai make the best of it combined with embarrassment and shame taught the Issei to hide their feelings, even from their children and grandchildren. Are the images of place so censored that the little narratives fail to represent meaningfully the place of internment or the space of America s failure to guarantee civil rights to all? Yes. Restrictions of the images that were allowed and the photographs that could be circulated made it difficult to offer the public a counter narrative to the one the government wanted to advance. Marita Sturkin summarizes the problem of the internment: Its images are overwhelmed by their sense of the ordinary and the domestic, outside of the discourse of war (1997, p. 695). During war, displacement, interruptions in lives occur, but the photographs of Japanese American internment that were circulated failed to create a clear sense of victimage. In this sense they remain little narratives that curate a time and memory place less horrific than it was. References Aden, R.C., Han, M.W., Norander, S., Pfahl, M.E., Pollack, Jr., T.P., & Young, S. L Re-collection: A proposal for refining the study of collective memory and its place. Communication Theory, 9, Alinder, J Moving images: Photography and the Japanese American incarceration. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Ansel Adams' photographs of Japanese-American internment at Manzanar. Library of Congress web archive. Retrieved from Barthes, R Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang. Brothers, C War and photography: A cultural history. New York: Routledge. Burke, K Permanence and change: An anatomy of purpose. New York: The Bobbs- Merrill Company, Inc. Casey, E.S Public memory in place and time. In K. R. Phillips (Ed.), Framing public memory (17-44). Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Edwards, E Raw histories: Photographs, anthropology and museums. New York: Berg. Gordon L Dorothea Lange photographs the Japanese American internment. In L. Gordon & G. Y. Okihiro (Eds.), Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the censored images of Japanese American internment (5-45). New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Himel, Y. H. T. (2 April 2015). Letter to Rago, D. and Perrault, S. Retrieved from / /?type=3&theater. Keen, S Faces of the enemy. [video] Berkeley, CA: Quest Productions. Massey, D.B Space, place and gender. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Personal justice denied: Report of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, Smith, D. 6 November Photographs of an episode that lives in infamy. The New York Times. Retrieved from Sontag, S On photography. New York: Picador, Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 109

13 Sturkin, M Absent images of memory: Remembering and reenacting the Japanese internment. Positions, 5(3),