FIGURE 1. Francis Stewart, ‘Memorial Day services at Manzanar, a War Relocation Authority centre where evacuees of Japanese ancestry will spend the duration. American Legion members and Boy Scouts participated in the services,’ 31 May 1942. War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement Collection, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
Photographic documentation from camp glosses over the conflict many residents felt. Cheery images of Japanese-American citizens commemorating Memorial Day, playing baseball, gardening, and sitting in classes portray Manzanar as just another American community (Figure 1). Yet Japanese heritage was much more widely expressed than can be seen in most uncensored government photography.
Heitz. “Pictured Pioneers,” pp. 2
I found an article by Kaily Heitz about photography at Manzanar, a World War II Japanese American incarceration camp located in California’s Owens Valley. In the article, Heitz discusses government censorship and argues that most of the photographs circulated around Japanese American incarceration were hyper-Americanized, creating “a photographic memory that forgets that [those incarcerated during the war] were Japanese.”1
Dorothea Lange, ‘Grandfather of Japanese ancestry teaching his little grandson to walk at the War Relocation Authority center for evacuees,’ 3 July 1942. War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement Collection, Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley.
Heitz, Kaily. “Pictured Pioneers: Photographic Representation of Japanese-American Identity on the Frontier.” Visual Studies 34, no. 1 (2019): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2019.1583541.
- Heitz. “Pictured Pioneers,” pp. 11 ↩︎