Ansel Adams at Manzanar

September 7 – October 29, 2006
Henry R. Luce Gallery

Ansel Adams United States, 1902–1984 Farm, Farm Workers, Mount Williamson in Background, c.1943    Gelatin silver print Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Division of Prints and Photographs Lot 10479-4, no. 5

In late October 1943, Ansel Adams arrived at Manzanar War Relocation Center, where nearly 10,000 Japanese Americans were interned during World War II under Executive Order 9066. His self-motivated photographic project was to show the loyal American faces of these internees, two-thirds of them citizens by birth whose constitutional rights had been violated by the internment.  From October 1943 to July 1944, he made four visits to Manzanar at his own expense and without recompense, talking to the internees and photographing them in activities that especially emphasized their Americanness. The internment camps were scheduled to close at the end of 1944, while the war in the Pacific still raged, and Adams believed ordinary Americans would be more tolerant of the return of the internees to the cities and towns if they were perceived to be as American as anyone else.

Ansel Adams United States, 1902-1984 Tom Kobayashi (North Field) Manzanar Relocation Center, California, c.1943 Gelatin silver print Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Division of Prints and Photographs Lot no. 10479-1, no. 23

His work was stimulated largely by his admiration for the work of Paul Strand, whose portraits of peasants in Photographs of Mexico (1940) were for Adams 'documents in the highest sense of the term'. It was Strand’s sense of immediacy and direct visual contact with the subject that Adams aimed for in his own Manzanar portraits  to convey the resourcefulness and quiet fortitude of the interned Japanese Americans. Another influence was the work of photographer Dorothea Lange, whose book with her husband Paul Taylor, American Exodus, about the dust-bowl migrations, was a landmark in documentary photography when it appeared in 1939, and who had photographed in Manzanar in 1942. When Adams visited Lange and Taylor in the late summer of 1943, they applauded his effort and offered their full support.

Adams’s goal was to publish these images in an inexpensive book, Born Free and Equal, which he hoped might influence public opinion. But although it made the best sellers list in San Francisco, Born Free and Equal (1944) was poorly distributed after its publication in December, largely because of wartime race prejudice. 

In 1968, Adams donated his Manzanar photographs to the Library of Congress, where they can now be seen online.  Although often overlooked among his great American landscapes, the photographs he made at the internment camp in Manzanar represented for Adams one of the most important experiences of his photographic career. This is a rare opportunity to see original prints made by Ansel Adams from the Library of Congress; the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona; the Japanese American National Museum; and the Honolulu Academy of Arts.

This exhibition, organized by the Honolulu Academy of Arts, will travel to the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles, 11 November 2006-18 February 2007.

Anne Hammond, Guest Curator

About the cover:

Ansel Adams
United States, 1902–1984
Yuichi Hirata, Manzanar Relocation Center, c.1943
Gelatin silver print
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., Division of Prints and Photographs
Lot 10479-1, no.12