Manzanar, California, USA
(Dorothea Lange / Library of Congress)
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, around 120,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes. Leaving their businesses and goods behind, they were transferred to concentration camps, known as ‘relocation centers’. Around 80,000 were native-born American citizens.
Documentary photographer Dorothea Lange took this image at the Manzanar camp, northeast of Los Angeles. More than 10,000 people were detained at the 500-acre camp. Like all such camps, Manzanar was treated as a military installation, with towers, barbed wire perimeters and armed guards. Before Manzanar closed at the end of 1945, 146 people had died as camp internees.
Lange created a significant body of work in the Depression era, working for the US Farm Security Administration. Born Dorothea Nutzhorn, her parents were second-generation immigrants from Germany. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941, she resigned in order to photograph the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans. Most of her images were seen as critical by the military, and were impounded for more than five decades.
‘The director of Manzanar has issued a detailed statement, showing that the food quotas there are no greater than elsewhere, and in some instances less. A good many reports have circulated as to the soft living, in the Jap camps, with intimation that our compulsory guests were being pampered with all the meat, sugar and butter they wanted, and that much of it was wasted. The rumor has been laid low at Manzanar.’
Madera Tribune, February 4, 1943
