Seen and Unseen

What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams's Photographs Reveal About the Japanese American Incarceration

I wrote this book to bring to light to the injustice of the Japanese American incarceration. We need to know our real American history, and make sure we don’t repeat our earlier, terrible civil rights violations. It’s been made vividly clear in the last few years that our democracy depends on all of us.

Three months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the incarceration of all Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States. Families, teachers, farm workers—all were ordered to leave behind their homes, their businesses, and everything they owned. Japanese and Japanese Americans were forced to live under hostile conditions in incarceration camps, their futures uncertain.

Three photographers set out to document life at Manzanar, an incarceration camp in the California desert: Toyo Miyatake, Dorothea Lange, and Ansel Adams.

Growing up, I knew that my godmother, Dorothea Lange, had photographed the Japanese American incarceration during WWll, and was horrified by the suspension of civil liberties for the Japanese Americans. I also learned Ansel Adams had photographed the incarceration. Though they were good friends, Dorothea always thought he “didn’t get it.” That intrigued me. I decided to write a book on the incarceration and use both their photographs. I knew we’d also need illustrations to fill in what they were forbidden to photograph (Dorothea) and what they chose not to photograph (Ansel).

As I began researching, I quickly discovered that one of the prisoners, Toyo Miyatake, had smuggled in a camera lens and a film holder. Friends made him the camera body in the woodshop. Toyo later devised an intricate system of smuggling film into the camp. He took several photographs of conditions that Dorothea and Ansel were not able to, as well as documenting everyday life in the camp which provide an intimate, insider-view.

As Toyo told his son while they were in Manzanar, “I have to record everything. This sort of thing should never happen again.”

“This is what we did. How did it happen? How could we? ” — Dorothea Lange