More than 110,000 Japanese-American citizens were forced from their homes and relocated to internment camps from 1942 to 1946 as World War II progressed in Europe. But through a series of photographs, Dorothea Lange told part of that story, which is on display at the Tanner Humanities building from Feb. 19 to March 13.
“These images capture a moment in history when people were violated,” said Melanie Newport, a U graduate history major who worked with the American West Center to organize the exhibit.
Lange, an influential photojournalist best known for her depictions of tragedies of the Great Depression, was commissioned by the government to document the internment of Japanese Americans, but Newport said “(Lange) was not on board…and was more attune to the subversive message of what was really going on.”
The government deemed Lange’s photos controversial and confiscated them during the time.
The pictures laid dormant for half a century and are now on display in honor of the Day of Remembrance on Feb. 19, the anniversary of President Franklin Roosevelt’s authorization of the internment.
“People could only take what they could carry in two hands,” said Haruko Moriyasu, coordinator of the U’s Asian-Pacific American Studies. They were immediately taken from their homes to assembly centers, which were often horse tracks with nothing but stalls for accommodations.
Ten camps sprung up in isolated locations of the American west. Topaz, one of the ten camps, held up to 8,130 people captive just outside Delta, Utah. Housing at the camps consisted of cardboard barracks without insulation and fell far short of appropriate living quarters.
After the last camps were closed in 1946, the prisoners, after losing everything, were released and given $25 to start over. Silenced by fear and shame, they did little to demand reparations for the injustices committed against them.
Wesley Sasaki-Uemura, a U history professor, is a third generation Japanese American.
“I learned about (the internment) from my high school teacher,” he said.
It was only after asking his mother did he find out that she had lived in one of the camps.
“People just didn’t talk about it,” Sasaki-Uemura said. “Most tried to move on and be quiet.”
Lange’s photos help to give the story of the internment and the people who suffered through it a voice.
Gary Okihiro, a professor at Columbia University, will be giving a lecture in conjunction with the exhibit about his book, Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese-American Internment on Thursday, Feb. 19 at 4 p.m. in the Humanities building.
The photo exhibit will be open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday for the duration of its stay.