''Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans'' is a book by

Ansel Adams Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advoca ...

containing photographs from his 1943–1944 visit to the internment camp then named

Manzanar War Relocation Center Manzanar is the site of one of ten American concentration camps, where more than 120,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II from March 1942 to November 1945. Although it had over 10,000 inmates at its peak, it was one o ...

Owens Valley Owens Valley (Numic Numic is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. It includes seven languages spoken by Native American peoples traditionally living in the Great Basin, Colorado River basin, Snake River basin, and southern Great Pl ...

Inyo County, California Inyo County () is a county in the eastern central part of the U.S. state of California, located between the Sierra Nevada and the state of Nevada. In the 2020 census, the population was 19,016. The county seat is Independence. Inyo County is ...

. The book was published in 1944 by U.S. Camera in

New York New York most commonly refers to: * New York City, the most populous city in the United States, located in the state of New York * New York (state), a state in the northeastern United States New York may also refer to: Film and television * '' ...

. In the summer of 1943, Adams was invited by his friend, newly appointed camp director Ralph Merritt, to photograph life at the camp. The project and the accompanying book and exhibition at the

MoMA Moma may refer to: People * Moma Clarke (1869–1958), British journalist * Moma Marković (1912–1992), Serbian politician * Momčilo Rajin (born 1954), Serbian art and music critic, theorist and historian, artist and publisher Places ; Ang ...

created a significant amount of controversy, partly owing to the subject matter.

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

was still being fought and the animosity against Americans of Japanese descent was high, especially on the West Coast. Adams was not the only photographer to take pictures in Manzanar. Before him,

Dorothea Lange Dorothea Lange (born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn; May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange' ...

had visited all eleven Japanese-American internment camps while a staff photographer for the

War Relocation Authority The War Relocation Authority (WRA) was a United States government agency established to handle the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. It also operated the Fort Ontario Emergency Refugee Shelter in Oswego, New York, which was t ...

. During Lange's visit in 1942, the camp was a less organized state and Lange was driven to portray the injustice of the relocation project, leading to a harsher and less optimistic portrayal of camp life than Adams's. The third photographer was internee Toyo Miyatake, previously a studio photographer in

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. Miyatake initially took photos with an improvised camera fashioned from parts he smuggled into the camp. His activity was discovered after nine months, but Merritt supported the endeavor and allowed him to have his stored studio equipment shipped to the camp and continue the project (initially a camp guard had to release the shutter for him after Miyatake had positioned the camera). Miyatake and Adams met and befriended each other at the camp, while Lange's and Adams's visits did not overlap. Adams's goal in the project was twofold: to stress the good American citizenship of the internees, as conveyed in the subtitle of the book, "The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans"; and to show their ability to cope with the situation:

The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair icby building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment…All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use. (Ansel Adams, 1965.)

Adams donated his collection of Manzanar photos to the Library of Congress in 1965. In 2001, Spotted Dog Press published an updated version of ''Born Free and Equal'' with a foreword by Archie Miyatake, son of Manzanar photographer Toyo Miyatake. The new version of the book has on the front cover a photo of Joyce Okazaki (née Nakamura), one of the children Adam's photographed.

Footnotes

References

* Ansel Adams,
Born Free and Equal
', New York: U.S. Camera (1944); reprint: CreateSpace (2012). * Ansel Adams, ''Born Free and Equal''; updated edition: Spotted Dog Press (2002). * Mary Street Alinder, ''Ansel Adams: a Biography'', Owl Books (1998). * Judith Fryer Davidov, "'The Color of My Skin, the Shape of My Eyes': Photographs of the Japanese-American Internment by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Toyo Miyatake", ''The Yale Journal of Criticism'' 9(2), pp. 223–244 (1996)

* Linda Gordon, and Gary Y. Okihiro (eds.), ''Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment'', W.W. Norton (2206). * Gerald H. Robinson, ''Elusive Truth: Four Photographers at Manzanar'', Carl Mautz Publishing (2002). * Jonathan Spaulding, ''Ansel Adams and the American Landscape: a Biography'', University of California Press (1998).

External links

at the U.S. Library of Congress.
Digitalized full text edition
at the U.S. Library of Congress. {{Japanese American internment camps 1944 non-fiction books Photographic collections and books World War II memoirs Books about the internment of Japanese Americans Museum of Modern Art (New York City) exhibitions 1944 in art Books about California Ansel Adams