In April 1942, Dorothea Lange showed up on the doorstep of the Raphael Weill School in San Francisco to photograph the children, specifically the Japanese-American children, who were students there.

Walking with a mincing step caused by the childhood polio that had shaped her right foot and weakened her right leg, wearing on her left arm the silver cuff bracelet and matching ring that she never relinquished, Lange set up her unwieldy tripod and camera to document a typical school day. Weeks later, every child of Japanese descent that she photographed that day was swept up among 120,000 people held in concentration camps for the next three years, under President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066.

Lange’s work as a documentary portrait photographer was well-known to the government. During the 1930s, she and her husband Paul Taylor had worked to document the conditions of migrant farmers in dozens of states across the country, but especially California, where Lange and Taylor lived.

The hastily organized War Relocation Authority wanted Lange to document their movement of the 120,000 evacuees — 70,000 of whom were American citizens — from their homes to remote desert prison camps to sit out the war.

“On the surface, it looked like a narrow job. It had a sharp beginning, and a sharp end. Everything about it was highly concentrated. Actually, it wasn’t narrow at all. The deeper I got into it, the bigger it became.”

Two boys at lunch, Raphael Weill school, April 1942.

In two brutal months, Lange and her assistant Christina Clausen Gardner documented the entire arc of the relocation.

They visited people in their last days at home in early April: meeting the pets they would give up, seeing the comfortable homes and lively spring gardens they were leaving behind, watching them pack, and documenting them as they locked their doors and reported to relocation centers.

Lange, always a carefully detailed captioner, took copious notes on the people whose portraits she took.

The Shibuya family of Mountain View, California. Lange’s caption acknowledges that all of the Shibuya children were born in America, and that four attended “leading California Universities, one a student at Stanford Medical School, one holding a degree in plant pathology from the University of California.” Lange’s notes also related that Mr. Shibuya had emigrated from Japan with $60 and a basket of clothes and had become a successful grower of chrysanthemums. Source: Discovering Nikkei, by Nancy Matsumoto, at http://www.discovernikkei.org/en/journal/article/3996/

She continued to see them off as they boarded trains, and then traveled after them to Manzanar, one of the permanent camps where they were to live, in the desert east of the Sierra Nevada.

Manzanar, 1942. Dorothea Lange for the War Relocation Authority.

“Now I had never had a comfortable feeling about that War Relocation job. Oh, the difficulties of doing it were immense,” Lange later said.

Lange, just before her death in 1965, examines photos from her work, preparing for a final retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.

“The billboards that were up at the time, I photographed. Savage, savage billboards.”

Billboard photographed by Dorothea Lange, 1942. (screen capture from Grab a Hunk of Lightning, PBS American Masters film, 2014. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/dorothea-lange-full-episode/3260/

When the federal government officials who’d hired Lange saw the results of her documentation, they fired her immediately and impounded her photographs. It would be decades before the public saw them.

In 1945, Lange was diagnosed with ulcers that would plague her for the rest of her years. She died of esophageal cancer at age 70, in 1965. It would be 40 years before most of her WRA photos were seen.

She once said, “No country has ever closely scrutinized itself visually … I know what we could make of it if people only thought we could dare look at ourselves.”

More than 800 photographs remain of what she dared to look at in 1942. One wonders if these two months she took part in, the process she had to stomach, the pride she swallowed to do the work, and the bitterness of its suppression — subtly, slowly helped kill her over time.

Flag at Manzanar prison camp, 1942.

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

Further Reading & Viewing
Writer Nancy Matsumoto has created a thorough, comprehensive, and strikingly personal 18-part overview of photographers who documented the era of Japanese-American internment at Nancy Matsumoto’s Discover Nikkei website. The site discusses the work of Lange, Ansel Adams, and Tōyō Miyatake, who founded a photography studio in San Francisco in 1923 (about the same time Lange did, in fact), and who continued to photograph during his internment. Today, the Miyatake family continues to operate the studio in San Gabriel, California.

The Japanese-American Relocation Digital Archives at the University of California includes many timelines, primary sources, and other resources for research and education.

Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese-American Internment, documents the many images Lange made for the WRA. Edited by Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro.

Material for this photo essay was drawn from the film for PBS/American Masters, Grab a Hunk of Lightning, directed by Lange’s granddaughter Dyanna Taylor. The film premiered in August 2014.

fecklessly tweaking the universe's algorithms in hopes of a puppy. Currently Director of Communications for the American Association of Geographers. She/hers.

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