Ansel Adams

by Mary Street Alinder

  Weary from a month spent on the road, driving from one place of misery to another, Dorothea paid scant attention to a primitive hand-lettered sign indicating a Pea Pickers Camp. Shrugging it off as just another place like all the others, and eager to get home to her family and out of the rain, she sped straight past. Nagging at her, however, was the feeling that she must go back. After fighting her intuition for twenty miles, she turned around and entered the rain-soaked camp, where she immediately discovered an apparently abandoned mother with her three children.8

  Migrant Mother was a close-up portrait, the last image in the series of exposures that Dorothea made that afternoon. With a dirty, tousled child huddling against each shoulder and a sleeping, grimy-faced baby nestling at her breast, the mother looks off into the distance, her face deeply etched with worry. She seems to be asking herself, how much longer can I continue?

  The crops had frozen in the fields, and with nothing to pick, the family had been living on peas and whatever birds the children could catch. The mother had just sold the tires off her car, and they were now stranded and desperate. Dorothea spent just ten minutes photographing, and her only subjects in the entire camp were this one family. She did not write down the mother’s name, merely the information that she was thirty-two years old.

  That was the story that Dorothea told, the one that became history, repeated in articles and Lange biographies. The mother did have a name; it was Florence Thompson, and over time she grew angry that her picture kept appearing year after year in various publications for which she received no credit or money. Her version of the story, not known until after Dorothea’s death, was quite different.9

  Thompson, her boyfriend, and her six children had been driving from the Imperial Valley, where they had picked beets, north to Watsonville to harvest lettuce. When their car broke down, the boyfriend and her two oldest sons had deposited the rest of the family at the Pea Pickers Camp, building them a rough shelter before heading into the nearest town on foot to get parts for the car. She had not sold the tires, and they stayed in the camp only that one day.10

  Dorothea had posed the subject. This was not a problem for a portrait photographer, which she certainly had been, but it broke the implicit rules of documentary photography, which purports to tell the whole truth and nothing but. Dorothea made six exposures; in each successive image, something concrete has been changed—a chair moved, child removed, the baby nursing in only the third frame, the two other children directed to turn away from the camera in the last exposure.11

  Thompson’s life did not get much better, but she and her children persevered. She became a union organizer in the camps. After they were grown, her children came to believe that she was unhappy with Dorothea’s portrait because it portrayed her as helpless and hopeless, rather than as the strong and proud woman they knew. Many have mistakenly credited Lange’s photograph with saving the family: soon after she sent these images to Washington, ten tons of emergency food were shipped to the camp. By then, Thompson and her family were long gone.12

  Lange created an instant icon for the Depression with Migrant Mother, although today we might be tempted, given her staging of its creation, to see it more as a docudrama. Like Alexander Gardner, who moved the body of a sharpshooter for pictorial effect, Lange used a real location, real people, and a real situation but believed their message could be better communicated if she rearranged things just a bit. For Dorothea, the end justified the means: later Ansel would say that some of her photographs, including this one, were among the greatest ever made.13

  Unable to process her negatives while on the road—which was where she was most of the time—Dorothea hired Ansel in 1935 on a per diem basis to develop her films and make occasional prints. She soon came into conflict with her boss, Stryker, who insisted that all FSA photographers send their undeveloped films directly to him in Washington. Dorothea rebelled, explaining that she needed to know what she was getting. Ansel agreed that Stryker’s rule was not in her best interests and met with him on her behalf. He was at least partially successful: Stryker agreed to let Dorothea (or Ansel, as her assistant) develop the negatives and make three prints from each. All would then be sent to Washington, with one print from each negative to be returned to Dorothea.14

  Ansel continued to work occasionally for Dorothea throughout the 1930s, receiving a small fee for his services.15 In the summer of 1938, while shooting for the FSA, she sent him all her films for three straight months. Explaining this extravagance, she wrote to Stryker, “It will cost me a lot of money but since I cannot for lack of time develop in the field I’ve decided to make no compromise on quality and there is no technician in the country to match him.”16 Ansel in turn respected the depth of Dorothea’s passion for photography, feeling that she was one of the few photographers as committed as he to the medium. He seconded her philosophy that “if our work is to carry force and meaning to our view we must be willing to go all-out.”17

  Almost surely it was Ansel who brought Dorothea’s work to the attention of Beaumont at MoMA. Although she was not included in Photography 1839–1937, she was represented in 1939’s Documents of America by nine prints—more than any other photographer.18 But it was only in 1940 that Dorothea fully arrived on the art scene, with her selection for Ansel and Beaumont’s first show for the Department of Photography, Sixty Photographs. Ansel asked her to write the statement for the documentary section of his catalog for A Pageant of Photography, which also featured her photographs, and invited her to join his faculty for U.S. Camera’s Yosemite Photographic Forum in June 1940, though she ended up not teaching due to low enrollment. He promoted her at every possible opportunity.

  In late 1942, Ansel joined the faculty of the Art Center School in Los Angeles because he believed that the Signal Corps would soon send its soldiers there for training. More direct involvement in the war did not materialize, as the Signal Corps never came aboard; instead, Ansel found himself teaching basic technique to photo-lab workers for West Coast defense factories.19 At odds with the head of the school and most of his fellow teachers, all of whom had a commercial bias, he resigned on March 23, 1943. His last class was held at the Los Angeles city morgue, where he instructed civil-defense workers on the preferred technique of photographing corpses.20

  Ansel withdrew to Yosemite. He had received a letter from the publisher of U.S. Camera, Tom Maloney, who warned him that photographs of nature had no relevance during wartime.21 No one seemed to agree with, or understand, Ansel’s conviction that beauty was salvation.22

  With perfect timing, an old Sierra Club friend named Ralph Merritt arrived in Yosemite. Merritt was the newly appointed director of the Manzanar Relocation Camp on the eastern side of the Sierra. When Merritt invited him to document Manzanar, Ansel seized the opportunity.23

  World War II, it is generally agreed, was a necessary war. But while America, the symbol of democracy, joined the Allies to stop the nightmare of fascism from engulfing the world, at home it was not freedom for all. In 1942, the American government, led by President Franklin Roosevelt, instituted racism on a federal level, directed solely at one group: people of Japanese ancestry, and most were American citizens.

  Immediately following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, there was great fear that the Japanese would invade the mainland United States. Terror was greatest along the West Coast, where Japanese submarines were sighted from shore. On February 24, 1942, there was a report of Japanese airplanes over Los Angeles; one antiaircraft unit opened fire, and hearing that, others joined in the shooting. Although the report had been false, and there had been no invasion by Japanese planes, people were in a panic, and every Asian was suspected of being a spy.24

  President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. It decreed that military zones should be established, “from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War .
. . may impose in his discretion.”25 The states of California, Oregon, and Washington were declared military zones. With great speed, orders were issued that all Japanese, citizens or not, were to be rounded up and placed in “relocation camps.” From there, jobs would be found for them by the War Relocation Authority (WRA, the government agency founded to administer the camps) in less threatened areas, in the country’s interior. It amounted to nothing less than a vast diaspora. We were at war with not just Japan, but Germany and Italy as well. Neither Americans of German ancestry nor those of Italian ancestry were imprisoned because of their ethnic background. Labeling them internment camps was a whitewash. Manzanar, and others like it across the West, was a prison.

  Twenty-five thousand young Nisei (first-generation American-born Japanese Americans) volunteered to serve in the armed forces during the war, and the most decorated fighting unit in United States military history was the heroic 100th Battalion of the 442d Regiment combat team, composed entirely of Japanese Americans.26 Not one person of Japanese ancestry was ever convicted of treason during World War II. Nonetheless, it took the end of the war to close the camps.

  Ten relocation camps were established. Manzanar, in California’s Owens Valley, opened its gates in March 1942.27 Soon more than 110,000 people were interned in the camps, 10,046 of these at Manzanar alone at one point.28 The official government line was that the purpose of the camps was to protect the people inside from the angry citizens outside, but the gun towers that surrounded each camp were turned inward on the inmates, not outward to protect them.29

  The evacuation was swift and uncompromising, the roundup capturing people found to be of even one sixty-fourth Japanese.30 People were forced to sell their homes, close their businesses, and store all their belongings on only a few days’ notice. Property and goods were sold off at below-bargain-basement prices; most people lost almost everything. Each was allowed to take but a few small suitcases.31

  The camps were all sited in isolated places. Manzanar, the Spanish name for “apple tree,” has become a symbol for all of the camps. Originally a fertile land graced with apple orchards, the valley had grown dusty and barren since much of the water had been diverted far away for urban needs. The five-hundred-acre site of the camp was loaned to the federal government by its owner, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.32 It was the challenge facing the Japanese American internees to plant fields that would provide produce both for themselves and for others outside the barbed wire.33 Irrigation ditches were dug by hand, and crops did indeed grow. Crude tarpaper barracks were constructed, along with a hospital and a school.

  Dorothea had photographed Manzanar before Ansel. Hired by the WRA to provide a visual record of the implementation of 9066, she covered the evacuation and first days of imprisonment.34 Completely opposed to the relocation (her new, second husband, social scientist Paul Taylor, was an outspoken advocate for the civil rights of the Japanese Americans), she believed her work with the camera represented the national conscience.35 Her nearly eight hundred images graphically depict the personal devastation caused by 9066’s uprooting of bewildered, innocent families.36 The Manzanar that Dorothea saw was raw, not yet softened by the determined hands of its internees. For her, the dramatic backdrop of the Sierra only seemed to heighten the harshness of the windblown, desiccated landscape.

  Although internees were not allowed to have cameras, Toyo Miyatake, a Los Angeles professional photographer, smuggled in a lens and crude parts from which he constructed a simple camera. His photographs of the camp, taken from the inside, show a surprisingly vital community, the people coping with their calamity with great courage, living life each day as best they could.37

  Ansel was Manzanar’s third photographer. For many years, his parents had employed Harry Oye, who was a Japanese national, or Issei, and thus unable to become a citizen. Harry was picked up by the authorities two days after Pearl Harbor and, due to his poor health, incarcerated in a hospital far away in Missouri.38 This outraged Ansel, who came to Manzanar in October 1943, stayed for a week, and returned for another week and another. Unlike Dorothea, he was not on a paid assignment. He believed that he could be more objective. Even though she was employed by the government, Dorothea had refused to soften the situation she found, which may be why the WRA largely buried her negatives.39

  A key element in the evolution of Manzanar from the Spartan camp that Dorothea had experienced to the vibrant village that Ansel found was its director, Ralph Merritt. From the time Manzanar opened until Merritt took over that November, there had been a string of unsuccessful directors. Two weeks after Merritt’s arrival, a Japanese American thought by some internees to be a government informant was badly beaten. Merritt had the instigators placed in jail. Negotiations began between the camp administration and five Japanese American prisoner representatives. Thousands of other prisoners stood vigil outside the hospital and the jail. A riot erupted between those who believed that cooperation with the government was the best course and those who seethed with anger about having been placed in such an untenable situation. Some threw rocks at the guards. When the crowd would not disperse, the new director called in soldiers stationed outside the camp, who began firing their rifles wildly and lobbed cans of tear gas. Ten were injured and two young Japanese American boys, ages 17 and 21, were killed.40

  Merritt vowed to never let anything like that happen again and began immediately to work directly with the internees, establishing a self-governing democracy and bending the rules whenever possible.41 Ralph Merritt, personally convinced of the utter wrongness of the camps, became a hero through his humanistic administration. His invitation to Ansel was extended in the hope that through his work, the people of Manzanar might be recognized for their loyalty to America even in the face of such gross mistreatment.42 Ansel wrote a letter of understanding that outlined the project. Both he and Merritt signed the agreement. Ansel would assume all travel and photographic expenses, but any profits from the sale of a potential book or article, or of prints, would belong to him. When his work was completed, Ansel was to deliver two full sets of photographs from this work to Merritt.43 Ansel telegraphed Merritt that he would arrive at Manzanar to begin photographing on Tuesday, October 25.44

  Ansel’s photographs emphasized that these were individuals, as American as any other citizen. He made close-up portraits of person after person, each undeniably unique and human under his scrutinizing lens; these are emphatically not anonymous faces that all look alike. He photographed families living in their simple quarters, no longer bare, but spruced up with creative, homey touches. His pictures show hardworking people who in their former lives held respected jobs—one a nurse, another, an accountant, a businessman, a lawyer, a designer. At Manzanar they established a newspaper, The Free Press; played that all-American game, baseball; and even erected a small Pleasure Park with a pond and a hand-built bridge and gazebo.

  Although the faces of the people in Ansel’s photographs were smiling, he also showed the impersonal rows of bleak barracks and people lined up for meals. One particularly strong image reveals a simple still life of a tabletop in the Yonemitsu family’s quarters covered with a small lace doily. A framed picture of a Caucasian Jesus leans against a portrait of their son, Bob, a PFC in military uniform, with three letters from him tucked to the side. Ansel quietly captured the irony of the son fighting for a country that had imprisoned the parents. In the spring of 1944, Ansel would come back to Manzanar for the express purpose of photographing visiting daughters and sons in their military uniforms.

  Nancy Newhall joined Ansel on one trip and was surprised by what she found. They drove into the camp one evening, knocked on a door, and were met by welcoming waves of children and adults, most bent on hugging Ansel and hearing his latest jokes. Over many visits, Ansel had clearly involved himself in the community. At least once he accompanied Toyo Miyatake to the Manzanar High School. Most of the pictures in Our World, the 1944 yearbook, were made by Miyatake and his son, Archie, who
was then a senior. However, appearing on one page is an image of Ansel photographing a theater rehearsal. With many pages of traditional yearbook images—smiling graduating seniors, clubs, and interest groups—a close reading of the text written by its student editors reveals a far less than idyllic educational experience. “Girls’ Sports” is described thus: “The girls became very enthusiastic about the game. With limited equipment and without a baseball diamond girls enjoyed playing with a make-believe diamond.” The book’s final picture is by Miyatake, a single guard tower inside the camp’s barbed-wire fence, its searchlight and unseen guns directed at the students and their families. It is captioned, “As you turn to the last page in this book, we hope that you will do so with a satisfied feeling. For it is very important to us that you will find in this story an accurate picture of the school and community life that you are living.” Ansel had been forbidden to photograph any obvious signs of imprisonment, including the barbed wire and the guard towers.45

  For one week in late January 1944, Ansel mounted an exhibition of these photographs right at Manzanar for those whom he believed should be their first audience, the internees themselves.46 When he arrived in New York in the spring of 1944, he carried with him sequenced photographs mounted on boards, with his own accompanying words. Not permitted to show the watchtowers, barbed-wire fences, or guns, Ansel was forced to tell the grimmest parts of the story in words. At MoMA, Nancy received the project with great enthusiasm and within a day and a half scheduled and planned an exhibition that turned out to be neither fast nor easy to open. Twice the museum canceled it and the trustees insisted that Ansel remove the panel quoting the Fourteenth Amendment that guarantees due process for every citizen. They also required he change the title from Born Free and Equal to Manzanar: Photographs by Ansel Adams of Loyal Japanese at the American Relocation Center.47