Ansel also presented this to his recent critic Maloney, who agreed to publish it as a book. Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans was issued in late 1944 at a price of one dollar. Due to wartime exigencies, the softcover book was poorly printed on cheap paper, but the power of Ansel’s message came through loud and clear. (See plate 7, second photograph insert.)
Ansel trod an extremely fine line. He believed it was essential to cloak himself in righteousness by clearly defining the victims as “loyal” Japanese Americans and steeping it in the writings of the unimpeachable (Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman). Born Free and Equal is a story that wends its way from the brutal beginnings of relocation through the blossoming of democratic civilization not to be denied at the mature Manzanar. Wherever Ansel photographed, his core beliefs were reaffirmed, even at such a place as Manzanar, where human dignity rose above disaster under the Sierra’s potent benevolence.
Ansel composed most of the book’s text, an objective description of a horrible situation coupled with an impassioned plea for his country to right this heinous wrong. Ansel explained his purpose on the final page of text.
You have now met some of the people at Manzanar, seen a small part of their daily life and work. I hope you have become aware of their tragic problem.
As I write this men are dying and destruction roars in almost every part of the globe. The end is not yet in sight.
What is the true enemy the democratic peoples are fighting? Collectively, the enemy is every nation and every individual of predatory instincts and actions. We fight to assure a cooperative civilization in opposition to the predatory Nazi-Fascist-Militarist methods and ideologies of government. We must prosecute this war with all the ruthless efficiency, stern realism, and clarity of purpose that is at our command. We must not compromise or appease. We must assure our people that there will be no further human catastrophies [sic] such as the destruction of Rotterdam, the annihilation of Lidice, the rape of Nanking, or the decimation of the Jews.
We must be certain that, as the rights of the individual are the most sacred elements of our society, we will not allow passion, vengeance, hatred, and racial antagonism to cloud the principles of universal justice and mercy. We may well close with these words of Dillon S. Myer:
“If we are to succumb to the flames of race hate, which spread with fury to every markedly different group within a nation, we will be destroyed spiritually as a democracy, and lose the war even though we win every battle.”
To thee old cause!
Thou peerless, passionate, good cause.
Thou stern, remorseless, sweet idea,
Deathless throughout the ages, races, lands,
After a strange sad war, great war for thee . . .
—Walt Whitman48
The exhibit, meanwhile, foundered in rough waters. Ten days before its scheduled opening in November 1944, the museum administration notified Nancy that the show was not acceptable, that it was more propaganda than art. But the background mutterings overheard were that Born Free and Equal provided succor to the enemy. After bitter wrangling, with hard negotiating by Nancy and cross-country telephone calls by Ansel, the exhibition of sixty-one prints was allowed to open in a basement display space, under the following conditions: the show’s title must be changed to simply Manzanar, and the Fourteenth Amendment, Lincoln’s statement, and the information on the many Japanese Americans who were serving their country with valor must all be removed.49
Both the book and the exhibition were favorably received by the press, with articles appearing in major newspapers coast to coast. The First Lady, Eleanor Roosevelt, wrote in her newspaper column of the book, “It is one of the publications designed to temper one of our prejudices, and I think it does it very successfully.”50 Born Free and Equal was on the San Francisco Chronicle’s bestseller list throughout March and April 1945, at one point making it to the number-three spot for nonfiction.
But copies were hard to come by. Ansel wrote to Maloney in December 1944 to complain that there was not one Born Free and Equal to be purchased on the West Coast.51 Both to Nancy and Ralph Merritt he grumbled that U.S. Camera had got cold feet at the last minute and refused to promote the book. Maloney was never forthcoming on where the books were; eventually, the story spread that thousands of copies had been burned publicly or in secret by either the Army or U.S. Camera.52 There is no evidence for this.53 For one thing, the government knew all about the book, and the WRA authorized its publication; moreover, Harold Ickes himself, then still the secretary of the interior, wrote the foreword. It has been impossible to ferret out exactly where this tale began, but all trails seem to lead to Ansel, who told me such stories more than once.54 The most likely scenario is that, with paper hard to get, Maloney simply did not print enough books and was too embarrassed to admit his error. Born Free and Equal also suffered the double whammy of being published only days before Christmas, losing most of the holiday season, the best time for book sales, and not given publicity.55
Born Free and Equal was not embraced by all. Ansel found he was shunned by many of the military who lived in Yosemite. The Ahwahnee Naval convalescent hospital sheltered patients who had been wounded while fighting the Japanese, and many were still convinced that all Japanese were evil.56
Sue Kunitomi Embrey, who had been imprisoned at Manzanar, held a very different view: “Like the faces that gazed before his camera at Manzanar—confident, steadfast and determined in their love of country and promise of America . . . Adams stood in defense of the United States constitution, and the 14th Amendment, while those elected to uphold it ignored it.57
Ansel and Dorothea engaged in a lifelong argument. She thought that photographs should be made with clear social intent to benefit humanity, while Ansel believed that a photographer could not place such restrictions on his or her work without weakening it. Art should be made for art’s sake, he felt, and then if it could be used for a good cause, all the better.58
When she saw Born Free and Equal in early 1945, Dorothea was appalled. Her own photographs of Manzanar directly mirrored her anger at the situation, communicating misery first and foremost. For her, doing anything less was being soft, and she dismissed Ansel’s work there as “shameful.”59 It angered her that he could find beauty in such an immoral setting. For his part, Ansel believed that the landscape surrounding Manzanar, with the spectacular Sierra to the west and the Inyo Range to the east, provided the internees with crucial emotional sustenance.
One critic charged that “Adams’ documentation was used to advocate internment as essential to the safety and well-being of all Americans, including those of Japanese descent.”60 That is bunk. Born Free and Equal was a courageous undertaking in 1944, and nearly all the condemnation voiced would be stilled if the book itself were read cover to cover. Ansel’s goal was to convince Mr. and Mrs. America that the very same freedom for which their sons and daughters were fighting was being violated here at home.
In a startling turn of events, after it ordered the camps to close by the date of April 29, 1945, the government had a difficult time persuading a number of internees to leave Manzanar. Over the past few years, prisoners had been “furloughed” to harvest crops in various Western states where they experienced hate-filled prejudice and grave threats. Many returned to Manzanar convinced that it was unsafe outside the camp. Here, they had built a community with their own backs and brains in less than three years, and some had found greater happiness there than at their former homes, where they lived largely segregated from their neighbors.61 The 1945 Manzanar High School year book, Valediction, opened with four pages with four photographs likely made by Toyo Miyatake. First came Mount Williamson. Next is seen the tar-paper camp buildings surmounted by the snow-dusted Sierra Nevada viewed through the iron wheels of rusting farm equipment. The third image is of a hand holding a wire cutter just as it breaks through the barbed wire, a guardhouse looming in the background. And the fourth picture shows a young, neatly dressed couple, a
suitcase in the man’s hand, both smiling as they walk past the camp entrance and back into the world. Immediately following these evocative and provocative pictures appears the warm farewell by Ralph Merritt, who identified himself benignly as Project Director.
The future—your future and that of this country is brighter because of your patience, your faithfulness to your family and to your ideals and because of your loyalty as citizens of a great democracy which is fighting for its life in a tragic war and earnestly trying to understand itself and to accomplish the final step of tolerance guaranteed by its Constitution.
For your part in all this, by going calmly on with your education, for your part in helping to make a better world, may you reap the rich reward of being and understanding America.62
Manzanar finally ceased functionally to exist on November 21, 1945.63
Years later, Ansel concluded about Born Free and Equal that “from the social point of view [it was] the most important thing I’ve done or can do.”64 Nancy regretted that neither the book nor the exhibition did justice to his efforts.65 Ansel gave most of the negatives he made of Manzanar to the Library of Congress, while Dorothea’s work showing the relocation can be found at the National Archives.
In 1990, nearly half a century later, survivors of the camps were paid twenty thousand dollars apiece in reparations, although a great many died before this apology was offered. The elements have obscured much of what was briefly Manzanar, but in 1991 California senator Alan Cranston introduced legislation to preserve it as a national historic site so that “we will at least symbolically remove some of the tarnish left on our Constitution by the forced internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans.”66 The National Park Service took control of the Manzanar site on April 29, 1995, fifty years to the day after the official closing of the camps. Today visitors are welcome to explore its 814 acres all year long.67
Divorced from his text, most of the photographs Ansel made at Manzanar cannot stand individually. One negative that he did not donate with the others from Manzanar was Winter Sunrise, The Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, an image that projects the nurturing elements he clearly saw in the landscape.68 Probably made during his second visit to the camp, at Christmastime 1943, Winter Sunrise has become one of his most famous photographs.
One very cold morning, before dawn, Virginia and Ansel arose from their cots at Manzanar, grabbed a thermos of coffee, and drove ten miles south to the northern outskirts of the small town of Lone Pine. Ansel had been photographing the Sierra from this general area for the past four years, but he had yet to get the picture he wanted. His earlier efforts had all been quite literal, with the summertime Sierra and nearby Alabama Hills in full light, without benefit of winter’s more dramatic conditions.69 Ansel knew when he arrived at his chosen location that this was the day for the picture.
In the darkness he climbed up on the car’s camera platform and set up his favorite equipment, the eight-by-ten-inch view camera with the twenty-three-inch component of his Cooke lens, Wratten no. 15 (G) filter, on a heavy tripod.70 Shivering, he jumped back into the car and sipped the steaming coffee that Virginia poured as they waited together for the light.
When the sun’s first rays fell on the highest peaks before them, including Mount Whitney and the Whitney Pinnacles (which would form the background of the picture), Ansel ventured once more into the freezing cold to frame his image. Covered in snow, the jagged silhouette of the Sierra was revealed slowly, inch by inch, as the sun rose. In the middle ground, the curving form of the Alabama Hills lay at the Sierra’s feet, still slumbering in shadow. Just then, a shaft of light illuminated the foreground meadow. But as it did so, it also shone brightly on one of several grazing horses, whose backside was turned defiantly toward Ansel’s camera. As has already been mentioned, Ansel was not given to prayer, but he later admitted that at this moment, he placed his hands together and cast his gaze heavenward to entreat God to move that horse. As if by divine intervention, the light became perfect, the horse turned in profile, and Ansel made his exposure.71 (See plate 4, second photograph insert.)
Winter Sunrise appeared as the final landscape in Born Free and Equal. It sings of Ansel’s mature signature artistic devices, especially the effect of a long-focus lens used from a great distance, not to zero in on one subject but to compress the spaces between the various elements, emphasizing two, not three dimensions, as he had done with Frozen Lake and Cliffs and Surf Sequence. As in many of his greatest photographs, nearly solid bands of tone travel across the image surface in horizontal stripes: at the bottom, a narrow, dark foreground punctuated by an equally narrow band of sunlight; above that, the deep color of the Alabama Hills; then the bright whiteness of the Sierra; and finally the middle tone of the warming sky.
Ansel never intentionally included a human or an animal in his creative landscapes. For him, nature was Teflon-coated; man did not stick. Given his choice, he would not have had horses in Winter Sunrise, but they were there, and he made the most of them; they added an earthly touch to the unearthly beauty of the scene. Control, as absolute as possible, was at the heart of Ansel’s photography. Mountains stayed put, but people and animals were wild cards, potentially unmanageable moving variables in Ansel’s highly structured approach to his art.72 For Ansel, the critical variable was light.
There are many stories about Winter Sunrise. A favorite one can be verified only with an original print by Ansel, and not a book or poster reproduction. The high school students in Lone Pine traditionally placed whitewashed rocks forming the letters L and P on the side of the Alabama Hills, which just happen to be included in the left-hand side of Winter Sunrise. Ansel judged those rocks a blight on one of the greatest and otherwise most pristine landscapes in America, and in all of his prints of Winter Sunrise, he had his print finisher spot out the “LP” with ink so that it would become invisible (unless you know it’s there).73
In the spring of 1943, Ansel had his first camera platform constructed for his car, a Pontiac station wagon—what the Beach Boys came to call a “woody.” From that time on, many of his best-known images would be made from this perch, which eliminated the clutter of an immediate foreground and enabled his camera to see a greater distance, making possible the expansive vistas for which he became famous. The camera platform ensured that Ansel would always have a raised, special view; with the construction of this important tool, he rarely again gained entrance to the natural world on foot.
Between Manzanar and the Sierra lies an amazing field of boulders, rising above which is 14,376-foot-high Mount Williamson, so gigantic that at sunset it casts a shadow seven miles long, fully engulfing the site of the internment camp. In the last days of Manzanar, during August 1945, Ansel drove his Pontiac along the dirt tracks that crisscross the boulder field, climbing toward Mount Williamson. He found his spot, climbed up on the platform, and positioned the eight-by-ten with the twenty-three-inch long-focus element of his Cooke XV triple convertible lens, adding a Wratten G. deep yellow filter. The bird’s-eye viewpoint allowed him to tilt the camera down slightly to include the huge rocks that stretched from the car to the mountain, its summit now cloaked with clouds pierced by rays of light from the unseen sun, outside the picture area.74 The sense of scale in the final image is surreal, with the telephoto effect of the long-focus lens making foreground rocks appear as large as the truly gigantic mountain behind them. Mount Williamson from Manzanar is ripe with the mystical and holy presence that Ansel believed permeated the area surrounding the camp. When Nancy Newhall first saw a print, she titled it The Apocalypse. (See plate 6, second photograph insert.)
In 1944, the editors of Fortune hired some of the best California photographers, including Edward, Ansel, and Dorothea, to illustrate a single theme issue to be called “The Pacific Coast.” Ansel and Dorothea decided to pool their energies, with the implicit understanding that he would do the big scenes and she the people. They produced five articles together, comprising a total of twenty-four photographs, and An
sel did one story completely on his own.75 Because they shared credit for the five done jointly, there is now no way to determine who made which image. The article that Ansel photographed solo was “The El Solyo Deal,” about a huge, 4,400-acre corporate ranch. Dorothea refused to photograph agribusiness; she had spent the last ten years documenting the plight of family farms, which were disappearing at a fearsome rate as they were absorbed by corporations. Ansel, for his part, had no moral problems with the assignment.76
Dorothea and Ansel’s goal in “Richmond Took a Beating” was to demonstrate the effects of wartime industry on an East Bay town. Before the war, Richmond had been a rather sleepy place of twenty-four thousand people, but its shipyard had grown to become the largest in the country employing one hundred thousand workers, and nearly that many new residents, a number beyond the operational mechanisms of an old small-town bureaucracy.77 The idea of the Fortune editors was to shoot the story over one twenty-four-hour period (a predecessor of the contemporary “Day in the Life” concept).
Working together on this story proved a severe test of Ansel and Dorothea’s relationship. An observer at the time commented, “What an impossible team! They were so unlike one another.”78 When Ansel picked her up, Dorothea had her one camera, a Rolleiflex, strapped around her neck, and was carrying a film bag and a notebook. He, in contrast, had as usual loaded his big station wagon with everything he might need and more, including four cameras. When they arrived in Richmond, Dorothea hopped out of the car and disappeared into the throngs of workers as each shift came and went. While she acted invisible with her quiet little camera, Ansel stood on top of his car with his big black beard and ten-gallon hat, the center of his intended subjects’ attention; in such a situation he found it very difficult to capture meaningful people images. Mountains and trees were not disturbed by his eccentric appearance and ways, but people surely were.79
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