ANSEL ADAMS’ PHOTOS: 40 YEARS OF CONTROVERSY

More than 40 years ago the late photographer laureate Ansel Adams shot pictures in scenic Owens Valley. But Adams wasn’t focusing on the nature scenes that made him famous. He wanted to photograph the nature of man.

His photos were taken behind the barbed wire of Manzanar, where 10,000 Japanese-Americans, most of them born in the United States, were held for the duration of World War II. Nearly all of the Japanese-Americans on the West Coast--about 110,000 men, women and children--were placed in relocation camps due to “wartime necessity.”

Adams’ photos were intended to contrast with the grotesque caricatures of the Japanese enemy drawn by cartoonists of the day. His subjects wore broad smiles in close-ups, tilled their gardens, played baseball and painted landscapes on the walls of their barracks as they waited out the war.

Politics suppressed the exhibit of Adams’ Manzanar photos twice before its inaugural showing in November, 1944, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The title: “Born Free and Equal.”

Adams gave the collection of 204 photos to the Library of Congress in 1965, where they have remained, virtually forgotten.

In 1978, a few of his Manzanar photos went on exhibit at UCLA. But it wasn’t until last fall that “Born Free and Equal” was resurrected for a tour to Fresno, Denver, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. And now, ironically, criticism comes from the very people he championed 40 years ago.

Today, 52 of the original prints are on view in Philadelphia at the Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies, but there the photos have been judged “too pretty” by some Japanese-Americans who resent the impression that camp life was comfortable.

The controversy continues in Washington. The Library of Congress has ruled that the original prints must be returned to its archives. That would mean Los Angeles would not see the originals, but the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center is scheduled to show reproductions in the fall.

The library’s edict has upset some Japanese-Americans in Los Angeles, where 75% of the Manzanar internees eventually settled.

Sue Kunitomi-Embrey, a Los Angeles Japanese-American activist, said there may be a relationship between the government ownership of the photos and the current quest for reparations to surviving evacuees of up to $20,000.

She felt that the message conveyed by Adams’ photographs and his book made “government people” uncomfortable from the beginning. According to Kunitomi-Embrey, Adams brought up an important question in the text of his accompanying book: “What is the government going to do about getting them back to the mainstream again?”

“Perhaps there are still people in government who don’t want to face the fact that this (the relocation) was a national failure,” said Kunitomi-Embrey, who was 19 when ordered with her mother to Manzanar. “Especially now when the United States is looked at as an international leader, they don’t want their dirty laundry put out on display.”

Adams’ photo-essay was revived by a former student of his, Emily Medvec of Washington. Nine years ago, she decided to pursue fine-arts photography and studied with Adams in 1981. A second-generation American of Russian-Czech ancestry, Medvec began the project as a tribute to her former teacher and his subjects. She organized and curated the traveling exhibition at the request of the Adams family.

It opened Oct. 4, 1984, at the Fresno Metropolitan Museum of Art, History and Science and was shown in conjunction with “Go for Broke,” an exhibition about the Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most-decorated unit of World War II.

“The combination of the two shows together provided an absolutely wonderful contrast,” said Kathy Angelillo, business manager of the museum. “On one side of the museum, we showed how Japanese-Americans were fighting for our country and on the other side of the museum, we showed how they were treated.”

But, she added, “None of us are proud of the camps, and no one is trying to hide those (Adams’) photos. But at the same time, we’re not trying to embarrass our government by showing them.”

Midway through the four-city tour, the Library of Congress ordered the photographs back to Washington, ruling that the vintage works could not travel beyond a six-month time limit. The originals are due to be returned to the library at the conclusion of the Philadelphia exhibit Sept. 7.

Medvec called the action censorship, but library spokeswoman Nancy Bush says the issue is preservation, not censorship.

“Anyone who comes here can see these prints,” Bush said, maintaining further that Medvec’s charges don’t consider the library’s “longstanding” policies and regulations concerning the preservation of vintage works: “If we had a flippant attitude about preservation and in taking care of materials, it wouldn’t mean very much to be the nation’s library.”

The exhibit will be re-created in Los Angeles with high-quality prints reproduced from the original negatives. The exhibit is scheduled for an October opening date in Little Tokyo.

Los Angeles photographer Archie Miyatake doubts whether high-quality prints could capture the original quality and intent of Adams’ photos. Miyatake’s late father, Toyo, was also a photographer and was Adams’ close friend. Toyo’s photos of camp life were compiled with selected photos from Adams’ Manzanar collection in the exhibition at UCLA and book titled “Two Views of Manzanar.”

Miyatake has tried, without success, to produce matching prints of his father’s photographs. “It just doesn’t come out the same, because the quality of the black-and-white paper today is not as good,” he said. “The original intent of the photographer is often lost in the process.”

At the Denver Art Museum, more than 20,000 viewers flocked to see the exhibition during its two-month run. “The photographs prompted a lot of memories to those people who are not of Japanese ancestry,” Thea Rock, the museum’s media specialist, said. “There was a camp located in Colorado and, generally speaking, many people who came to see the exhibition did not realize this was a part of American history.”

Adams’ photographs got a mixed response from the Japanese-American community in Philadelphia, according to Museum Director Gail Stern, who co-initiated the “Japanese-American Experience” at the Balch Institute.

Ben Ohama, a retired dental technician who was interned at Poston, Ariz., at age 24, thought the photos effectively captured the tragedy and the triumph of the Japanese-Americans. “The photos really show the joy in our faces that we had made those places livable and pleasant, especially for the young ones,” Ohama said.

But some Japanese-Americans say the photos depict camp life as “too pretty--like they were having a vacation at the expense of the government,” said Sumiko Kobayashi, who chaired the exhibition’s planning committee.

According to the institute’s Lawrence Seiver, several Japanese-American members of the planning committee didn’t want the photos included in the “Japanese-American Experience” show. They felt the photographs didn’t adequately portray the harshness of camp life. He said those board members thought the photos would be misunderstood.

Reiko Gaspar, co-initiator of the exhibit and a past chapter president of the Japanese American Citizens League, said some committee members were upset that smiling faces and ordinary activities predominate in the photos.

Most of the Japanese-Americans in the photos emigrated to America in the early 20th Century, Gaspar said, and “the early Japanese custom is that you do not show your emotions on your sleeves. So most people became very stoic. Whenever they discussed grief, they would smile because they did not want you to worry about their grief.”

Gaspar said those who understand the Japanese-American culture can see the tears and sorrow beneath the pleasant facial expressions. “Ansel Adams was a stranger,” she explained. “The Japanese-Americans not only showed their best, but they were not ready to show their sorrow or their anguish.”

From a perspective of 40 years, Dennis and Suiko Shimizu, whose portraits were taken by Adams for the Manzanar portfolio, recall camp life as full of pleasant memories. The Los Angeles residents met and married at Manzanar.

They laughingly remembered spending the entire morning cleaning up their one-room barracks for the photo session.

“I didn’t know who he (Adams) was at the time,” Dennis said, “but we were told that he wanted to take a picture of my wife and me because we were newlyweds. We were so busy cleaning the place that we can’t even remember what he looked like. But when he got there, he said he just wanted natural poses, so he took a picture of my wife and me near the entrance of our barracks.”

When they were evacuated in 1942, Dennis’ father lost the shoe store he began in 1908. After the war, Dennis and Suiko successfully rebuilt the business.

Today, still at work and the parents of three and grandparents to nine, the Shimizus good-naturedly dismissed the internment experience as the result of wartime panic. “If we stayed in L.A., we would have suffered from more hardships because our fellow Americans probably would have condemned us and given us a hard time,” Shimizu said.

The Shimizus’ feelings were in sharp contrast to other Japanese-Americans who remember the initial hardships of camp life.

Archie Miyatake, interned at Manzanar as a teen-ager, recalled waking up each morning with his face and mattress covered with sand from the dust storms. “You get up in the morning, look at the mattress and it’s all covered with sand. You grit your teeth and you feel the sand. You wrinkle your nose and it’s all plugged up with sand.”

After the initial period of acclimatization to camp life, discomfort turned into conflict as a riot erupted between pro-American and anti-American coalitions.

“After the riot, we basically resigned ourselves to the fact that we’d have to live this way, so we accepted it,” Miyatake said. That’s when lawns were grown and camp life became very peaceful, he said. And that’s when Adams arrived in Manzanar.

Adams, who returned several times to Manzanar, suspected his photos would be labeled “propaganda,” Medvec said. He refused outside support and worked alone.

Medvec maintained that Adams’ photo of a panel of text from the 14th Amendment (which guarantees rights of citizenship) was removed before the 1944 MOMA exhibit could be shown. (The panel is included in the Philadelphia exhibit.)

But Mary Alinder, the editor of Adams’ autobiography scheduled to be released this fall by Little, Brown, said that the problems with MOMA were over artistic rather than political differences. Museum administrators required that the photos of the text panel and a letter from President Lincoln be deleted because they felt Adams “stood for art, not propaganda.”

When Manzanar Camp Director Ralph Merritt invited Adams to the camp, about 212 miles northeast of Los Angeles near U.S. 395, Adams decided his contribution to the war effort would be to document “the great, indomitable human spirit and the positiveness of these people,” Alinder said.

Adams’ purpose was not to document the hardships they confronted, according to Alinder.

His book, also titled “Born Free and Equal,” was written to dispel popular anti-Japanese sentiment, according to Medvec.

But despite rave reviews, the book disappeared from bookstands within weeks after the late 1944 release. Medvec said that the military bought 8,000 of the 10,000 copies printed to keep them from the American public. Alinder speculated that public complaints about the book being “an un-American statement” may have dictated its removal.

Adams ultimately printed master copies of all 204 photographs of the Manzanar portfolio in 1965 and donated them to the Library of Congress. He also donated the negatives with the intention of ensuring public access to those photographs, Medvec said.

“When I first started this project, I thought it was all history,” Medvec said. “I didn’t think the emotion would still be alive. The opposite was true.”