Researchers Rediscover a Master Naturalist’s Rarely Seen Side in His Heartfelt Photos of Japanese-American Internment

Photographer Peter Wright felt like an archeologist stumbling onto a lost temple in the jungle when he discovered a cache of pictures by Ansel Adams at the Library of Congress. Lawyer John Armor, Wright’s buddy, was equally ebullient when he saw the crates containing Adams’ pictures from the World War II Japanese-American internment center at Manzanar, Calif.

The project Armor and Wright embarked upon almost immediately will be published by Times Books this fall as “Manzanar,” a collection of 100 of the pictures Adams took in the fall of 1943 with explanatory text written by Armor and Wright. Seeking to “match Ansel Adams’ sympathetic view and brilliance,” Times Books editorial director Jonathan Segal asked John Hersey, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Hiroshima,” to to write the introduction to “Manzanar.” It is titled, “A Mistake of Terrifically Horrible Proportions.”

“It is another side of the mirror” of Hiroshima, Hersey said in a short telephone conversation from his home on Martha’s Vineyard. “Both the ‘Hiroshima’ pieces and this say as much about America as they do about the Japanese.”

The bombing of Hiroshima, Hersey said, “is still something you can’t be absolutely categorical about.” But Manzanar, he said, “is a case in which the hysteria after Pearl Harbor caused us to lose sight of one of the fundamental positions taken by the Bill of Rights--that is, that we don’t imprison citizens who’ve not been accused of anything.”

“A grave injustice was done to people who had done no wrong,” said Segal, the book’s editor. “When I saw the photos, I realized that this could be a book that truly makes a difference.”

Established in 1941 on a desert site north of Los Angeles formerly known as Camp Owens, Manzanar was the first of 10 “relocation camps” set up in California, Colorado, Wyoming, Arkansas, Arizona and Utah during World War II.

More than 110,000 Japanese-Americans were interned in these camps throughout the course of the war, 10,000 of them at Manzanar. President Reagan is expected soon to sign a bill providing compensation and an official apology to the 55,000 to 60,000 surviving residents of the camps.

In 1943, Adams was invited to visit Manzanar and to make a photographic record of the camp by his friend, Ralph Merritt, Manzanar’s second director. For Adams, renowned then as now for his work as a nature photographer, it was to be the sole venture into photo-documentary work involving human subjects.

“They are absolutely so clear, there seems to be nothing between your eye and the objects in the picture,” Hersey said. “It’s not an album of horrors the way the pictures of the German concentration camps were.”

Adams, too, wrote that he was “moved by the human story unfolding in the encirclement of the desert and mountains” at Manzanar. In 1944, he published a book, “Born Free and Equal,” containing his own commentary and some of his pictures.

But anti-Asian sentiments ran high in this country during World War II. The book had a very limited print run, and met with such intense public resistance that copies of “Born Free and Equal” were burned in protest. Adams chose not to renew the copyright and the book fell into obscurity.

Wright, “like all serious photographers” a devotee of Adams’ work, took to haunting the photo archives of the Library of Congress when he moved to Washington to become news photo editor of the Associated Press five years ago. While combing the library’s negative collection, he came across a reference to the Manzanar pictures.

Expecting to see “a couple of weird prints,” he called up the collection, “and up popped sixteen 16-by-20 boxes. I opened them up and I was just amazed.”

Adams, who died four years ago at age 82, had donated the 160 pictures to the library in three batches between 1963 and 1968. Along with the photographs and negatives, Wright and Armor found “a fat file of correspondence” from Adams about the Manzanar series.

“He was quite sympathetic to the Japanese,” Armor said. “Sympathetic at a time when it was not fashionable to be so.”

In his correspondence, Wright added, Adams talked about “how he hoped that someday, something would be done” with the Manzanar pictures. Adams tried, apparently, to put together a show of the series at the Museum of Modern Art here, “but as far as I can tell the show never did take place,” Wright said. “There was a public outcry, and the whole thing was canned.”

In researching the text for their book, Armor and Wright plodded through more than 10,000 pages of congressional testimony, as well as military records from the period. They read the personal correspondence of Harold L. Ickes, President Roosevelt’s labor secretary, and one of the few in official Washington to oppose the decision to intern Japanese-Americans. They obtained one document that still has not been declassified, a letter from Col. Karl Bendetsen “saying he didn’t feel it was appropriate that the American public know that plans were already in place to intern the Japanese-Americans” before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

They learned also that “before Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt asked for a list of all the Japanese-Americans living in the United States, and within two weeks it was on his desk. Combined with other evidence, Armor said, “it sure as hell from a straight research standpoint looks like plans were in place” before Pearl Harbor.

Armor and Wright say it is “happenstance” that their book is coming out as the President is expected to sign the restitution bill.

But Hersey agreed that the coincidence was fortuitous.

“I think the time has become ripe for another look” at the World War II internment of Japanese-Americans, Hersey said.