Through a lens darkly

DOROTHEA LANGE worked for the U.S. government. Her famous photographs of migrant workers and sharecroppers, shot in the early 1930s, were commissioned by the Farm Security Administration. In February 1942, not long after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the detention of Japanese Americans in internment camps. The following month, the War Relocation Authority hired Lange to photograph the process. Ninety-seven percent of the pictures she shot were never published; instead, they went straight into the National Archives. Edited by historians Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, “Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment” represents the first time many of these images have been made available to the public.

It’s impossible to look at the quiet photographs in this book without being torn in all directions. Lange’s captions, true to the times and the chosen vocabulary of her employers, refer to the camps as “assembly centers.” The photos, meanwhile, fall just short of propaganda: Japanese Americans are shown waiting patiently in lines, their possessions piled by train stations and barracks, or standing by the astonishing, brilliant gardens they managed to create from desert nothingness at Manzanar, Turlock, Hayward, Centerville, Byron and other locations.

Lange was an artist and a political leftist. She was outraged by the government’s behavior for most of her life, and never more so than in its treatment of Japanese American citizens. The Depression only heightened her interest in bringing poverty and racism to the public eye. In the early 1930s, she left her husband, painter Maynard Dixon, for progressive Berkeley economist Paul Schuster Taylor. Lange was continually harassed by officials and bureaucrats while photographing, and these pictures, taken before and after evacuation -- as well as during internment -- reveal a simmering, furious restraint.

Lange always showed a profound respect for the privacy of her subjects. As a result, very few of the images here take us inside the often windowless barracks. (At Turlock, stables were used to house single male Japanese citizens.) Her cameras were large, unwieldy -- a Rolleiflex, a Zeiss Juwel or a Graflex -- and she often took a lot of time to set up her shots, which explains why many of them look posed. The best are unquestionably the most spontaneous: Her photos of men, women and children tagged, lined up or herded into waiting areas are evocative of concentration camps. Those showing armed guards, watchtowers and barbed wire fences make it almost impossible for any American to take the moral high ground.

Lange was hard on fellow photographer Ansel Adams, who was given access to Manzanar by the director of the camp, a friend from the Sierra Club; his pictures were even less revealing than her own. “He’s ignorant on these matters,” she wrote. “He isn’t acutely aware of social change.” In her introduction to “Impounded,” Gordon emphasizes that Lange’s photos did more than portray the Japanese Americans as victims. But the fact is that they were victims -- of an insensitive government behaving, in this area anyway, much like a dictatorship.

Okihiro’s essay, “An American Story,” is far more forceful on the brutal treatment shown to elderly community leaders at Sand Island and elsewhere. He describes how assets were frozen and how women, forced to sell their possessions before relocation to carpetbaggers at ridiculous prices, chose to smash antiques and appliances instead.

Lange must have suffered as well, making these photographs. One wishes that she had been able, somehow, to see what was happening head on, to show the efforts at rebellion and to get to know her subjects better. Looking at the internment sideways, which some of these photos cause us to do, one hand shielding us from the brutal sun, just seems wrong. *