Casting his own light on a dark spot

ARCHIE Miyatake vividly remembers the scene: Ansel Adams was playing on his sister’s toy piano after a family photo session in 1943 at the Manzanar War Relocation Center.

“My father named the piece right away and was really surprised that he could play so well,” says Miyatake, who was a teenager at the time. “That’s when Ansel Adams told him, ‘You know, I was originally studying to become a concert pianist.’ But he got so interested in photography that he stepped out of school and turned himself to photography.”

It may be an obscure fact that the photographer responsible for changing the way Americans perceived Yosemite was originally intended for a career in music. But that he dedicated himself to taking portraits of Japanese Americans interned at Manzanar during World War II may come as the bigger surprise to those who have seen only his ethereal images of Half Dome. The exhibition “Ansel Adams at Manzanar” at the Japanese American National Museum revisits this unexpected junction between one of the best-known landscape photographers and one of the darker chapters in American history.

“The portraits of the internees at Manzanar have not generally been considered as a major part of Ansel Adams’ work,” exhibition curator Anne Hammond says via e-mail, “but he believed his effort there to be one of the most important experiences of his photographic career.”

Beginning in 1942 through the end of the war, the U.S. government removed about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom were American citizens, from their homes and communities to 10 internment camps in California, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming. About 11,000 of them were at Manzanar, in Owens Valley, 225 miles north of Los Angeles.

Adams’ concerns about the unjust treatment toward Japanese Americans prompted him to visit Manzanar beginning in 1943. Through his acquaintance with Ralph Merritt, the director at Manzanar and a fellow member of the Sierra Club, Adams was allowed to document life at the camp. For the next two years, Adams could freely photograph what he saw there, with the stipulation that he wouldn’t photograph the guard towers and the barbed-wire fences.

One of those held at Manzanar was Miyatake, whose father, Toyo, owned a portrait studio in downtown L.A.’s Little Tokyo before the evacuation and eventually became the official camp photographer. A mutual friend, photographer Edward Weston, told Adams to find Toyo Miyatake at the camp.

A shot of the Miyatake family sitting in their living room is one of the 54 photographs on display at the museum.

“My father let him use the darkroom to change his film holders, and they would do a lot of talking,” says Archie Miyatake, now 82. “They got along well.”

The ordinary family scene of the Miyatakes underscores one of Adams’ objectives to depict the people there as Americans no different from those living outside the camps. The photographs portray Manzanar as any other American community -- families wearing their Sunday best, farm workers tending crops and children gathering around the schoolyard.

“Their power as images becomes clear with the realization that Adams at no point attempted a pure documentary portrayal of the camp,” Hammond writes. “He came to Manzanar to present his own kind of propaganda (not the government’s), in a documentary style: that the Japanese Americans in the camp were hard-working, acculturated Americans, who deserved the respect of their fellow American citizens -- since they were at this time leaving the camps to find places back in the community.”

In his efforts to alleviate tensions on both sides of the fence, Adams wrote extensively of his hope that other Americans would welcome the Japanese Americans back once they were released from the camps.

Along with taking their photos, Adams interviewed his subjects about their lives before camp, their feelings about their country and the obstacles they expected after their imminent release. Some of the original interviews with the detainees are printed as wall texts alongside the photographs.

One of them is of an internee named Roy Takeno, a journalism major who graduated from USC, speaking at a town hall meeting. “Trained in American schools, and believing in American ways, he feels, along with thousands of his fellow Nisei, the unsatisfactory elements of enforced racial segregation,” Adams writes. “America has not assimilated all who have assimilated America.... “

The exhibition also includes some of Adams’ signature landscapes taken during his drive from Yosemite to Owens Valley, with Mt. Williamson often seen in the background of the photographs.

AFTER taking hundreds of photographs at the internment camp, Adams published many of them in “Born Free and Equal: Photographs of the Loyal Japanese-Americans at Manzanar Relocation Center, Inyo County, California” in 1944. However, when the photographs were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in November of that year, the museum changed the title of the show to simply “Manzanar.”

“He received a very warm response from the photographic community, but a mixed one from the general public, which is not surprising, considering the U.S. was in the middle of the war in the Pacific at the time,” Hammond says.

“He was unhappy about the change to the title, but was pragmatic about it, feeling it was more important that the photographs be publicly shown.”

Adams also exhibited his works especially for his photographic subjects while they were still incarcerated at Manzanar. Realizing the importance of his photographs as a historical document, Adams eventually donated the collection to the Library of Congress in 1965.

In total, Adams took four trips on his own expense to the camp. His final trip was in August 1945. Because snow conditions would close off the most direct route from Yosemite to Owens Valley, Adams had to drive down to Bakersfield, loop around the Sierra Nevada range and head back north to reach the camp in the winter.

“He drove a huge eight-passenger sedan. It must have been a 1930s car, a huge boxy-looking car. I don’t know how he was able to drive to the camp with that thing, with the gasoline ration, but he got there somehow,” Miyatake says. “He was determined to photograph the people in Manzanar.”

cynthia.dea@latimes.com

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‘Ansel Adams at Manzanar’

Where: Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. 1st St., L.A.

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, except 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays. Closed today, Mondays, Christmas and New Year’s Day.

Ends: Feb. 18

Price: $4 to $8; free, 5 and younger

Info: (213) 625-0414, www.janm.org