Ansel Adams's book Born Free and Equal
The following portraits are a selection of Ansel Adams's photographs of the Manzanar Relocation [internment] Camp for Japanese-Americans published in 1944 by U.S. Camera along with a text by Adams.
The digital images were made from the 112-page copy held by the Prints and Photographs Division. In a letter to his friend Nancy Newhall, the wife of Beaumont Newhall, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, Adams wrote: "Through the pictures the reader will be introduced to perhaps twenty individuals . . . loyal American citizens who are anxious to get back into the stream of life and contribute to our victory." The book received positive reviews and made the San Francisco Chronicle's bestseller list for March and April of 1945. A hardcover edition of Born Free and Equal (Bishop, CA: Spotted Dog Press, 2001) is available which corrects surname and chronological errors found in the original and includes essays by former internees Archie Miyatake and Sue Kunitomi Embrey.
—from the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 2054
Miss Kay Fukuda, U.S. Naval Cadet Nurse, 1943
Corporal Jimmy Shohara, 1943
Richard Kobayashi, farmer with cabbages, 1943
Hidemi Tayenaka, wood worker, 1943
Akio Matsumoto, commercial artist, 1943
Sam Bozono, Policeman, 1943
Yuichi Hirata, Manzanar Relocation Center, 1943
Michael Yonemitsu, x-ray technician, and Harry Sumida in x-ray room, 1943
Nurse Aiko Hamaguchi and patient Toyoko Ioki, Manzanar Relocation Center, 1943
Tatsuo Miyake (student of divinity) 1943
We don't think of Ansel Adams as a creator of people photos, but this is the time in his life when he followed his heart to express his compassion and admiration for his fellow Californians of Japanese descent who were uprooted from their homes and deprived of their livelihoods after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the hysteria that followed.
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