Three Views of Manzanar | Lost LA | Season 4, Episode 2 | KCET

what happens when we let mass hysteria and racial bigotry trump our most cherished political values there are a few better reminders than a National Historic Park deep in California's Owens Valley the former site of the Manzanar War Relocation Center but Manzanar is more than a history lesson for thousands of people of Japanese ancestry this desert prison was a temporary involuntary home incarcerated Gardens they went to school some fell in love got married and started families all behind the barbed wire life went on even if constitutional rights stopped at the guard tower and that determination to make their prison into a home to maintain a sense of dignity despite the injustice was captured by three different photographers each with a unique point of view one of them as an artist you would never expect to document a human tragedy a photographer famous for framing people out of his compositions his prints are kept at the UCLA library I had to see what he captured la is an idea as much as a city a landscape of aspirations and imaginations behind the idea of la are the stories of people dreamers seeking fortune or reinvention and those who saw the dream as an illusion so let's uncover clues to have forgotten past in the archives Lost la explores the untold history behind the fantasy of California Lost la is made possible in part by a grant from an r/a foundation a Margaret a Cargill philanthropy the Ralph M Parsons Foundation and the California State Library [Music] Ansel Adams is best known for capturing moments of the sublime in his beloved Sierra Nevada but a collection at the UCLA library reveals a lesser-known episode in his career in 1943 Adams brought his camera to Manzanar there he captured an all-american scene that subtly undermines the rationale for the incarceration imprisoned behind barbed wire because of their presumed as loyalty these japanese-american inmates played baseball and when I got the chance to inspect that original print in person what really caught my eye was the handwriting on the back cryptic notes about clearances and segregate the deciphering I went to Manzanar [Music] when I finally arrived in manzanar I met up with two experts Rose masters a park ranger and historical interpreter and Paul Keita gawky whose work revisits historic photos of victims of the incarceration so this is the man's in our baseball field I'm here because this is the site of one of my favorite Ansel Adams photos this comes from UCLA and there's all these Ansel Adams photos these photos are all from the War Relocation Authority collection there's printing there's also some handwriting and all the photos they cleared question mark a lot of them stay okay including this one but some of them the word segregation right next to that question do you know what that might mean having just seen the back of this in October 1943 when Adams was corresponding with Ralph Merritt the project director of Manson are they were determining what the rules would be for when Adams comes here as an independent photographer at the invitation of merit to take pictures here Manson are and one of the rules was that Merritt would be able to look at all of Ansel Adams photographs and if he didn't want one of them printed he could say not this one don't print this and that was something that Adams voluntarily submitted himself to he did government have a very different definition of segregate like we're thinking segregated from the rest of the United States yes true but within these camps the government segregated people based upon who they deemed to be loyal and who they deemed to be disloyal [Music] and those of the government decided through some very questionable tactic were disloyal they sent to tule lake segregation center in Northern California different camp right and there were people that were being segregated right around the time the Adams was here taking photographs in Manzanar my suspicion is that if it said Segura get had somebody in it who was going to be sent to tule Lake and that would actually go against what Adams was himself trying to do which was he's very focused on people who were loyal what I think it's even more fascinating about this is it just seems like a subtly subversive photo right because he's here at Manzanar and he's he's photographing these people who are incarcerated because they're of their presumed disloyalty to the United States and yet they're doing one of the most American things possible right they're playing baseball yeah yeah I'm baseball was a huge pastime here in Memphis entire by June of 1942 there were a hundred baseball softball teams here [Music] part of Adams purpose and coming here was to try to actually show the loyalty and the American this and the individuality of the people that he was photographing who were incarcerated here he wanted the American public to understand that these are Americans too you can remember like two-thirds of the people were US citizens born here in the United States I also came across a letter from another very famous photographer Dorothea Lange to Ansel Adams and I guess she was here before photographing the man's in our camp she made it sound like like he would have a tough time she basically said good luck I guess she encountered a lot of difficulties with the government yeah Dorothea Lange she worked for the War Relocation Authority which was the aguh vermin agency that yeah oversaw all the camps she photographed all over the San Francisco Bay Area immediately right after everybody's leaving their homes and in bringing their two bags of luggage and getting rid of everything then she came down here but she had a hard time with the army they didn't like she was documenting all this work even though she was hired by the government to document all this her photographs show left a lot of emotion and show love hardship on one level it almost seems surprising that the government brought in photographers to document what was happening here Dorothea Lange's photos must not have been what they expected summer images had impounded written on the front of them ok so I think they weren't released but they were not destroyed today they're publicly accessible yes even if they were censored during the war you know the federal government though it is one big thing it often has conflicts within it and the conflict with Dorothea Lange's photographs was that the army was one entity right and they were the ones forcing people out of our homes forcing them into these incarceration camps and then the worry location Authority was another entity that was created by an executive order to run the camps and then to eventually get people out of the camps and those conflicted all the time those two entities one of the things that she talks about is how difficult it was for her to be here at Manzanar taking pictures because she felt like she was watching the Constitution a road before her eyes so laying and Adams they had to may be related but different purposes for photographing here how did that how did those different purposes come through in their work I mean when I looked at the collection of Adams photos I mean he's got a lot more portraits a little more smiley people the same way he works with landscape it's got that same feeling through his photographs well I think for me the body of work that Blanc created there's it's so intimate and so emotional it's powerful it's two different periods of time too because Ansel Adams is working like a year later when things have kind of settled down I mean there's still hardships like near the riots and some of the camps there was a protest against somebody being jailed and it erupted into violence for the military police opened fire on a crowd and killed two young men and injured nine others and it led to profound changes in not just manzanar but the other incarceration camps as well where the government pushed forward the segregation program to segregate all of the japanese-americans that they deemed to be disloyal and I guess what I would say is that photographers like Dorothea Lange show the hardship of what's going on I mean it's what there is people look like they're dealing with some really hard stuff so it's just two different perspectives did she photograph the baseball field here I don't know if it was this exact field but she definitely photographed people playing baseball and softball her baseball photos are a lot raw um there's less structure like it not atoms that are you just showed us it looks like a real baseball field right right in the Lange photos it's a little more just a dirt you know it's interesting that there was a baseball field there were basketball courts you know people were incarcerated here for months and years but during that time they had to make a home here and I imagine try to find some measure of happiness in their day-to-day lives and I guess this is a place one of the places where that that might have happened sure we've learned that there were sometimes games I had one or two thousand people here watching the baseball games it was definitely a place of competition and joy and also just a way to spend time when he can't go anywhere else yeah I think it probably brought the families together nice days in the East days right because the nice days would be playing and then these days could watch though even though this whole process disrupted the family structure this is some place where everybody kind of come together [Music] would you play ball at a place like Manzanar I'll admit it I felt some hesitation after all this place brought so much pain to so many but resilience is part of man's in our story too and that's why the National Park Service encourages visitors to play on the surviving courts in ball fields maybe that can help us understand this place of sorrow and what baseball meant to the people in prison here even more Pollan i thinkt rose and drove on one of Manzanares most somber and most photographed sites beckoned [Music] yeah I mean it's it's not often you come across a place that's so beautiful but also so somber at the same time and and desolate yeah there was a reason this camp was here right really surrounded by three mountain ranges use this Ansel Adams photo of this monument that's that oh yeah there's this at least 60 years old in it this looks like yeah almost the same amount of snow in the mountains yeah that's right yeah look at the back here it says cleared and okay so this is one one of the photos that merit this would have allowed to be published but Ansel Adams wasn't the only photographer to come to this Cemetery Dorothea Lange she was here and took a photograph of the first grave that man yeah is that do you know where that is it's offering this corner over here should we go take a look yeah let's go over there any read then yeah May 15 1942 the photo is striking because the government hired her to document what was happening here and she turned around engaged on a photo of a gravesite so how are you gonna do this how can I help you just break up with ya and try to get some of them down see ya show sense of place I think okay I wish the Sun was just a little bit lower right now so you have a personal connection to Dorothea Lange your family my family in Oakland California when they were leaving for San Fran assembly center which is really incredible for me was I was 16 years old 1970 and I was taking a history class u.s. history class and I learned that japanese-americans were rounded up and put in incarceration camps that's the first time I've ever heard that I was like totally shocked how could my parents US citizens be locked away in camps so I went home and talked to my parents and they really didn't want to talk about it so in 1978 I served working as a photographer my uncle was an artist in San Francisco no book aragaki he told me that Dorothea Lange had photographed her family and I'm like wow I went to the National Archives and I searched for the photographs of my family so I looked through these shoeboxes of archival photographs and I found the picture of my grandparents and my dad and my aunt my dad looks really sad and then I was like why is my grandmother looking up at this Caucasian lady smiling and later on in life I found out that that was her family friend who would come off to see them goodbye and then there's this other photograph of my aunt here if you're standing by the luggage in Oakland and then there's another photograph of her right here wow these are all by Dorothea Lange yeah and she's wearing her tag you know everybody had to wear a tag with a number right yeah so she's wearing her tag there you found this in the National Archives yeah and I was like just totally blown away her there they were like recorded in history during this really trashed part of their lives [Music] so you describe your work as revisiting photos rather than recreating them what do you what do you mean by that a lot of times I've tried to photograph the person in the same place but a lot of times it's it's so impossible due to they asian where they live so well at times when I meet them at their home I have a conversation with them before and I try to see what happened with her family I try to have some kind of their feeling either they both feel the same so that's why I use the large format camera four by five camera am I using that digital camera so what feeling are you trying to recapture here with Dorothea Lange fire that we've seen was versus a little bit tighter but with mine and trying to put some of the Sierra Nevadas at the background and give it a little more sense of place yeah [Music] sixty two-year-old Matson nosegay Murakami was already suffering from heart disease when he arrived here in March 1942 less than two months later he became the first of 150 people to die while imprisoned at Manzanar sadly mera kaam II died here alone without family his grave is one of only six remaining as a tribute to the 150 men women and children who died while imprisoned at Manzanar visitors often leave items on the concrete monument quarters $5 bills even sake bonds those stories about families coming together around manzanares ballfields really moved me so I left my own memento to honor their memory Adams and Lane weren't the only ones with cameras at Manzanar there's another powerful photograph of this somber place that focuses on the shared pain of the community it makes sense that the photographer foregrounded emotion he was an inmate himself before the incarceration toyomi Autopia ran a successful photography studio in Little Tokyo and when he came to Manzanar he boldly smuggled in a lens so he could capture life in the camp one of his most iconic photos is this one a three boys standing at Manzanar spirometer I needed to learn more about this brave man who broke the rules and risked everything to document life within the barbed wire today his grandson Allen keeps the family business alive in San Gabriel at the toyomi otaku Studio so Allen toyomi otaku sounds like an incredible man he smuggled in the materials to build a camera it's my go to the film into in to Manzanar right so he smuggled in a lens yeah and the back of the camera the film holder yeah and that's all he went in with once he got to camp then he started coordinating with the carpenter and a welder in order to construct this homemade camera the story goes that all the Japanese American Japanese had to evacuate right so they were given so many days in order to prepare and basically you could only bring in what you could carry so is most people thought of just two suitcases so he heared the lens and a camera back in you know within his luggage and you have the camera here yes they do this is it this is it right here this is a nice little work of art that he put together so basically he had a carpenter construct the body of the camera the box yeah and then he had somebody weld the camera lens onto a drainpipe and this is a drain pipe that he found at the camp at the prison right that acts as the focusing device to focus on to the the back of the camera the drawn glass so you would view the image here focus and then take your picture you you would actually pull this off and then slide in the film okay and that's really the basics of a camera you can tell it was designed to be inconspicuous right this doesn't look like a camera right I mean it could be anything right but it could just just be a wooden box well I heard my dad call it a lunch box I always can't get over you know how intricate that the carpenter was with all the wood lamination so it took a lot of resourcefulness and maybe a little bit of luck to to really get all of the equipment he needed it inside oh yeah he didn't really bring anything in until he was like legally the official photographer initially when he was allowed to shoot the photographs there were rules so he'd set up a shot focus everything but when it came down to actually snapping the shutter he had a Caucasian staff shoot it so he couldn't actually take the photo correct right and I compose it it would be his his work right but the mechanics he wasn't allowed to do that that's correct I I think that was Ralph's merits way of yeah kind of covering himself I see he's really student Oh interesting oh but the beginning months of the incarceration photography was just not allowed yeah yeah and this camera was used primarily at dusk or dawn so he he couldn't be seen as easily what he was so important for your grandfather to be able to photograph and and really you know stick his neck out to be able to do that well the story goes that one day he took my dad aside his son and said hey I have to show you something so he wanted to a suitcase and he pulled out a lens my father immediately thought oh my gosh you're gonna get arrested and he says no I I need to do this I'm gonna build a camera and I'm gonna photograph camp life so something like this never happens again yeah this is my duty as a photographer yeah and that's that was his motivation there well it's documenting cap life probably from the inside looking out versus Ansel Adams had a view of more from the outside looking in I've seen many of you your grandfather's photos and what really strikes me is that he's able to capture the way the people who were imprisoned were able to maintain dignity and agency despite like this profound violation of their rights that was their model the Japanese word is she got the gun I and it's kind of like suck it up you make the best of it you know come on there's another one you know hold it in but just you know stay positive and survive and you know I would always take my my parents to Manzanar to revisit the they reminisce the stuff and it wasn't until about five years ago I was taking a picture of my mother and father and and my mom pauses and said well if it wasn't for manzanar you might not be here and is it what that was the first time they met Wow so this camera have you actually used this to take pictures yes it partially still work yeah I'd say about the three years ago I found oh the famous the three boys wire this is a really famous photo and I've been I was able to replicate it pretty pretty close Wow there they are what is that 50 60 years later all right that's powerful yeah yeah would you like to take a picture I could pose I could try using this so you're a third generation photographer yes yes their generation photographer this is my studio area on here why is it so important to you to keep the family business alive I mean it's how I make a living yeah but also I still document a lot of the japanese-american community events like me say we cuz yeah been doing it since the inception yeah it's fun I mean it's you know part of you know my social life too so sure let's plan you know I'd like to take your picture yeah yeah I'd love to stay on this work this is amazing attempt this you know it's not working perfectly but okay work I always have a shout estate yeah yeah so after your grandfather was able to start photographing legally uh-huh other people were allowed to bring cameras in to Manzanar to my understanding of that is that they were everybody had access to like Sears catalog yeah so they were able to purchase cameras film so so there's quite a collection of people's work you know that have been donated to Manzanar sure we're gonna see what happens here we'll drop in the film and everything's Mannie here baby expose the film and look right over here one two three amazing it really is an honor to sit in front of this camera and and hear your family story thank you very much I appreciate Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange helped shape America's collective memory of Manzanar through their fame they raised awareness of the historic breach of civil rights but the image is captured by the people actually imprisoned there though not as well known are just as powerful by documenting how incarcerate Ain a sense of dignity and domesticity even in the worst of times their inspiring reminders of resilience in the face of injustice [Music] Lost la is made possible in part by a grant from an r/a Foundation a Margaret a Cargill philanthropy the Ralph M Parsons Foundation and the California State Library

Channel: PBS SoCal

Views: 40,341

Keywords: kcet, southern california, history, Nathan Masters, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Tōyō Miyatake, incarceration, internment

Id: araQR50tVjI

Length: 26min 40sec (1600 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019