History professor Jim Curtis ’59 recently published a book of propaganda photographs taken in the Japanese internment camps during World War II. Could it happen again?
Japanese-American internment
Japanese-American internment
The steely face in the photograph bears no name. The man appears to be in his 20s. His stare is unflinching. His right eyebrow arches imperceptibly, seemingly posing both a challenge and a query. “It’s a haunting photograph,” says James Curtis ’59, professor emeritus of history at the University of Delaware. “The subject seems to be questioning the photographer and the viewer.”
Taken in 1943 by Ansel Adams at California’s Manzanar War Relocation Center, the photo is included in Curtis’s recently published Discriminating Views: Documentary Photography and Japanese American Internment. The book examines an ugly period in American history, from 1942 to 1945, when as many as 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry—62 percent of them American citizens—were forcibly relocated to 10 internment camps.
Published in 2015, the book feels especially relevant today. One of Donald Trump’s first acts as president was to attempt to limit Muslim immigration to the United States, stirring fears that just as Japanese Americans were targeted during World War II, so too could Muslim Americans’ loyalty be questioned in a new century. “The assumption that all Islamic people are susceptible to radical views is the same as the idea that Japanese Americans were all potentially susceptible to the kinds of things going on in Japan in the 1940s,” Curtis says. “It’s so reminiscent of what was going on [in the United States] after Pearl Harbor.”
Discriminating Views challenges long-held beliefs that the 16,000 images captured by federal War Relocation Authority (WRA) photographers reflected an honest and accurate picture of daily camp life. Rather, says Curtis, the images are carefully curated propaganda. While the government touted the camps as “new frontier communities” that were committed to “treating prisoners humanely,” the reality was often different. In addition to Adams, such notable photographers as Dorothea Lange, Francis Stewart, and Hikaru Iwasaki (an internee who won the trust of camp administrators at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming) documented camp life through their lenses. “The photographers were instructed not to take pictures of barbed wire or guards or military structures at the camps,” Curtis says. “They offer a sanitized view of life in the camps. If you compare the images in the book with paintings done by internees, you get a very different story.”
Most of the photographs were not shared with the public. Instead, they were crafted to serve as documents of record—as skewed as that record may be. “The U.S. government wanted to document the internment process to show how the WRA was treating the Japanese, in case there were questions later,” says Curtis. “They needed to justify the government’s claim that these ‘very dangerous people’ were under control.”
The photographs contrast starkly with the reality of life in the camps. For example, Manzanar, which looks peaceful in the photographs, was the site of a 1942 riot in which two detainees were killed after internees challenged camp staffers who were stealing sugar and meat to sell on the black market. Curtis’s goal in writing this book is to shed light on the discrepancies between the photographic history and the lived history of Japanese internees. A history major at Carleton, Curtis wanted to “ask the same questions about a photograph that historians would ask about a document.”
The project’s origins date back nearly five decades. In 1971, while Curtis was teaching a course on history and the media, his students at the University of Delaware went to the National Archives to research individual projects. While they were there, they discovered the internment camp photographs sitting in boxes in the administration’s audiovisual section. In 1972 Curtis obtained a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that allowed his students to create a slide show of the internment camp pictures they’d discovered. The slide show, titled Behind Barbed Wire, was shown on campus and at the National Archives and then, later, in San Francisco and Los Angeles at the invitation of the Japanese American Citizens League. Actor George Takei, who played Sulu on the original Star Trek television series and whose family was relocated to Arkansas during the war, was in the audience one night in L.A. “He invited us back to his parents’ house for dinner afterward,” says Curtis, “which was a huge evening for the Star Trek fans among us.”
In the ensuing decades, many of the WRA photographs have been digitized and put online. Curtis began to build a personal database of images and captions that eventually numbered 2,200 pictures—and began work on the book that would become Discriminating Views in 2000. “I simply wanted to get the story out,” he says.
Despite the duplicity conveyed in the photos, Curtis says, “they certainly don’t lose their power as art objects.”
