Ansel Adams

In 1943 Adams visited a prisoner of war camp, it was made up of all of the Japanese-American families who has been wrongfully moved there because of their involvement in the second world war. Adams was told that he could not photograph the place or the people if it showed that they were in a prisoner of war camp, he could only photograph them as if they were out in the world living their lives as normal. However, Adams was clever in the way that he used natural occurrences such as shadows to capture the reality of the situation such as an image of a guard/solider or barbed wire without the government spotting those things in his photographs.

A bit of background/context to explain why it was Japanese-American families:

"After Japan bombed Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941, fear of a Japanese invasion and subversive acts by Japanese-Americans prompted President D. Roosevelt to sign Exective order 9066 on February 19, 1942. The act designated the West Coast as a military zone from which "any or all persons may be excluded." Although not specified in the order, Japanese-Americans were singled out for evacuation. More than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry were removed from their homes and lost out on their businesses in California, Southern Arizona, Western Washington and Oregon and they were then sent to 10 relocation camps."

The reason I have chosen to look at his Manzanar project is because it falls back to the idea of truth within Photography; he got permission to go and photograph the people and the place of Manzanar but with the agreement that he couldn't show them as prisoners of war, he then asked himself the question of "how much of the truth can I actually tell without getting caught?" He took a risk when it came to this particular series but by exploring the ways around what the government had asked him not to include, he managed to obey them whilst not 100% obeying them and the photographs really do emphasise that point. This all links back to the context in which my project is based on by challenging the idea of truth within Photography.

Information can be found at: https://www.loc.gov/collections/ansel-adams-manzanar/about-this-collection/

Images can be found at: ansel adams manzanar