Exhibition details
This exhibition features 50 prints from Ansel Adams’s 1943 Manzanar portfolio, documenting Japanese-Americans interned during WWII with portraits, daily life scenes, and the camp’s surroundings.
January 31 – April 13 2024
Location
Main Gallery
Reception
Lecture
Image: Ansel Adams, Entrance to Manzanar, 1944-45, Gelatin Silver Print, Collection of Ron Perisho
Works on display
In 1943, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), one of America's most well-known photographers, documented the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California and the Japanese-Americans interned there during World War II. The exhibition features 50 prints from Adams's Manzanar portfolio, which includes portraits, scenes of families working, sports and leisure activities, and details of the architecture and everyday life of the internees. The Manzanar War Relocation Center was located in Inyo County, California, at the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains approximately 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles. Although Adams included images of the rugged scenery surrounding the camp in the portfolio, this series was a departure, both politically and aesthetically, from Adams’s better-known landscape photography.
When Adams offered his original prints and photographic negatives from this series to the Library of Congress, he explained, "The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and despair by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment .... All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use."