From the Archive: Japanese Internment at Manzanar, California (photo gallery)

In 1943, Ansel Adams, America’s best-known photographer, documented the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California and the nearly 10,000 Japanese Americans interned there during World War II. These digital scans of Adams’ original negatives are part of the Library of Congress collection Suffering under a Great Injustice: Ansel Adams’s Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar. Adams was invited to photograph daily life at the camp by Manzanar camp Director Ralph Merritt and from 1943 to 1944, he made a number of trips to the camp, located in California’s Inyo County to the east of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. His work has been widely criticized for sanitizing the suffering of interned Japanese-Americans, although he was censored in what he was able to photograph. For example, he was banned from photographing the guard towers at the camp and instead photographed from them, giving away their existence. A selection of these photographed were exhibited in 1944 under the title, Born Free and Equal and was not well received by wartime America. In 1968, Adams donated his Manzanar photographs to the Library of Congress. View photos here