EXECUTIVE ORDER 9066 .....Three months after Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt, against the advice of many of his advisors and for reasons of rank political opportunism, signed EXECUTIVE ORDER 9066 and the forced relocation of 1000s of Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans into Internment camps in the West began. Soon after, the War Relocation Authority hired Dorothea Lange to photograph the process. Langes earlier work documenting displaced farm families and migrant workers during the Great Depression did not prepare her for the disturbing racial and civil rights issues raised by the Japanese Internment and she quickly found herself at odds with her employer, the federal government. To capture the spirit of the camps, Lange created images that frequently juxtapose signs of human courage and dignity with physical evidence of the indignities of incarceration. Not surprisingly, many of Langes Internment photographs were censored by the federal government and lots of them disappeared’ from public view for decades. For more on Internment: zinnedproject.org/materials/a-lesson-on-the-japanese-american-internment/ The true impact of Langes work was not felt until 1972, when the Whitney Museum incorporated twenty-seven of her photographs into Executive Order 9066, an exhibit about the Japanese internment. NY Times critic A.D. Coleman called Langes photographs documents of such a high order that they convey the feelings of the victims as well as the facts of the crime.
Posted on: Sun, 26 Jan 2014 01:35:57 +0000
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