HISTORY LESSONS | THE MANZANAR PHOTOGRAPHS: ANSEL ADAMS & THE B.C. SECURITY COMMISSION PHOTOGRAPHS: LEONARD FRANK | ANSEL ADAMS, LEONARD FRANK
12.05.2005 | 12.06.2005

ANSEL ADAMS: THE MANZANAR PHOTOGRAPHS

Ansel Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902 and by the time of the Second World War was already a well-known photographer, especially of landscapes and ‘nature’. At the age of 13 he was removed from the public school system to be taught at home by his father and aunt. He was a self-taught pianist who planned, in his youth, to become a professional musician. With the free time resulting from his home-schooling the young Adams took walks in the area that is now Golden Gate Park, then still a wilderness, a habit to which some have attributed his ‘love of nature’. In 1916 Adams was given a Brownie camera while on a visit to Yosemite National Park, a place he then visited every year for the rest of his life. Over the years Adams became closely associated with the American West through his photographs, and the West, as an iconic natural place, became known to millions of people who may have otherwise cared little for the beauty of nature, as a result of seeing his pictures.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the American government reacted by signing into law Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. This law designated the West Coast as a military zone from which "any or all persons may be excluded", but in effect, it was to have an impact exclusively on the Japanese American community with the result that the entire Japanese American population on the West Coast was uprooted. In this round-up of people who had been hard-working, patriotic citizens only a few months earlier, 115,000 people were deprived of their rights and their possessions, including real estate and businesses. A major difference, however, between the Japanese American and Japanese Canadian treatment by their respective governments after the War was that Japanese Americans were allowed to return to their homes and they recovered their property. In Canada everything seized was sold, supposedly to pay for the cost of the internment. The internment camps for the Japanese Americans were scattered around the US west, in Arizona, California, Idaho, New Mexico and Colorado. Conditions in the camps varied widely, with Tule Lake, California considered to be the worst, and Manzanar, the subject of this exhibition, perhaps one of the best.

Adams had a personal link to the internment. His anger over the fact that his parent’s Japanese gardener was sent to one of the camps was one catalyst that led him to undertake the Manzanar project. His anger, somewhat moderated, still showed in 1965 when he offered the collection to the Library of Congress.

He wrote:

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.

Although the current suspension of civil liberties in many countries could not have been foreseen, Adams seems to have known that Manzanar could be a cautionary tale of past wrongs for future generations.

LEONARD FRANK, `A PHOTOGRAPHER OF RECORD’: THE B.C. SECURITY COMMISSION PHOTOGRAPHS

In early 1942, photographer Leonard Frank was contracted by the B.C. Security Commission (established March 4, 1942) to document the internment sites created to receive the Japanese Canadians on the west coast, including Hastings Park.  A portfolio of these photographs has been donated to the archives of the Japanese Canadian National Museum by the descendents of one of the employees of the Commission.  Frank’s biographer, Cyril E. Leonoff, makes no mention of this contract, but entries in Frank’s account books for 1942 (in the archives of the Jewish Historical Society of B.C.) reveal that he was employed by the B.C. Security Commission as their photographer. It appears likely that Frank himself did not retain ownership of the negatives.

We have to wonder about Leonard Frank’s thoughts when taking the photographs of the Japanese Canadian internment sites.  Born in 1870 as Leonhard Juda Frank, Leonard Frank was a generation older than Ansel Adams. Frank had apprenticed with his father, who ran a photo studio in Germany. He spent some twenty-five years in Alberni, on Vancouver Island, where he received recognition as a photographer, and as a civic leader.  However, during the First World War, as a German-born, naturalized Canadian, he experienced exclusion and discrimination there, which led him to relocate to Vancouver in 1917.  Somewhat ironically, in 1942, when he was engaged in making these photographs for the B.C. Security Commission, he was also attempting to respond to pleas for help from his relatives, who were being deported and subsequently perished in extermination camps in Germany.  In his own life he had been exposed twice over to the same kind of discrimination that he was now being paid to document. Leonard Frank died in 1944, a year before the War ended.

While Ansel Adams’ photographs speak personally, and intimately, about the residents of the Manzanar camp, Leonard Frank’s photographs are, for all their interest, remarkable for their clinical approach and lack of interaction between the photographer and subject. He was, of course, an employee of the organization that had uprooted the people.

The meaning of these images has changed with the passage of time.  The original intention may have been to document how well the Japanese Canadians were being treated, conforming to the government’s use of the euphemism “evacuation” to describe the internment of the Japanese Canadians.  However, with the passage of time, and the educational process that led to the announcement of redress for Japanese Canadians on September 11, 1988, we can now look upon Frank’s images with what Susan Sontag refers to as “an appropriate context of feeling and attitude.”  The events documented in these photographs must be remembered for precisely what they picture: a suspension of civil rights, based on a politics of racism, committed by the Government of Canada against its own citizens.

At the end of the War in 1945, Japanese Americans were allowed to return to their homes, which were largely kept intact. Japanese Canadians, on the other hand, were restricted in their movements until 1949, while in the meantime some 4,000 individuals and families were deported to Japan and others dispersed across Canada.  When they were finally free to go home, there were no homes to return to.  Their possessions and properties were confiscated and sold by their Government in their absence, and the proceeds used to pay for their incarceration.

Ansel Adams’ Manzanar photographs, taken in 1943 and published in 1944, just before the end of the war, brought Adams hostility from many Americans incensed that he could be so sympathetic to ‘the enemy.’ Leonard Frank's B.C. Security Commission portfolio of photographs may now be considered and viewed as key government documents, and as revealing of a most shameful period in Canadian history.