Open to the public since 1996, the Skirball Cultural Center has established itself as one of the world's most dynamic Jewish cultural institutions and among the leading cultural venues in Los Angeles. Its mission is to explore the connections between 4,000 years of Jewish heritage and the vitality of American democratic ideals. It seeks to welcome and inspire people of every ethnic and cultural identity in American life. Guided by our respective memories and experiences, together we aim to build a society in which all of us can feel at home.
Recently, NPR had a great story on Manzanar and an Art Exhibit showcasing the efforts to document the experience.
<iframe src="http://www.npr.org/player/embed/466453528/467115580" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"></iframe>
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the U.S. War Relocation Authority made a decision it would soon regret. It hired famed photographer Dorothea Lange to take pictures as 110,000 Japanese and Japanese-Americans were removed from their homes on the West Coast and interned at remote military-style camps throughout the interior.
The agency had hoped Lange's photos would depict the process as orderly and humane.
i
A newsstand in Oakland, Calif., in February, 1942. Dorothea Lange/Courtesy Library of Congress
But the hundreds of photos that Lange turned over did the opposite. She considered internment a grave injustice, and her photos depict it that way. She captured the confused and chaotic scenes of Japanese-Americans crowding onto buses and trains, the stressed and confused looks on their faces, their shuttered businesses, the threadbare barracks that would become their homes for months or years.
Instead of allowing Lange to publish her photos, the government seized them.
Now, some of them are on display at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, through Feb. 21. They are part of an exhibit that tells the story of Japanese internment through the pictures of three photographers: Lange; the equally renowned landscape photographer Ansel Adams, whose photos from California's Manzanar internment camp anchor the exhibit; and Toyo Miyatake, a Japanese-American photographer who was interned at Manzanar but smuggled in a camera.
The stories that photos tell depend so much on who's snapping the shutter, and Manzanar: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams illustrates that in dramatic fashion. Each photographer offers a vastly different perspective on what Japanese internment was like, their photos reflecting differences not only in style, but in the relationship each photographer had to this shameful chapter of U.S. history.