Adams photographs of Manzanar War Relocation Center

Photographs document the lives of Japanese Americans interned during World War II at the Manzanar Relocation Center, in Inyo County, California. There are numerous close-up and occupational portraits of individuals, including Roy Takeno, editor of the Manzanar Free Press, and photographer Tōyō Miyatake. Group portraits include families, women and children. Other photographs show people posed in their living quarters and engaged in indoor daily life such as shopping, religious services, health care, and education; more informal views portray outdoor agricultural scenes and sports and leisure activities. Landscape views feature the background mountains and desert as well as camp facilities and buildings.Collection title devised by Library staff.There are 244 distinct images. Most are represented by a pair of negatives and prints; 2 are represented only by prints; and 36 are represented only by negatives.Restricted access. Please use digital and print surrogates to preserve the fragile original prints and negatives.Well-known fine art and landscape photographer, Ansel Adams, took on several war-related assignments. When offering the Manzanar photos to the Library in 1965, Adams wrote in an accompanying letter, "The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice ... had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment."Some photographs published in Born free and equal : photographs of the loyal Japanese-Americans at Manzanar Relocation Center, Inyo County, California / by Ansel Adams. New York : U.S. Camera, 1944.Gift; Ansel Adams; 1965-1968.A set of catalog records describing each item is available through the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. See http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gdc/lcoa1.abou