Documenting the Incarceration

The government hired professional photographers to document the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans, but gave them strict orders: they were not to show barbed wire, armed military personnel, the camps’ squalid conditions, or anything that could negatively affect the public’s view of the camps. Dorothea Lange, pictured here in 1936, was one of the photographers hired to document the plight of Japanese American residents. Just before the trains pulled out of one town, Woodland, Lange suffered a nervous breakdown. “I went down to the lobby to type a letter,” wrote her assistant, Christina Gardner. “When I came back she was just in a paroxysm of worry about what was going to happen to these people. What was going to happen? Our government was doing this. She saw the greater fabric in a way very few people did at the time.”