Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment

by Linda Gordon, Gary Y. Okihiro

Overview

"Unflinchingly illustrates the reality of life during this extraordinary moment in American history."—Dinitia Smith, The New York Times

Censored by the U.S. Army, Dorothea Lange's unseen photographs are the extraordinary photographic record of the Japanese American internment saga. This indelible work of visual and social history confirms Dorothea Lange's stature as one of the twentieth century's greatest American photographers. Presenting 119 images originally censored by the U.S. Army—the majority of which have never been published—Impounded evokes the horror of a community uprooted in the early 1940s and the stark reality of the internment camps. With poignancy and sage insight, nationally known historians Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro illuminate the saga of Japanese American internment: from life before Executive Order 9066 to the abrupt roundups and the marginal existence in the bleak, sandswept camps. In the tradition of Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World, Impounded, with the immediacy of its photographs, tells the story of the thousands of lives unalterably shattered by racial hatred brought on by the passions of war. A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2006.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393330908
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	02/17/2008
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	284,958
Product dimensions:	7.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Winner of two Bancroft Prizes for best book in American history, Linda Gordon is the author of The Second Coming of the KKK and a biography of photographer Dorothea Lange. She lives in New York and Madison, Wisconsin.

Gary Y. Okihiro is the author of Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II and Common Ground: Reimagining American History. He is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

In these days of fear of the terrorist 'other', reading this measured, intelligent introduction to a time that is all-too possible to imagine recurring, and looking at Lange's photos... may be one of the most useful things one can do this Christmas.

The Sunday Times [London]

[The] images show Americans of Japanese extraction being relocated to 'assembly centers', labeled and processed like cattle and closeted away in dismal shacks for the duration of the war... No wonder her pictures were never used and disappeared for half a century.

The Independent [UK]

Through her discerning and sensitive eye, Lange's observations of the situation were too real and too critical for the government, and were consequently confiscated.

Amateur Photographer

When America's War Relocation Authority hired Dorothea Lange to photograph the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942, they put a few restrictions on her work. Barbed wire, watchtowers and armed soldiers were off limits, they declared. And no pictures of resistance, either. They wanted the roundup and sequestering of Japanese-Americans documented-but not too well. Working within these limits, Lange, who is best known for her photographs of migrant farmers during the Depression, nonetheless produced images whose content so opposed the federal objective of demonizing Japanese-Americans that the vast majority of the photographs were suppressed throughout WWII (97% of them have never been published at all). Editors Gordon and Okihiro set this first collection of Lange's internment work within technical, cultural and historical contexts. Gordon (The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction) discusses Lange's professional methods and the formation of her "democratic-populist" beliefs. Okihiro (Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II) traces the history of prejudice against Japanese Americans, with emphasis on internees' firsthand accounts. But the bulk of the book is given over to Lange's photographs. Several of these are as powerful as her most stirring work, and the final image-of a grandfather in the desolate Manzanar Center looking down in anguish at the grandson between his knees-is worth the price of the book alone. 104 photos, 2 maps. (Nov.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly