Provided by Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona: Ansel Adams Archive
“Monument in Cemetary, Manzanar Relocation Center, California, c.1943”

‘Ansel Adams at Manzanar’ features more than 50 of the original work of one of America’s most famous photographers, who, during World War II, documented life in an American concentration camp. This exhibition opens at the Japanese American National Museum on Saturday, Nov. 11, and will run through Feb. 18, 2007.

When Adams learned that over 10,000 Japanese Americans were forced to live in a government-run concentration camp located in Inyo County, Calif., not far from Death Valley, he decided to document “the tragic momentum of the times” in 1943 and 1944. Because of Manzanar’s location adjacent to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, where Adams had spent years photographing, it was a logical site for him to document this experience.

In the end, Adams observed that most of the Japanese American inmates “have responded, in one way or another, to the resonances of their environment” surrounded by the endless desert and snow-capped mountains.

Adams gained permission to photograph inside Manzanar from the camp director, Ralph Merritt, whom he knew from the Sierra Club. However, Merritt restricted what Adams could shoot, prohibiting photographs of the barbed wire fence and the guard towers. Because of a mutual friendship with photographer Edward Weston, Adams also made a point of meeting and eventually becoming friends with Japanese American photographer Toyo Miyatake, who was imprisoned at Manzanar with his family. As an inmate, Miyatake was not supposed to have a camera, but he smuggled in a lens and film holder and had a camera body constructed, so he could document their camp experience secretly. Eventually, Merritt named Miyatake the official photographer of Manzanar, and in the 1960s.

Miyatake’s work was exhibited next to Adams’ photography in the exhibition Two Views of Manzanar at UCLA.

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