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Comment by brudgers | Hacker News Reader

Dorethea Lange was working for the FSA and made work as Americans were rounded up for the crime of Japanese heritage.

https://anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothea-lange-censored-phot...

Her work was censored as part of the changed propaganda agenda from the we-are-all-citizens of Migrant Mother to ends-justify racism.

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If one can, I urge visiting one of these camps. You'll see many such photos on display. But for me it took feeling the brutal heat of the surrounding desert in Manzanar. There is no shade, no AC. In the summer, it gets up to 110º. In the winter, it barely breaks 40º. In every photo you'll see a cloud of fine dust on the ground. It hurts.

And the US jailed more than 120,000 Japanese Americans there.

For those who cannot visit, it's worth seeing how inhospitable the location is: https://goo.gl/maps/wz7NTbhMMYTid4b26

Less well known, there was also internment of Alaska Natives in inhumane conditions. One camp had a mortality rate above 10 percent.

https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/haunted-by-world-war-ii-...

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/us-forcibly-detain...

In a related note, people are always surprised that Ansel Adams also photographed Japanese internment: https://www.loc.gov/collections/ansel-adams-manzanar/about-t...

Photographs by them and others are displayed at the Manzanar National Historic Site. Both the web site and the physical site are worth visiting.

What all of the photographers had in common was a desire to show some kind of truth, and an inability to avoid restrictions from the authorities in the pursuit of that truth. What we are left with is a valuable resource to help us understand the camp experience. Although these artists were censored and manipulated, they provide for us today a concrete record of a time when American citizens were held behind barbed wire without due process of law. For that we are grateful.

https://www.nps.gov/manz/learn/photosmultimedia/photogallery...

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