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Clem Albers (Photographer), Evidence of the Forthcoming Evacuation of Residents of Japanese Ancestry, San Francisco, March 29, 1942
Courtesy The Bancroft Library
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From May
1942 to January 1945, in the name of national security, nearly 120,000 West
Coast residents of Japanese ancestry occupied ten permanent camps in isolated
inland areas for the duration of World War II. Their forced evacuations and
relocations following the bombing of Pearl Harbor were not secret: there was
much controversy over the government’s action, and a number of photographers
officially documented the event.
Nevertheless,
it was not until the 1970s that individuals and institutions—within and outside
Japanese American communities, where they were a source of shame—began to open
a wider window into this egregious chapter of American history.
On this day seventy-five
years ago, as the San Francisco Chronicle
recorded, “for the first time in 81 years, not a single Japanese is walking the
streets of San Francisco.” Today, we remember the incarceration of Japanese
Americans through the work of one press photographer whose “professional eye,” scholar Arielle Emmett notes, “captured contradicting realities between the government
and public perceptions of the Japanese and the people themselves.”
Clem Albers (1903–1990)
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| Courtesy http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist/lange.html |
Under
contract by the War Relocation Authority’s Information Division, San Francisco Chronicle press
photographer Clem Albers photographed the incarceration of Japanese Americans,
primarily in northern to
southern California. From March to late April/early May 1942, with his 4-by-5-inch Speed Graphic press camera, he documented
relocations to and arrivals at Manzanar, Tule Lake, and Poston camps. After his
brief assignment, he was a warrant officer at the U.S. Maritime Service,
returning to his job with the San
Francisco Chronicle after the war.
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Clem Albers, Impounded Japanese American automobiles,
Manzanar Relocation Center, April 1942
Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration
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Clem Albers, A truck packed with Japanese American residents of San Pedro, California, leaves for a temporary detention center, April 5, 1942
Courtesy extranewsfeed.com
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Clem Albers, While military police stand guard, this detachment watches arrival of evacuees at Manzanar War Relocation Authority center, April 2, 1942
Courtesy The Bancroft Library
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Clem Albers, “Manzanar, Calif.—In the doorway of her barrack apartment at this War Relocation Authority center for evacuees of Japanese ancestry,” 1942
Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration
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As we now know, the U.S. government impounded not only cars of Japanese families, but also
photographs taken of the incarcerations, such as the military’s oversight of camps and residents. As the New York Times has observed, “Photographs of barbed wire, machine gun-wielding guards or dissent within the camps were forbidden . . . photographs of resiliency and civic engagement in the camps were encouraged.” And as Karen J. Leong notes, “particularly those depicting the reality of armed guards supervising the evacuees” were censored.
Such images by Albers and other internment photographers, notably
Dorothea Lange, were reviewed by military commanders and branded “Impounded.” Housed
at the National Archives, where they were rediscovered only in the last decade,
they have lost their restricted status.
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Clem Albers, Military police officers checking their weapons at
Manzanar Relocation Center, c. 1942
Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration
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Clem Albers, Dressed in uniform marking service in the First World War,
this veteran enters Santa Anita assembly center for persons of Japanese ancestry evacuated from the West Coast, 1942
Courtesy National Archives and Records Administration
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Today, internment photography continues to have wide-ranging
impact: from connections made between the internment and the current
administration’s call for Muslim bans and registries, to studies about prison
photography, to representations by contemporary artists of minority populations
and their roles in the histories of communities, cities, and nations.
One example is Albers’ haunting and perhaps most iconic image depicting the mass
relocations of Japanese Americans in Southern California. His 1942 photograph
of two-year-old Yukiko Okinaga Hayakawa awaiting
evacuation at Union Station in Los Angeles
found relevance nearly forty years later in L.A.
History: A Mexican Perspective (1981), a mural by Chicana artist Barbara
Carrasco.
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Clem Albers, A young evacuee of Japanese ancestry waits with the family baggage before
leaving by bus for an assembly center, April 1942
Courtesy National Archives
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Ironically, Carrasco’s mural, featuring scenes of the
marginalization of Los Angeles’s minorities among more celebratory historic
events, itself was censored. Objections to less laudable depictions of the
city’s history were, perhaps, unwelcomed during Los Angeles’s bicentennial
(1981) and Summer Olympic (1984) festivities.
California Historical Society/LA
Plaza de Cultura y Artes; photograph by Sean Meredith
Even how we speak about the internment era is undergoing change.
Organizations such as Densho suggests internment terminology conforming to the Resolution on Terminology put forth by the Civil
Liberties Public Education Fund, which has recognized the limitations of the
wartime-era terminologies in today’s world. For example, “relocation” is
suggested as “imprisonment, incarceration, internment, detention, confinement.”
“Relocation camps” are better described as “internment camps,
detention camps, prison camps, or concentration camps.”
At a press conference on October 20, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called relocation centers “concentration camps,” despite the War Relocation Authority’s denial of the term’s accuracy. Seventy-five years later, we have come full circle.
Shelly
Kale
Publications
and Strategic Projects Manager
skale@calhist.org
Sources
Tim Chambers,
“Dorothea Lange’s Censored Photographs of FDR’s Concentration Camps,” https://anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothea-lange-censored-photographs
Silent Soliloquy: An Unknown Photographer Chronicles
the ‘Inscrutable Laughter’ of Japanese American Internment,” Visual
Communication Quarterly 20, no. 2, 2013; http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/hvcq20/20/2
James
Estrin, “A Lesson from
the 1940s: ‘America Is Capable of Being Un-American,’”
Feb. 23, 2017; https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2017/02/23/a-lesson-from-the-1940s-america-is-capable-of-being-un-american/?_r=0
Karen J. Leong, “Envisioning a Usable
Past,” in Todd Stewart, Placing Memory: A
Photographic Exploration of Japanese American Internment (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 2008)
Resolution on Terminology, “Civil Liberties Public Education
Fund; http://www.momomedia.com/CLPEF/backgrnd.html
“S.F. Clear of
All but 6 Sick Japs,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 21, 1942
WWII Japanese American Internment and Relocation
Records in the National Archives: Introduction; https://www.archives.gov/research/japanese-americans/internment-intro
Read more about Japanese
internment on the CHS blog:
http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2015/08/this-day-in-history-august-10-us-rights.html
Barbara
Carrasco’s mural is part of CHS’s forthcoming exhibition and publication ¡Murales Rebeldes!: L.A. Chicana/o Art under
Siege. Read more on the CHS blog:
http://californiahistoricalsociety.blogspot.com/2016/10/murales-rebeldes-contested-chicanao.html
