MANZANAR, CALIFORNIA 1942
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The next day, America declared war on Japan and, in 1942, President Roosevelt declared that all Japanese-Americans living within 500 miles of America's Pacific coast were enemy aliens and would be relocated to detention camps. Los Angeles photographer Toyo Miyatake was among those sent to Manzanar, a camp on the dusty eastern border of the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Born in Japan, Miyatake came to America with his family when he was 14. After graduating from public school in Los Angeles, Toyo eventually became a photographer and opened a studio where he did portraits. In 1942, Miyatake's entire family was moved to Manzanar. Because he thought the detention would be temporary, he didn't sell his studio or equipment. While enemy aliens weren't allowed to have cameras, Toyo managed to sneak a lens and a film holder into Manzanar, where he stayed for almost four years.
During his first year of detention, Miyatake got a camp carpenter to build him a camera that mounted his lens on a drain pipe with a long thread; rotating the pipe allowed him to move the lens back and forth to focus an image. Film and other equipment was hard to get, but one of his clients in Los Angeles managed to sneak him supplies. Taking care that nobody saw him, Miyatake took pictures of the camp for documentation.
The famous photographer Edward Weston was a friend of Miyatake and of the head of Manzanar. Weston influenced the camp director to allow Miyatake to open a studio to document family events like weddings, although a white person had to take the actual pictures, since policy didn't allow camp residents to have cameras.
Eventually there weren't enough white people available to take all the pictures needed, so Miyatake was allowed to do the actual photography himself. He became the official photographer of Manzanar and his pictures are rare documents of a sad period of American history.
In 1946 when the war was over, Miyatake returned to Los Angeles with his family and reopened his studio. Before he retired in 1976, his pictures of Manzanar were shown along with those of the famous Ansel Adams at an exhibit called "Two Views of Manzanar." Miyatake died in 1979, before the American government offered an official apology to all Japanese-Americans who suffered detention during the war.