Dorothea Lange and the Censorship of Internment Photographs

After class today I became interested in the question some of you posed about Dorothea Lange's internment photographs, and whether or when they appeared in print. While we were talking, I had a vague-but-unconfirmed memory of reading that Lange's internment photographs were in fact censored by the U.S. government. I didn't want to say it without checking my facts first, but my memory was correct.

Here's the story. Lange was hired by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to document internment through her photographs. This was well before she became famous. She was supposed to do what many WRA photographers did, which was to present internment as a positive thing: freely chosen by complicit Japanese Americans; good for them; good for the nation. (The propaganda here is eerily similar to pro-slavery propaganda from the 19th century.) However, as you can see from the photograph Gina and Carla showed in class, Lange did not follow instructions. She was a troublemaker.

Here's a picture of Lange at work photographing internment. You can see her hovering in the background:

Source: Library of Congress

What Lange wanted to do was to show the reality of internment, rather than create propaganda. And so she began taking stark, realistic photographs that did not excise the bleak and painful aspects of internment. According to a fascinating 2006 New York Times article, the WRA attempted to restrict her--and not just her, but the other photographers too--as she worked:

[A]t nearly all of the 21 locations Lange visited, the government tried to restrict her. At the assembly centers and at Manzanar she was not allowed to photograph the wire fences, the watchtowers with searchlights, the armed guards or any sign of resistance. She was discouraged from talking to detainees. At one point she was almost fired when one of her photographs appeared on a Quaker pamphlet denouncing the internment.

Despite the government's efforts to control the representation, Lange was able to create an alternative historical record through her photographs. From the same article:

In many of her pictures the subjects look away from the camera, accentuating their sadness and anxiety. Yet Lange also emphasizes the detainees’ essential Americanness: a United States Army volunteer helping his mother and family prepare for their internment, a smiling boy with a baseball bat, another boy reading a comic book.

Somehow these photographs disappeared. Ms. Gordon said historians did not know exactly what happened to them beyond that the Army deposited them in the National Archives. Ms. Gordon said she could only guess at how bitter Lange must have been to witness the disappearance of so much hard work.

This New York Times article came out in 2006, when historians unearthed Lange's internment photographs and published them in a book titled Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment. Finally, Lange's alternative historical record saw the light of day.

Troublemakers rock!

Yes, censorship happens in the United States. Usually it is a quiet affair, and is done by local school boards, libraries, and media organizations without the public's knowledge. This week is Banned Books Week, and if you get a moment to take our library's survey on the topic, you might learn something about how literature has been censored, and continues to be censored to this day, in the U.S.

Be a troublemaker! Read a banned book today!
Dr. K.