Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (review)

Moving Images contributes significantly to making the World War II incarceration of Japanese Americans a part of public memory by skillfully analyzing "how images of incarceration were made, how they meant to function, and how they have been reproduced subsequently by the popular press and museums to construct versions of public history" (19). Alinder's study lives up to the promise of its title. The five tightly structured chapters discuss the period of uprooting just after the Presidential Proclamation 9066, the Manzanar "camp" in the deserts of Eastern California, and more contemporary contextualizations of the internment in The Museum of Modern Art to the National Museum of American History. Alinder weaves in the generations affected by this dislocation: the Nisei, the American born children of the Issei pioneers, and their Sansei and Yonsei progeny, for whom this episode is a family memory rather than a personal experience. Individual photographs receive deft consideration, both for the information they hold and for their potency as images that contain moving, emotional import.

Alinder constructively places Dorothea Lange's War Relocation Administration photographs in West Coast cities in the context of her previous work with the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s. Lange portrayed the distressing removal so potently that many of her images were not used or were overwritten by WRA bureaucrats with textual non sequiturs. Ansel Adams's work at Manzanar intently gave individuals their dignity, but in patriotic contexts that stripped them of their ethnicity. She contrasts these external views to images generated by Japanese Americans: the professional photographs of Toyo Miyatake and the amateur images in the Manzanar high school yearbook. Alinder concludes with two contemporary Yonsai photographers who have interpreted the ruined sites.

Although the subtitle refers broadly to Japanese American incarceration, this is really a study of Manzanar. We do not see the Heart Mountain photographs of Mieth and Hagel, and we are not able to place Manzanar into the broader landscape of memory of the ten "camps." The conundrum of the loyalty questionnaire that vexed Nisei citiens, producing both the "no-no" boys at Manzanar and the draft resisters of the Fair Play Committee at Heart Mountain, is beyond the study's view. Her fine treatment of Ansel Adams's Western work dissipates as she attempts to maneuver his brittle ego through the labyrinth of the Museum of Modern Art. There are generalizations here that should be removed. The differences among generational points of view could have occupied the additional space created by this excision in her otherwise tightly argued book. What happens when the memory of incarceration is now embodied by those who experienced life in the "camp" as children? Even in her portrayal of the high school photographs, one can sense her frustration at testimonies that are, seemingly, upbeat.

These are quibbles about a book that gracefully navigates the space between academic and public discourse. The book's last chapter in which the author engages the larger landscape of the "camps" and addresses the dynamics of generational memory is particularly promising.