Hi, all.
Just finished another slideshow video, this time for a song from the new record and with someone else's photographs. With shots this perfect, timeless and iconic, it'd be pretty stupid to try to substitute my own.
In 1943, Ansel Adams was invited by his friend and fellow Sierra Club member Ralph Merritt, then director of the Manzanar War Relocation Center, to photograph the camp and its residents. Adams, mindful of the both the historical significance of the assignment and the great injustice done to Americans of Japanese descent by FDR's Executive Order 9066 and the resultant actions by the US Army and Department of Justice, took numerous pictures of life in the camp.
These photos, in lighting, composition and impact, are as beautiful and important as any Adams took in the Sierras or on the North Coast of California. They are the finest extant record of life in the internment camps.
Adams initially published the photos, with his own text, in a book entitled "Born Free and Equal; The Story of Loyal Japanese Americans." While the book received positive notice from critics, the larger public was indifferent at best. Eventually, Adams donated the photographs to the Library of Congress, saying,
"All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use...The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and despair by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment."
The Library has digitized the photos and made them available to the general public on the web. Also available at the Library's site is a reproduction of the original book.
In making the video/slideshow for "In Manzanar," I have relied heavily on the Adams collection, as well as a few photographs in other LOC collections and two images from Wikimedia Commons. I am very thankful to the Library for making these collections available online, for you, my fellow taxpayers, for paying for this great resource, and to the lovely and monumentally talented Land of Enchantment for hipping me to it.
I'm pretty confident I don't need to fill in folks here on the backstory (Sarah Palin's a different story; when she tells hit, the Nisei will be warning Gen. DeWitt that they're armed and ready for him), but, just in case, Wikipedia has a decent summary.
Anyway, I hope you like the video, and thanks again for this great government, however flawed it may be at times.