The desolate stillness of a photograph showing a row of barracks belies the turbulent conditions of its making. Two months after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, executive order 9066 authorized the forced removal and mass incarceration of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans living on the west coast by the United States government.
Cameras were considered contraband and banned from the camps, but Toyo Miyatake, a respected photographer before the outbreak of war, managed to assemble a makeshift one from a lens and film holder he had smuggled inside the Manzanar camp in California. For months he took photos like this one clandestinely, compelled to capture for posterity the realities there; eventually the camp director allowed Miyatake to become the camp’s official photographer on the condition that a white assistant would click the shutter, thereby remaining technically within the rules.
