Ansel Adams credit-stamped photograph of Japanese women interned at Manzanar. ...

Description

Ansel Adams credit-stamped photograph of Japanese women interned at Manzanar. (1943) It was in 1943, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), America's most well-known photographer, documented the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California and the Japanese-Americans interned there during World War II. Adams's Manzanar work is a departure from his signature style landscape photography. Although a majority of the more than 200 photographs are portraits, the images also include views of daily life, agricultural scenes, and sports and leisure activities. When offering the collection to the Library of Congress in 1965, Adams said in a letter, "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 dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment...all in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use." Offered here from the private collection of Hollywood studio photographer Kango Takamura, himself an interned Japanese-American citizen, is a credit-stamped original Ansel Adams gelatin silver 3.5 x 4.25 in. glossy print depicting interned Japanese women, working in what for all intents and purposes appears to be a sewing sweatshop. In retrospect, Adams' conservative and patriotic perspective on the condition of inmates in the American concentration camps for Japanese is now viewed as something of a utopian fantasy, with no allowance for the true harsh reality of forced internment. Regardless, an exceedingly rare and significant historical artifact in multiple respects. A trace of handling and age, still in fine condition. From the personal collection of photographer Kango Takamura.

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