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Suffering Under a Great Injustice
by Ansel Adams


From the Library of Congress American Memory project:

"In 1943, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), America's best-known photographer, documented the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California and the Japanese Americans interned there during World War II.

In 'Suffering under a Great Injustice,' Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar, the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress presents for the first time side-by-side digital scans of both Adams's 242 original negatives and his 209 photographic prints, allowing viewers to see his darkroom technique and in particular how he cropped his prints.



This special presentation also reproduces the book "Born Free and Equal," published in 1944 by U.S. Camera, which includes a selection of Adams's Manzanar internment camp photographs along with a text by Adams.

In 1955, Ansel Adams wrote, "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 All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use."

To learn more about the Japanese-American Internment Camps, we also recommend the following Web sites:

Confinement and Ethnicity: An Overview of World War II Japanese American Relocation Sites

Japanese American Exhibit and Access Project

Japanese American Relocation Digital Archives (JARDA)

War Relocation Authority Photographs of Japanese-American Evacuation and Resettlement, 1942-1945