Seen and Unseen: What Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams’s Photographs Reveal About the Japanese American Incarceration

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Photo of watchtower, barbed wire, and camera

Three months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Roosevelt ordered the incarceration of all Japanese and Japanese Americans living on the West Coast of the United States.  Three photographers set out to document life at Manzanar, an incarceration camp in the California desert: Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams. In Seen and Unseen, Elizabeth Partridge and Lauren Tamaki weave together these photographers' images, firsthand accounts, and stunning original art to examine the history, heartbreak, and injustice of the Japanese American incarceration.