Why the US photographed its own WWII concentration camps
Dorothea Lange’s photos of the incarceration of Japanese Americans went largely unseen for decades.
US President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942 — two months after Japan’s bombing of the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor. It empowered the US army to designate strategic “military areas” from which any and all people deemed a threat could be forcibly removed. This began a process of placing 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II.
To control the narrative around the removal, the government created a new department, the War Relocation Authority, and hired photographers to document the process. One of those photographers was Dorothea Lange, who had become famous during the 1930s for her Great Depression photographs for the Farm Security Administration.
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