World War II
Dorothea Lange's worked quickly changed from the Depression to WW
II when FDR signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942. It
allowed Military commanders to set up zones where they had marshall
law declared. They could decide who was allowed to be within the
zone, depending on race, age, sex, or any other group that the military
thought was a threat. Similar to the Nazi concentration camps, the
United States rounded up Japanese-Americans and placed them in specially
designed camps placed away from the west coast. Although the US
was at war with Germany and Italy as well, no such measures were
put in place to round up and restrict the movement of these people.
It was blatent discrimination clouded by the shroud of war. Invidividuals
who were only partially Japanese were forced to report to these
camps, as if they had committed some crime or were suspected of
being terrorists. In fact, the US was guilty of a blatent form of
racism by believing that any asian person was a spy.
The government either wanted to ensure the process was fair and
just, or it wanted to have a record of the people coming into the
camps, because Dorothea was hired to document the lives of the people
as they came into the camps, stayed there, and eventually left.
She reported that her time documenting the procedure was one of
the most intense of her life:
"On the surface," she said, "it looked
like a narrow job. There was a sharp beginning to it, a sharp
end; everything about it was highly concentrated. Actually, thought
it wasn't narrow at all. The deeper I got into it, the bigger
it became."
A. D. Coleman, a critic of the sytem, commented on how she was exactly
the correct person to document the horrible and dispicable lesson
in history:
"she was precisely the right photographer for
the job ... She functioned in effect as our national eye of conscience
in the internment camps. Her constant concerns - the survival
of human dignity under impossible conditions, the confrontation
of the system by the individual, and the helpless innocence of
children - were perfectly suited to the subject."
The following two images are the tip of the iceberg of a huge collection
of images taken during World War II:
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