Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment Details
Review In these days of fear of the terrorist 'other', reading this measured, intelligent introduction to a time that is all-too possible to imagine recurring, and looking at Lange's photos... may be one of the most useful things one can do this Christmas. "[The] images show Americans of Japanese extraction being relocated to 'assembly centers', labeled and processed like cattle and closeted away in dismal shacks for the duration of the war... No wonder her pictures were never used and disappeared for half a century. "Through her discerning and sensitive eye, Lange's observations of the situation were too real and too critical for the government, and were consequently confiscated. "[T]he bulk of the book is given over to Lange's photographs. Several of these are as powerful as her most stirring work, and the final image of a grandfather in the desolate Manzanar Center looking down in anguish at the grandson between his knees is worth the price of the book alone. " Read more About the Author Linda Gordon, winner of two Bancroft Prizes and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, is the author of The Second Coming of the KKK, Dorothea Lange and Impounded, and the coauthor of Feminism Unfinished. She is the Florence Kelley Professor of History at New York University and lives in New York and Madison, Wisconsin.Gary Y. Okihiro is the author of Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II and Common Ground: Reimagining American History. He is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York City. Read more
Reviews
Mostly a photographic essay, but with two introductory essays of intellectual heft, the work represents probably the most readily accessible adult presentation of the Japanese Internment situation of WWII. The pictures mostly speak for themselves. The introductory essays assign context that is both important and well formulated.What the pictures cannot relate, given by the essays is the nature of the social and legal contexts and the largely defective processes of both reason and juris prudence which allowed the implementation of this travesty to progress.
