Moving Images: Photography and the Japanese American Incarceration (The Asian American Experience) [Hardcover]

Alinder's book will appeal to those interested in Asian-American history, American history, California history, and most especially, those folks interested in photography. The book is well written, smart and provocative. While I'm familiar with many of the photographs and the history of the Japanese-American Internment, thanks to Alinder's book I know so much more and see so much more in the photographs. Great work.

There are two aspects to MOVING IMAGES. On the more general level, it is a book about different ways photography can be used to advance political agendas. Second, the book explores this topic through photographic documentation of the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II. I found the second aspect much more interesting than the first.

On February 19, 1942, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, which authorized U.S. military commanders to designate areas of the United States "from which any or all persons may be excluded." Though not specifically directed at people of Japanese descent, the Order was applied primarily to Japanese-Americans. About 110,000 ethnic Japanese people were sent to internment camps for most of the rest of the War -- even those who were U.S. citizens, even the families of Japanese-American servicemen in the U.S. military, and even veterans of the U.S. armed forces (including one seventy-year-old man who had enlisted in the U.S. Navy during the Spanish-American War and received disabling wounds and who was, in early 1942, living as an invalid in a sanitarium in Los Angeles). Executive Order 9066 remains an indelible stain on the generally liberal and enlightened legacy of FDR, and the broad-gauge internment of Japanese-Americans ranks as the worst instance in the 20th-Century of organized racism perpetrated as a matter of official federal government policy within this country. It was an abominable disgrace.

The internment enterprise was administered by the War Relocation Authority. The WRA engaged a number of photographers, including Dorothea Lange, to document the "relocation" of Japanese-Americans. The WRA wanted the enterprise depicted as essentially a humanitarian endeavor, with the "relocated" Japanese-Americans depicted as compliant and non-threatening - good Americans of the future, even. Lange, however, could not help but take photographs that communicated "the pathos and injustice of the incarceration." Chapter One of MOVING IMAGES explores the tensions between the non-congruent missions of the WRA and Lange. Chapters Two and Three deal with the photographs of the camp at Manzanar, California by two different photographers - one, Ansel Adams, an outsider; and the other, Toyo Miyatake, an inmate. A fourth chapter deals with several museum exhibitions of the Japanese-American incarceration, and the last chapter with recent photographic projects of the now-desolate camp sites undertaken by two Nisei whose parents had been inmates.

The book contains about forty photographs of the Japanese-American incarceration. I would have liked to have seen more, but that's because I am more interested in the incarceration as a matter of history than I am in an academic discussion of what I will call the semiotics of photography. And MOVING IMAGES is much more concerned with the latter subject. The book also is a product of the academy (author Jasmine Alinder is an associate professor of history). While I didn't find it nearly as pretentious and/or wooden as many books of the academy, it is prone to over-analysis and it does contain a fair share of ivory tower buzz words such as "hegemonic", "dialogic", "concretize", "iconicity", and "indexicality". I believe that Alinder reads too much into some of the photographs and I disagree with some of her interpretations or judgments, too many of which to my mind tend to be shibboleths.

Nonetheless, I am glad that I stumbled across the book and read it. It has stimulated a desire to learn more about Executive Order 9066 and the Japanese-American incarceration.