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

SEEN AND UNSEEN begins in the hours after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The U.S. government, fearing that anyone of Japanese descent could be a spy or commit sabotage, began arresting leaders of the Japanese American community on the West Coast. In February 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered 120,00 Japanese Americans be forcibly removed from the West Coast to what the government called "internment camps" but were actually prison camps. Able to bring only what they could carry, they left behind their homes and business, even their pets. One of those camps, Manzanar in California, is featured in the story. Asked by the government to photograph life at the camp, Dorothea Lange was horrified that Americans could be treated in such a way and decided her photos would tell the truth about what was happening. But she always had to have a guard by her side and couldn't photograph guard towers or barbed wire fencing. Her photos of families planting gardens and children in a school without any tables or chairs still tell an important story. A photographer from Los Angeles, Toyo Miyatake, was imprisoned at Manzanar from 1942-45. Using smuggled materials and a homebuilt camera, he secretly took photos of what Lange could not. When the camp asked him to take photos of specials events, he was finally able to openly photograph weddings, celebrations, and birthdays. In the fall of 1943, Ansel Adams was invited to photograph life at the camp. Adams had not been against the internment of Japanese Americans and wanted to show prisoners as "hardworking, cheerful and resilient," so there are lots of smiles in Adam's posed photos. In January 1945, the ban on Japanese Americans living on West Coast was lifted. The prisoners at Manzanar were given $25 and train tickets home.