Mixed Feelings About These Photos
I had never seen Ansel Adams series of photos from a US internment camp for Japanese-Americans during WWII. I had mixed feelings about them. Adams said that he wanted to portray the resiliency of those imprisoned, showing how they made the best of a bad situation. And certainly I have great respect for that, and the cultural strengths we see at work are a prelude to how Japan itself was rebuilt after the devastation of WWII.
But at another level I find these photos incredibly creepy. They look too much like the fake photos staged by Germans and Russians of various eras to airbrush the horrors of their concentration camps. I am willing to believe we Americans were better jailers, but none-the-less I was disturbed that these looked a lot like propaganda photos.
