Where Did Ansel Adams take pictures?

When Harry Oye, a longtime employee of his parents’ business who was an Issei and in ill condition, was abruptly taken into custody by law enforcement and transported to a hospital in Missouri halfway across the country, this incident hit close to home for Adams. Angered by this occurrence, Adams welcomed the chance to shoot Japanese-American internees at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in 1943. Ralph Merritt, a friend and Sierra Club member, was in charge of the facility at the time.

As a civilian, Adams had already finished a number of jobs for the military, including instructing photography at Fort Ord and taking pictures of Yosemite’s Ahwahnee Hotel, which served as a Navy hospital during the conflict. However, he was eager for a more significant assignment connected to the war effort. Adams’ Manzanar documentation would end up being his most important war-related undertaking.

Adams took pictures at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in the fall of 1943. This facility was situated in Inyo County, California, along the eastern edge of the Sierra Nevada mountains, about 200 miles northeast of Los Angeles. His customary landscape photography was changed by this series. Adams wrote a piece on the Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned in this stunning but uninhabited area, where the mountains acted as both a figurative fortress and a source of inspiration for the prisoners. Adams focused on the internees and their activities, taking pictures of their daily lives in the barracks, their employment as welders, farmers, and garment manufacturers, as well as their leisure pursuits, which included baseball and volleyball tournaments.

Born Free and Equal, a 112-page book with a selection of these photographs and text by Adams, was released in 1944 by U. S. Camera. Adams wrote: “Through the pictures, the reader will be introduced to perhaps twenty individuals… loyal American citizens who are eager to get back into the stream of life and contribute to our victory” in a letter to his friend Nancy Newhall, the wife of Beaumont Newhall, curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art. Positive reviews were given to the book, which also appeared on the March and April 1945 bestseller lists of the San Francisco Chronicle.

Where Did Ansel Adams take pictures?

Adams photographed the mountains around Manzanar in addition to his work within the camp. During his journey to Manzanar, he took two of his most renowned landscape photographs: Mount Williamson, the Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California, 1944, and Winter Sunrise, the Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California, 1944. These spectacular images were not part of Adams’s gift to the Library.