
Manzanar Cemetery
Posted by:
Touchstone
N 36° 43.523 W 118° 09.754
11S E 396186 N 4065038
Quick Description: Ansel Adams visited the Manzanar War Relocation Camp in 1943 and took over 200 images of the camp during his visit. The original glass plates are housed in the Library of Congress.
Location: California, United States
Date Posted: 9/1/2009 9:16:48 AM
Waymark Code: WM74P2
Views: 3
Long Description:The Cemetery Obelisk is certainly one of Ansel Adams most memorable
images from his visit to Manzanar, and one that is most easily
recognizable.
The Library of Congress has the following to say about this
collection:
" In 1943, Ansel Adams (1902-1984), America's best-known
photographer, documented the Manzanar War Relocation Center in
California and the Japanese Americans interned there during World
War II. In "Suffering under a Great Injustice": Ansel Adams's
Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar, the Prints
and Photographs Division at the Library of Congress presents for
the first time side-by-side digital scans of both Adams's 242
original negatives and his 209 photographic prints (with the print
on the left and the negative on the right), allowing viewers to see
his darkroom technique and in particular how he cropped his
prints.
Adams's Manzanar work is a departure from his signature style of
landscape photography. Although a majority of the photographs are
portraits, the images also include views of daily life,
agricultural scenes, and sports and leisure activities. When he
offered the collection to the Library in 1965, Adams wrote, "The
purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a
great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions,
had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for
themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent)
environment…All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an
important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good
use."
The coordinates above will put you at the Western edge of the
camp where a spacious parking lot allows access to the Cemetery
Obelisk with Mount Williams in the background.