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

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States government forced Japanese and Japanese American families living on the West Coast into incarceration camps. Three photographers documented life at one of them, Manzanar in the California desert: Dorothea Lange, who worked for the government but saw the policy as unjust; Toyo Miyatake, an incarcerated photographer who smuggled in a lens and film holder; and Ansel Adams, who arrived in 1943 with his own aims. Elizabeth Partridge, Lange's goddaughter, compares what each chose to show and what was kept out of view, and Lauren Tamaki's illustrations fill in moments no camera recorded. Firsthand accounts and an essay on the model minority myth round out the book, a 2023 Orbis Pictus honor book.