Female internees practicing calisthenics at Manzanar War Relocation Center, Owens Valley, California.
In 1943, Ansel Adams followed an invitation by newly appointed camp director Ralph Merritt to photograph the everyday life of the Japanese American internees in the camp. Unlike his colleague Dorothea Lange, whose pictures for the War Relocation Authority focused on the hardship and humiliation of the deportation and internment, Adams’s intent was to “show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, (…) had overcome the sense of defeat and despair by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment.” (Ansel Adams, 1965)