Displaced Smiles: Photography and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans During World War II

Abstract

Historical texts, oral testimony, and scholarship document vividly the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II — the loss of private property and personal belongings, and the emotional and psychological suffering, that the imprisonment caused. Yet there is very little visual evidence in the photographic record of incarceration that would attest overtly to these injustices. A photograph on April 1, 1942, by Clem Albers, a photographer for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), depicts three well-dressed young women who have just boarded a train in Los Angeles, which will take them to a so-called assembly center (Figure l). The photograph would appear at first glance to tell a very different story. The women smile and extend their arms out of a raised train window to wave goodbye, as if they are embarking on a vacation or some other pleasant excursion. The Albers photograph is not an exception to the photographic record of incarceration. In the thousands of photographs made of the incarceration process by government photographers, independent documentarians, and “internees,” it is much more difficult to find photographs that portray suffering than it is to find images of smiling prisoners.Not surprisingly, these photographs of smiling Japanese Americans are unsettling for those scholars, curators, and activists who have worked to expose the injustices of the wartime imprisonment. The smiles are charged for several reasons: They appear to belie the injustice of incarceration and the suffering it caused, they are reminiscent of the ugly stereotype of the grinning Oriental, and they suggest that those portrayed were entirely compliant with the government's racist agenda.