Photographs of a Japanese Canadian internment camp: mourning loss and invoking a future1

Abstract

This article examines photographic representations of an internment camp where the Canadian government held thousands of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. The photographs were illegally taken by internees from the Tashme internment camp and were subsequently donated to the Japanese Canadian National Museum. The representations of the camp are strikingly different. One set of photographs presents the harsh living conditions in Tashme and the other, idyllic scenes of ‘nature’ where the camp was located. With the retrospective knowledge that the internment camps were part of a larger plan to systematically remove ‘all people of the Japanese race’ from Canada, it is difficult not read the ‘nature’ photographs as shocking denials of reality. The article resists this reading and instead explores what each set of representations says about how the internees perceived the camps. A closer analysis of each set of photographs reveals signs of life as well as substitutions for what would have been difficult to bear seeing: the pain, humiliation and dissolution of community life. I argue that the photographs were a means to visually re‐configure the bleak hopeless spaces of incarceration and invoke a future, which is essential in the complex process of psychic survival. Using the work of Christian Metz, the article analyzes both sets of photographs as fetish objects that preserve what has been lost (the pre‐war community) while averting the gaze from painful events (the dissolution of community and family life in the camps). While acknowledging the dangers of averting the gaze and disavowal, the article explores how the photographs can help in the process of mourning loss.