In 2002, Spotted Dog Press released its hardcover edition of Ansel Adams’ out-of-print book, Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese Americans, It was first published in 1944 by U.S. Camera during World War II when approximately 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry were removed from their homes, denied due process and incarcerated in “war relocation centers.” Manzanar War Relocation Center, in Inyo County, California was one of those and the subject of Ansel Adams’ book. We remember our publishing experience, almost twenty years ago.
Twenty-five years ago, in between the water-starved fruit trees planted during World War II, the stone-lined ruins of Manzanar’s gardens were covered with weeds and mounds of dirt left behind by arrowhead and bottle hunters. Only one original building remained intact and it was used to house road equipment. Manzanar deserved better.
Clipping provided by the late George M. Wakiji
Click on image to enlarge
The 2002 Spotted Dog Press edition of Born Free and Equal was one more voice for Manzanar, that of its author, Ansel Adams. It was circulated in schools, museums, and libraries, and made its way to the desks of legislators. As an educational tool, it was a reminder of what people do to each other, without empathy and beyond civility. Controversy is not without its obstacles and the project had many, but it also had the support of those whose voices were heard publicly and quietly behind the scenes—Sue Kunitomi Embrey, Archie Miyatake, Joyce Okazaki, Vernon Miller, Bill Michael, Jonathan Kirsch, Alissa Hiraga, the Friends of the Eastern California Museum, The Rafu Shimpo, and Adams’ family who saw that the book was carried at the Ansel Adams Gallery in Yosemite National Park.
New edition scheduled for Summer 2021. Eastern Sierra Interpretive Association in Bishop, California, partnering with the National Park Service is currently working on an updated edition of Born Free and Equal that will be sold at exclusively at Manzanar.
Clipping provided by the late George M. Wakiji
1942
At the onset of World War II, Ansel Adams was living in Yosemite National Park with his wife, Virginia Best, daughter of oil painter, Henry Cassie Best, and their children. Adams' wanted to help with the war effort, but he was too old to enlist. He volunteered for a number of war-related photography assignments. He both escorted and photographed Army troops in Yosemite National Park training for mountain warfare in the European theater. He taught photography to the Signal Corps at Fort Ord, and traveled to the Presidio in San Francisco to print classified photographs of Japanese military installations on the Aleutian Islands. Despite his volunteer efforts, he was frustrated that he could not do more.
Image: Spotted Dog Press Collection
That summer, friend Ralph Merritt whom Adams had met in the Sierra Club, asked Adams if he would be interested in photographing a little-known government facility in the Owens Valley on the east side of the Sierra Nevada. “I cannot pay you a cent,” Merritt told Adams, “but I can put you up and feed you.” Merritt was director of the Manzanar War Relocation Center, a collection of several hundred tar-papered barracks built atop a remote desert plain where more than 10,000 people were housed behind barbed wire and gun towers. All were of Japanese ancestry, but most were American citizens, forcibly removed from their homes by presidential order to ten relocation centers across the country. The resulting effort was the book Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese Americans published by U.S. Camera under the direction of the War Relocation Authority.
A Brief Publishing History
Nancy Newhall was a photography critic and author, active from 1940-1965. Married to Beaumont Newhall, director of the Museum of Modern Art’s photography department, she assumed his duties as director and curator for three years when he was drafted into military photo intelligence during World War II. In 1946, she wrote an article for Photo Notes about the challenges of exhibiting Ansel Adams’ Born Free and Equal. In 2000, the Institute for Learning Technologies, Teachers College/Columbia University granted Spotted Dog Press permission to reprint Ms. Newhall’s article.
Read her Photo Notes review here.
In 1985, Emily Medvec curated and organized a traveling exhibition of Adams’ Manzanar photographs at the request of his family. The exhibition was accompanied by a forty-four page catalog entitled, Born Free and Equal, containing postage-sized photographs and text from the original 1944 U.S. Camera edition. Read more about Medvec’s project in this Los Angeles Times article.
1988
In 1988, Wynne Benti canoed five hundred miles on the Yukon River from Whitehorse to Dawson City in Canada’s Yukon Territory with a Sierra Club group of six canoes. Two things happened that year. Wayne Gretzky was traded from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings, a fact she was reminded of by every Canadian she met, and the Canadian government formally apologized for interning its citizens during WWII. When the trip’s outfitter learned she worked for NBC in Burbank, he showed her a front page newspaper clipping of his grandparents. They had just received reparations of $20,000 from the Canadian government. More important than the money, which would never compensate the financial loss of their farmlands in coastal British Columbia, was their government’s apology. Benti had never heard of internment. The outfitter, Albert Omotani, named for the province where the internment camp in which he was born was located, said, “Your country did this too.”
A year later, federal legislation (H.R. 543) established Manzanar as a National Historic Site. Up until 2002, no significant funding had been appropriated for the site’s development. The Eastern California Museum in Independence, California and seven miles north of Manzanar, served as the rock and mortar repository for all historic documents and artifacts, and as a meeting place for visitors to the annual Manzanar Pilgrimage.
The Friends of the Eastern California Museum was a small island of humanity in a very conservative county, but they were on a mission. For years, they diligently followed a long and circuitous path to see that Manzanar was respected and remembered.
Image: One of the many proposed cover designs for the Spotted Dog Press edition.
In 1997, having just moved to Inyo County from Los Angeles with husband, Andy Zdon, Benti wrote to the editor of the Inyo Register in response to a letter by a local citizen, condemning any federal funding to develop the languishing Manzanar site as a bonafide National Park site. Shortly after the letter was published, she received a phone call from Eastern California Museum director, Bill Michael, asking if she would join the board.
One evening, Benti arrived early at the museum for a board meeting with the Friends of the Eastern California Museum. She was approached by Michael, who held up, eye-level with both hands, a well-worn red softcover book, entitled, Born Free and Equal. He said, “Ansel Adams wrote this.”
Benti had studied photography at UC Davis with Harvey Himelfarb. She knew Adams’ work as a landscape photographer and his development of the Zone System with Fred Archer, but had never seen his photographs of the war relocation center at Manzanar. Michael said, “You should publish this. It’s in the public domain.” Not quite, she would later learn after taking on the project.
A year later, in 2001, the Spotted Dog Press edition of Born Free and Equal was at press when 2966 people lost their lives in a terrorist attack on September 11. Just getting to that point had been a challenging journey of publishing twists and turns.
Image: Wynne Benti remembering Sue Kunitomi Embrey at the 2007 Manzanar Pilgrimage
2000
Benti hired Thomson & Thomson (Thomson Reuters) to conduct an extensive copyright search of Born Free and Equal. The Center for Creative Photography was contacted for permissions, but queries went unanswered for months. Finally, someone told her to contact William Turnage at the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust in the Bay Area. She had never worked with Adams’ images beyond the photographs of him taken by fellow hikers on Sierra Club High Trips and published in the Spotted Dog Press edition of Norman Clyde’s Close Ups of the High Sierra.
His photograph of Joyce Nakamura (Okazaki) was chosen for the final cover. Now a librarian from Seal Beach, California, sixty years earlier, Joyce and other American children were incarcerated with their families at Manzanar and war relocation centers across the West. The out-of-focus image of the American flag behind Joyce was added just after 9/11.
Image: Final cover design
Unfamiliar with the Ansel Adams Publishing Right Trust, in early 2000, Benti contacted the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona asking about reproduction rights. For six months, her phone calls went unanswered until finally a staffer referred her to the Trust in Marin County where she began a long correspondence with William Turnage, Trustee of former executive director of the Wilderness Society. When California Senator Alan Cranston was working on the California Desert Protection Act with the Wilderness Society, he introduced Turnage to Adams. Benti asked Turnage how Spotted Dog Press could purchase the reproduction rights, but was never given a definitive answer. She reached out to publishing law attorney Jonathan Kirsch on how to move forward to publication.
Adams’ Manzanar collection was not available online in 2000. Benti traveled to the Library of Congress to locate the images. She and two librarians were unable to locate some of the original photographs. Those missing images are noted in the photographic index as well as additional images that were added. Benti contacted Mary Alinder, Adams’ former assistant, who said some of the photos were at the National Archives, but Benti’s on-site search produced nothing. The reproduction photographic prints purchased from the Library for use in the book were covered with scratches and dust specks and required hundreds of hours of retouching for print reproduction.
As Born Free and Equal progressed, Benti and Zdon met with Turnage at his home in Marin County to present the final design. Turnage did not personally approve of the use of a child’s photograph on the cover and would not permit Spotted Dog Press to use Adams’ name on the book or on the spine, unless all contributors were listed together using the same size typeface, thus the listing of all contributors. As in the original, “Text and Photographs by Ansel Adams” could be used, not “By Ansel Adams,” and his name could not be used in any promotion. It wasn’t until years after the book was published, that Turnage cited the Trust’s long-term relationship with the Little Brown and Company as a reason for the restrictions. Complicating matters, Born Free and Equal was to be released at the end of 2001. Unknown to Benti, it was the year of the centennial celebration of Adams’ birthday and the release of the book, “Ansel Adams at 100.”
Paper and ink
The 1944 U.S. Camera original was printed on war rationed paper and quickly disappeared from newspaper stands within weeks of being released. Many former internees speculated that the books were removed by the government. One said she had visited Adams and saw the books stored in boxes at his home.
In 1965, Adams’ donated the collection to the Library of Congress. He concluded his letter: “All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use.”
In an effort to give Adams’ work the deference it deserved, the 128 page, 8.5”x11” edition was printed on a sheetfed press using duotone photographs (black and a PMS color) on 157 gsm matte art paper.
As previously mentioned, the book was at press when the World Trade Center was attacked. The original jacket was a sole photograph, that of Joyce Nakamura Okazaki. At the last minute, Benti added the stock photograph of the American flag.
Fifty-eight years after U.S. Camera published Ansel Adams’ original book, Spotted Dog Press, released Born Free and Equal in January 2002.
Photo: Adams’ letter to the Library of Congress
Toyo Miyatake
While working at Manzanar, Adams met Los Angeles photographer Toyo Miyatake who was interned with his wife and children as a result of Executive Order 9066 issued on February 19, 1942. Long before the war, Miyatake had studied with the photographer Edward Weston and had established his own respected photography studio in downtown Los Angeles. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and with little notice from the United States government, the Miyatake family, like all American families of Japanese ancestry, had to leave behind everything they owned and were shuttled off to internment camps with no more than a few suitcases. Those who were not able to transfer their property deeds to friends for their homes and commercial properties before their internment, lost everything. The Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce supported Executive Order 9066. One of the reasons for their support was that Japanese farmers owned some of the most valuable coastal lands in Culver City, Santa Monica and on the Palos Verdes peninsula. One way to gain to access to that land at below real estate market value was to remove the owners.
Photo: Toyo Miyatake at the Manzanar War Relocation Center gate by Ansel Adams.
Miyatake Camera
Though Toyo Miyatake was prohibited from taking his camera equipment with him to Manzanar, he realized the importance of what was happening. No one knew how it was all going to end, what future lay before them. Miyatake made his own camera from scraps of wood and a lens that was smuggled into camp by one of his film vendors in Los Angeles.
Photo: Toyo Miyatake’s camera. ©2001 Archie Miyatake/Miyatake Studio
Toyo’ Miyatake’s son, Archie, wrote about the family’s experience in an essay entitled “Manzanar Remembered” for the Spotted Dog Press edition:
“One day, my father called me to the barrack and said, “I have to tell you something. As a photographer I have a responsibility to record life here at the camp so this kind of thing will never happen again.” Speaking in Japanese, he told me that he had smuggled in a camera lens and ground glass. He showed me the lens and film holder. At that moment, we never imagined that he would eventually become the camp’s official photographer.”
Photo: Archie Miyatake at Manzanar War Relocation Center, inyo County, California. Photo: ©2021 Miyatake Studio