Born Free and Equal at MOMA, 1946
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. The article she wrote for Photo Notes about the challenges of exhibiting Ansel Adams’ Born Free and Equal work are reprinted here with permission from Columbia University (credit at end of article).
Born Free and Equal, by Ansel Adams: Photographs of the loyal Japanese-Americans at Manzanar Relocation Center, Inyo County, California
Reviewed by Nancy Newhall, Photo Notes - June 1946
1. Perhaps even now, after more than a year, I am still too close to Born Free and Equal to see it with genuine objectivity. For me the book is still inseparable from the exhibition on which it was based, and from Manzanar itself, which, though I saw it when its great days were over, was an unforgettable experience.
2. A brief retelling of the story may be useful. Stunned by the catastrophe at Pearl Harbor and terrified of immediate invasion, an overwhelming majority of Westerners heartily endorsed the drastic military evacuation of all persons of Japanese ancestry from the Pacific Coast. The need for segregating enemy agents and sympathizers was so urgent that the suffering of thousands of innocent citizens, uprooted and herded, without a hearing, into desert camps, went almost without notice. Even in California, however, where the percentage of Japanese, and, consequently, the hysteria were highest, more and more people came to realize that this mass evacuation was a dangerous blow to constitutional rights and liberties and a serious dislocation to the growth of racial equality.
3. In December, 1942, the evacuees at Manzanar, still unexamined and unsegregated, rioted. By the fall of 1943, when Ansel Adams arrived with his camera, the wisdom and shrewd kindness of the new Director, Ralph P. Merritt, had brought forth a miracle. The painful process of segregation was over; alien sympathizers had been sent to Tule Lake. The armed guards who formerly watched with machine guns from the turrets were dwindling to the formality of gatekeepers. In the barren desert between the towering mountain ranges, a thriving community of 10,000 were raising their own food, making their own clothes, running a cooperative, schools, hospitals, a newspaper, baseball games, a choir, and plays. Still walled in by murderous prejudice, the people were learning to face the realities of going forth again, not backwards into the Little Tokios of the West Coast, but forward, wherever in the length and breadth of America, their skills and professions might be needed. This new attitude was nobly expressed by an editorial in the Manzanar Free Press: "The tragic experiences of evacuation, the untold volume of business losses of the evacuees, the unwarranted hatreds engendered against us by some people because of our hereditary kinship with the Asiatic foe--these we write off our ledger... We ask you, the American people, to try us on our own merits. We are willing to stand or fall by our records, realizing that it is one of the inherent characteristics of the country we love to appraise its people by the contribution they can make toward the total welfare of the nation."
4. It was this poignant appeal that Ansel Adams, voluntarily and at his own expense, set out to interpret. He refused to be officially sponsored by governmental or civil organizations, believing that such sponsorship immediately raises a prejudice, for or against, in the mind of the observer. He purposely avoided making either a documentary essay or a journalistic report. Both, in his opinion, have become formularized and are wearing thin, because photographers so commissioned are seldom given time and opportunity to develop their own potentials together with those of the subject. He wanted to build through interrelated images the feeling of direct contact with the people and the place, and to present this, the sincere, individual report of one citizen, to other citizens, through non-political channels.
5. By May, 1944, when he arrived in New York with sheafs of mounted photographs and text material, his concept was so clear that it took only a day and a half to make the exhibition, from first glance to final counterpoint of images and text. Museum of Modern Art department heads enthusiastically accepted the show; U.S. Camera decided to publish the sequence as it stood, together with a more detailed essay.
6. The essence of both book and exhibition was immediate and widespread circulation. They were scheduled to appear simultaneously in September.
7. Both were plunged into delays and confusion. The Photography Center closed; the Museum was undergoing a reorganization; the Circulating Department's new reduced quota was already full; prospects for the circulation of the Manzanar show were dim, after the disgraceful and disillusioning refusal of museums throughout the country to show the paintings of Jacob Lawrence; together with several other shows, Manzanar was cancelled. These setbacks stopped the flow of certain expected funds and facilities. Gradually the obstacles were all overcome. Suddenly the underlying issues--public prejudices, the place of propaganda in an art museum, the question of art as propaganda--blazed up together ten days before Manzanar was scheduled to open. As a result, the emphasis was forcibly shifted from "propaganda" to "art"; the title, Born Free and Equal, considered too ironic, was changed to the non-committal Manzanar; the text was pruned, and several important parts--the Fourteenth Amendment, the Lincoln letter, the records of Japanese Americans in the armed services--were omitted. This weakened the impact of the exhibition, since its basic concept was the conflict between the warm humanity and lyric beauty of the photographs with the dark records in the text--the bitter past, the broken promises, the present problems. At the time it seemed that, even so, it was better to put on the exhibition than to withdraw it.
8. Opinions as to its success were divided. Many people were deeply moved by it, as their letters and other tributes testify. To certain photo-journalists, the wholehearted and poetic approach lacked "punch." The documentarians in general found the beauty of the photographs distracting and the total content "too pretty," unrelated to "reality."
9. At Manzanar I was astonished (no disrespect to Adams intended) at the fidelity with which he had captured the spirit of the place. The bare facts of tarpaper barracks in the dusty desert, the confusions of communal living, the human foibles accumulating in so large a community,--could easily have been photographed harshly or heartrendingly, in any of the accepted formulae, and only those who have been there would have sensed the distortion. In Adams' photographs the same facts are stated clearly, filled with light and space, and mysteriously imbued with the intangibles--the new hope and courage, the deep appeal--accept us, believe in us, of Manzanar. The chief problem of the Director at that time was persuading the people that Manzanar must die. The young were returning to be married, returning on vacation, on furlough; the old were begging to stay there until they died. To thousands, Manzanar had become very precious--their first real contact with the America they dreamed of. It was natural that they should want to keep it alive, as sanctuary and symbol to hearten them on their voyages into the unknown, and difficult for them to comprehend that, deliberately and officially founded on a great wrong, artificially and unnatural in its organization, Manzanar in spite of the miracle that happened there, must crumble back into the desert and free them to help create the real America.
10. The book, meanwhile, was also in travail. The original concept--which still seems to me excellent--of presenting the message immediately to the reader through the exhibition text and photograph sequence and of introducing into the logical breaks in that sequence more detailed information for the reader to study at leisure--was discarded by the publisher in favor of a closer relation between photographs and essay. More and different photographs were asked for, more and different information continually required. Every day, people were hopefully leaving Manzanar. Their need for understanding was so pressing that Adams let time consuming discussions go by the board and acquiesced in the publisher's demands. Since he had returned to the West Coast, and all parties were in haste, decisions had to be reached through transcontinental correspondence, telegrams and phone calls. The actual assembly of the book was entrusted to an inexperienced assistant, who nearly broke down under the strain. To me, the books bear the marks of this haste and confusion. Physically, for a book designed to sell cheaply and produced in wartime, the number, size, and comparative quality of the illustrations are admirable. But illustrations and text continually interrupt each other. Instead of a close relation, building logically to a climax, sequences of photographs which often cumulate prematurely are scattered through the text, compelling the reader with half a sentence hanging in his mind to leaf through several pages of illustrations before he can get on with it. The text is uneven. Parts of it are brilliant by themselves and somewhat repetitive when read together. Crisper characterization in the interviews with individuals, and possibly juxtaposition with the big close-up portraits, would have added to the strength and the directness of the impression. It would have been well, when the original sequence was discarded, to have started with a totally fresh concept. These faults are due to lack of that careful and incisive editing every book, and especially one as potentially great as this one, should receive.
11. Perhaps these faults do not worry most readers. As I said before, I cared deeply for the project, and the fact that neither of its presentations carried its true impact still bothers me.
Reproduced with permission, @2000 Institute for Learning Technologies, Teachers College/Columbia University