President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, two months after Japan bombied Pearl Harbor. It empowered the US army to incarcerate 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II.
In March 1942 the government created a new department, the War Relocation Authority, and hired photographers to document “resettlement” and life in the “relocation” camps, possibly to complement the work of the WRA’s Community Analysis Section. One of those photographers was Dorothea Lange, who had documented dustbowl migrants and other rural Americans for the Farm Security Administration. The WRA photographs were surpressed until 1972.
An exhibition of Dorothea Lange’s photographs, The Politics of Seeing is currently on display at the Jeu de Paume museum in Paris. Her most well-known photograph is her 1936 portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, popularly known as “Migrant Mother.”
A video from the WorldCrunch OneShot photography series.
More:
“The Assignment I’ll Never Forget: Migrant Mother,” Dorothea, Lange, Popular Photography(1960).
“Unraveling the Mysteries of Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother,’” James Estrin, New York Times
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Nina Berman explains how she took her photograph of the “King of Kings” statue at the Solid Rock Church in in Lebanon, Ohio. A Worldcrunch OneShot video.
Hine believed his images of children, some as young as 8, laboring in mills, meatpacking houses, coal mines and canneries would force demands for change. He was right. Regulations and legislation cut the number of child laborers nearly in half by 1920. Editors of Time Magazine selected Hine’s photo of Sadie Pfeifer as one of the 100 most influential images of all time.
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