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For the Japanese American community of the San Francisco Bay Area - one of the largest and most established on the West Coast - families were given only days to dispose of homes, businesses, and possessions before being forced onto buses for the Tanforan Assembly Center following the attach on Pearl Harbor and the start of war with Japan. 

Starting in September 1942, most of the incarcerated citizens at Tanforan were transported by train to the Central Utah Relocation Center – more popularly known as Topaz – located at a dusty site in the Great Basin of central Utah. Packed by the War Relocation Authority into crowded railcars, families and individuals spent about two nights and a day to reach Topaz, which was still under construction. Between 1942 and 1945, the Topaz War Relocation Center held more than 8,000 people, exposing its prisoners to extreme heat, dust storms, and bitter cold, while families tried to build stable lives in overcrowded tar-paper barracks with little privacy and limited resources.

Famous for her Depression-era photographs documenting poverty and displacement, Dorothea Lange was hired by the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to record the forced removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans citizens in the San Francisco Bay Area and Central Valley. Between February and July 1942, Lange made more than 800 hundred photographs that challenged the WRA narrative – relocation for national security reasons – with images revealing the coercion and humiliation.

Epiphanies in Ancient Sands offers quiet contemplation with photographs of what is left in the sands of the Great Basin juxtaposed with fragmented text and poignant photographs by Dorothea Lange that set the atmosphere and tone of emotional trauma of personal identity being taken.