Whispers In The Apple Orchard offers impressions of stillness and quiet contemplation of the Japanese American experience at the Manzanar War Relocation Center from World War II in the Eastern Sierra Nevada.
Located in the Owens Valley just at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains in California, the Manzanar War Relocation Center was the first of the 10 concentration camps to be established that began accepting detainees in March, 1942 following the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. By July of 1942, the population of the camp had grown to nearly 10,000 Japanese Americans with about 90 percent of the incarcerated from the Los Angeles area.
In the fall of 1943, Ansel Adams, well-known for his famous Western landscape photographs, including Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, documented the Manzanar War Relocation Center. The resulting work, a departure from his photographs depicting beauty in the landscape, concentrated on portraits of the detained and their activities of family life in the barracks and at work in the camp. In 1944, Adams published his photographs and text in a 112-page book, Born Free and Equal, which had received positive reviews and made the San Francisco Chronicle’s bestseller list for March and April of 1945.
14-1/2 x 11-3/4 x 5/8 inches
Traditional Katazome-shi paper covered binders board with Iris book cloth binding and hinged mylar title
Seven (7) 14 x 11 inch broadsides
Tipped-on archival inkjet photographs and appropriated portraits printed on mylar from the Ansel Adams archive in the Library of Congress
Text fragments adapted from original writing and personal narratives recorded and cataloged by Densho, a digital archive relating to the Japanese American experience.
