
These incredible photographs by renowned landscape photographer Ansel Adams show the everyday lives of thousands of the Japanese Americans who were locked up in a California internment camp during the Second World War.

Adams was invited by his friend and camp director Ralph Merritt to document life at the Manzanar War Relocation Center, one of ten internment camps along the West Coast where more than 110,000 people were detained.

Although a departure from the landscape style he is most celebrated for, most notably his famous black and white landscapes of the American West, Adams accepted the invitation, making a number of trips to the camp in 1943.

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Locked up: Celebrated photographer Ansel Adams documented the everyday lives of the Japanese Americans detained at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in 1943. Pictured: school children inside the camp

Inside the camp: Although he was banned from taking pictures of barbed wire of guard towers, Adams took this photograph of the barracks inside Manzanar from a guard tower on one of his visits in 1943

Some of the photographs Adams took at Manzanar were the subject of his controversial book ‘Born Free and Equal’ as well as a landmark exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art.

Published in 1944 while war was still being waged, the book protested the treatment of these American citizens at the incarceration camp and what Adams branded an ‘enforced exodus’.

But due to the political climate in America at the time and the fact that anti-Japanese feelings was at an all-time high, Adams’s book was met with anger by many Americans. The book was pulled from some stores and in some cases, burned.

More than 11,000 Japanese people were incarcerated under armed guard at Manzanar, most of them American citizens from the Los Angeles area, after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, following which the government sought to quickly solve the ‘Japanese problem’ along the country’s West Coast.

At work: Mori Nakajhima works at a poultry farm, left. Pictured right, camp detainee Benji Iguchi works the fields on a tractor, 1943

America's pastime: Despite their incarceration, the detainees at Manzanar are seen here making the most of their free time playing baseball at Manzanar in 1943

Now, fifty of these photographs will be presented at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles from October 8 until February.

They include portraits of the prisoners there, including one of Japanese-American photographer Toyo Miyatake, who was detained along with his family in the camps and who guided Adams when he visited.

Also seen are the detainees working, gardening and playing baseball as well as landscape shots of the barracks more aligned with the style Adams is known for.

‘Manzaner: The Wartime Photographs of Ansel Adams’ presents a lesser-known side to the photographer’s body of work and offers visitors an insight into this disturbing period of American history.

‘[Adams] felt this was an injustice, and he actually ended up conducting interviews with people in the camp, asking people about their experiences, how they felt prior to incarceration, whether they’d experience racial prejudice before the war,’ Skirball’s assistant curator Linde B. Lehtinen told Slate.

‘He tried to capture not only what was happening in the camps visually, but he wanted to know who these people were.’

She added that he wanted to ‘emphasize their loyalty as American citizens’.

Stunning: A Japanese monument in a cemetery inside the Manzanar War Relocation Center with Mt. Williamson visible in the background

Portraits of the prisoners: Pictured left, detainees, including Roy Takeno, outside the Free Press Office, 1943. Pictured right, Japanese-American photographer Toyo Miyatake, who was detained in Manzanar and who guided Adams when he visited

The racism of the times will be captured through the propaganda posters, films and magazines from the period.

And the exhibition will also feature other photographs from Adams’s peers, including Dorothea Lange and Miyatake,, who was commissioned to by the U.S. government to document the camp, as well as artifacts and artworks that show what life at Manzaner was like, including personal narratives of the experience.

However, Adams’s photographs do not paint a full picture, as he was prohibited from capturing any images of barbed wire or the guard towers and all of his photographs were subject to the approval of the War Relocation Authority.

But what they do show is the resilience of the community living in the camps.

In a letter, Adams, who died in 1984, said: 'All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use.

'The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and despair by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment.'

Home: Photographs, letters and personal belongings are seen inside a home in the Manzanar internment camp, one of ten that incarcerated Japanese people along America's West Coast during the Second World War

'Birds on Wire': One evening in 1943, Adams captured a stunning photograph of bird resting on wires in the camp in a style more reminiscent of the landscape photographs he is most famous for



