At first glance, Dorothea Lange’s photographs of Japanese-Americans, taken in the early 1940s, appear to show ordinary activities. People wait patiently in lines. Children play. A woman makes artificial flowers. Storefront signs proudly proclaim, “I am an American.”

But these quiet images document something sinister: the racially motivated relocation and internment during World War II of more than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry who lived on the West Coast, more than 60 percent of whom were American citizens.

Anchor Editions recently began selling prints of 20 of Ms. Lange’s Japanese internment photographs. Half of the proceeds are earmarked for the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued to stop the government’s mass incarceration of Japanese-Americans and continues to protect immigrant rights.

Although Ms. Lange’s photographs were commissioned by the federal government as part of its documentary programs, they were suppressed for the duration of the war. Never actively distributed, her prints were sometimes defaced by military personnel, the word “impounded” scrawled across them. After the war ended, the photographs were discreetly deposited in the National Archives, where they remained, largely unseen and unpublished, for decades.

“These photographs exemplify Lange’s mastery of composition and of visual condensation of human feelings and relationships,” the historian Linda Gordon wrote in the 2006 anthology “Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment,” which brought many of the photographs to light. “They also unequivocally denounce an unjustified, unnecessary and racist policy. Ms. Lange’s critique is especially impressive given the political mood of the time,” an era when even liberal public figures, such as the celebrated writer and illustrator Dr. Seuss, gave in to fear about Japanese-Americans.

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Ms. Lange’s photographs capture not only the oppression of a people but also their struggle to retain their dignity: neatly dressed families huddled together, awaiting transportation to detention camps; a slouching girl, her eyes cast downward, guarding her family’s meager possessions; a group of children raising an American flag, affirming their loyalty to a nation that viewed them as alien and dangerous; a relocation center in Manzanar, Calif., in stark contrast to the majestic mountains beyond it.

At the time, the internment was hailed by some and condemned by others. Activists warned that the incarceration of loyal and patriotic Americans would do little to protect the nation, and would serve instead as grist for enemy propaganda. In retrospect, some have compared the internment centers to concentration camps. Nevertheless, in February 1942, two months after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order that authorized the exclusion of all people of Japanese descent, both citizens and immigrants, from the West Coast.

The order, which presumed that Japanese-Americans were disloyal and potentially traitorous, was meant to protect the country’s most vulnerable assets, including airports, power plants, railroads, shipyards and military installations, from sabotage and spying. As enacted, the order was unambiguously racist: While it also applied to German and Italian nationals, they were spared the indignity of mass incarceration and were instead evaluated on a case-by-case basis.

Within weeks of the executive order, Japanese-Americans were ordered to secure or sell their houses, liquidate their businesses and abandon their work or studies. They were told to report to “assembly centers” with only the basic necessities — clothes, bed linens, toiletries and essential personal effects — they could carry. Pets were forbidden. Major household items were stored by the federal government, but at the owners’ risk.

Conditions in the assembly centers, typically off-season race tracks, unused fairgrounds or stockyards, were abysmal. Families lived in tiny, often windowless stalls that were invaded by insects and smelled of urine and horse manure. The detainees were eventually relocated to newly built camps in remote areas, where they remained — beset by illness and depression, and surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards — for the war’s duration.

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Photographing such conditions was not new to Ms. Lange. As a member of the documentary project of the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s, she chronicled the lives of the rural poor. She was a masterful portrait photographer, affording her underprivileged subjects, of all races, the same respect as she did her more affluent clients and subjects. Like her F.S.A. photographs, her images of incarcerated Japanese-Americans are notable for their compassion and empathy, capturing the self-possession, complexity and struggles of Americans victimized by stereotypes and viewed by many as criminals.

According to Ms. Gordon, Ms. Lange was angry at what she encountered in the camps: “The documentary style she had developed in the 1930s was inherently critical, and viscerally, emotionally so.” Yet, interestingly, she provided no images of resistance. “Of course the Army would not let her near any evidence of it, and she did her work so early in the development of the camps that resistance may not yet have developed,” Ms. Gordon surmised.

Ms. Lange’s photographs remain as relevant as ever. Anti-immigrant, racist and nationalist fervor are again on the rise. And some are championing the censoring, limiting or discrediting of reporting in order to manipulate news and information.

“Despite the yawning gap between prewar generations and those born after the war,” the historian and artist Patricia Wakida wrote in the preface to the groundbreaking anthology “Only What We Could Carry: The Japanese American Internment Experience,” “there is nevertheless an unnerving familiarity to many of the dark themes running through this book. The neighbor who watches from a safe distance, the church employee who tries to make the best of a horrible situation, the racist politician whose vitriol fires up others with hated, the anguished apologist who accepts egregious injustice as necessity, the victim who blames himself such voices are still heard today. … The targets have changed, but the themes have remained constant.”

Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

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