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Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment Paperback – Illustrated, February 17, 2008

4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 158 ratings

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"Unflinchingly illustrates the reality of life during this extraordinary moment in American history."―Dinitia Smith, The New York Times

Censored by the U.S. Army, Dorothea Lange's unseen photographs are the extraordinary photographic record of the Japanese American internment saga. This indelible work of visual and social history confirms Dorothea Lange's stature as one of the twentieth century's greatest American photographers. Presenting 119 images originally censored by the U.S. Army―the majority of which have never been published―Impounded evokes the horror of a community uprooted in the early 1940s and the stark reality of the internment camps. With poignancy and sage insight, nationally known historians Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro illuminate the saga of Japanese American internment: from life before Executive Order 9066 to the abrupt roundups and the marginal existence in the bleak, sandswept camps. In the tradition of Roman Vishniac's A Vanished World, Impounded, with the immediacy of its photographs, tells the story of the thousands of lives unalterably shattered by racial hatred brought on by the passions of war. A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2006. 104 black-and-white photographs
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Editorial Reviews

Review

[The] images show Americans of Japanese extraction being relocated to 'assembly centers', labeled and processed like cattle and closeted away in dismal shacks for the duration of the war... No wonder her pictures were never used and disappeared for half a century. "

[T]he bulk of the book is given over to Lange's photographs. Several of these are as powerful as her most stirring work, and the final image of a grandfather in the desolate Manzanar Center looking down in anguish at the grandson between his knees is worth the price of the book alone. "

In these days of fear of the terrorist 'other', reading this measured, intelligent introduction to a time that is all-too possible to imagine recurring, and looking at Lange's photos... may be one of the most useful things one can do this Christmas. "

Through her discerning and sensitive eye, Lange's observations of the situation were too real and too critical for the government, and were consequently confiscated. "

About the Author

Winner of two Bancroft Prizes for best book in American history, Linda Gordon is the author of The Second Coming of the KKK and a biography of photographer Dorothea Lange. She lives in New York and Madison, Wisconsin.

Gary Y. Okihiro is the author of Whispered Silences: Japanese Americans and World War II and Common Ground: Reimagining American History. He is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York City.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (February 17, 2008)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 224 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393330907
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393330908
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.26 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.1 x 0.7 x 9.3 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 158 ratings

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4.7 out of 5 stars
158 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book insightful and interesting. They appreciate the introductory essays that provide context and intellectual depth. The photos are great and show in detail how the government covered up the Japanese prison cover-up. Overall, it's a fantastic resource for history teachers.

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12 customers mention "Enlightenedness"12 positive0 negative

Customers find the book insightful and interesting. The introductory essays provide context that is important and well-written. Readers describe it as a fantastic resource for history teachers, revealing, and provocative. They appreciate the information and photos that they have never seen before. Overall, it's an important book in the study of Japanese Americans.

"This is a great read to understand US history from a perspective rarely taught in schools...." Read more

"...dispossession and internment during WWII is very clear and provokes thought...." Read more

"Mostly a photographic essay, but with two introductory essays of intellectual heft, the work represents probably the most readily accessible adult..." Read more

"...Lots of information and photos that I have never seen before. Great resource for Japanese Internment." Read more

10 customers mention "Photography"10 positive0 negative

Customers appreciate the book's photography. They say the photographer is amazing and that the photos show in great detail how the government covered up the Japanese prison.

"...The pictures mostly speak for themselves. The introductory essays assign context that is both important and well formulated...." Read more

"...The photography by Dorothea Lange is as always superior. She is by far one of the greatest people who lived and walked on this earth...." Read more

"...The book itself is produced well with very good photo reproduction. It will be a personal favorite and a classroom resource for a long time." Read more

"...Lange's photos are beautiful and the printing doesn't do them justice...." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on November 27, 2024
    This is a great read to understand US history from a perspective rarely taught in schools. I highly recommend this book to help students understand recent history through the eyes of those in the Japanese American Internment camps.
  • Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2022
    The terrible injustice of Japanese-American dispossession and internment during WWII is very clear and provokes thought. Plus, there's a kind of conversation going on with the photographer: Ms. Lange, did you choose to highlight these words on a box so I'd go on and think X and Y? Are you hoping I can imagine on my own a bigger scenario here? The book is worth pondering and re-pondering.
    One person found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2011
    To our nation's everlasting shame, FDR on February 18, 1942, ordered the roundup and incarceration of some 110,000 Japanese Americans, well more than half of them U.S. citizens and life-long residents. They were given barely more than enough time to pack a tooth brush and a change of underwear before they were forced to leave their homes. They were denied the opportunity to prove their loyalty to their country. Thus did FDR respond to the December 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ("a date that will live in infamy") by an infamous action of his own against his own people.

    But for Dorothea Lange's remarkable photographs of this egregious episode in our racist past (German and Italian Americans were treated with much more deference), we would have a far less meaningful record of the wrongs visited on Americans of Japanese ancestry. The story of how the photographs came to be taken is told in the first of two long chapters of "Impounded." The second long chapter is an account of the "profound effects in the Japanese American community" of its members long internment in what were barely more than concentration camps.

    First published five years ago, some 65 years after the events portrayed, Lange's photographs reveal her sympathy for her subjects. One will search the photographs in vain for any evidence that these Americans either singularly or as a group posed any threat to our security. Not one of pictures could, by any stretch of FDR's war driven imagination, be used to show that the internment program was justified. No wonder, then, that the government suppressed their publication, impressing the word "impounded" on the prints.

    "Impounded" tells two stories, both important to our understanding of the period. The first, the one told in the photographs, is that of the nature of, and the effects of, the unjustified deprivation of the civil rights on an entire subset of the American population. The second story, unspoken except by implication, is of the government's acknowledgment of the wrongs committed by its need to impound these photographs. Linda Gordon and Gary Okihhiro, the editors of "Impounded", demonstrate just how fragile our liberties are and how much is required of us all to prevent their erosion by our government. It can happen here.

    End note. An earlier review by Rollin Drew sharply criticizes the publisher for the inferior quality of the book's reproductions of Lange's extraordinary photographs. He may well be right as a technical matter. But on the level at which this book spoke to me, the quality of the prints amply reveals Lange's remarkable courage in challenging the underlying need for the relocation program and by showing the scarring hardships it imposed on our fellow citizens. See if you don't agree.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on March 21, 2024
    There’s a little bow in the front hardcover but the book is otherwise in excellent shape, including the dust jacket. Shipping was prompt.
  • Reviewed in the United States on December 29, 2011
    Perhaps the most racist and unconstitutional program the U.S. government engaged in against its own citizens over the past century was the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. In the first half of 1942 about 110,000 Japanese-Americans - most of whom had been born in the United States and were U.S. citizens, and many of whom had close relatives actually fighting for the country in the U.S. military - were shipped off to ten concentration camps and rather Spartan living conditions in the hinterlands for the duration of the War. This book tells and illustrates much of the injustice of that program, but not in a wholly satisfactory way.

    As Gary Y. Okihoro writes in his contribution to this book, "As the nation prepared to defend democracy against the threat of fascism, its leaders authorized and conducted undemocratic actions that bypassed and ignored constitutional guarantees and freedoms." It is impossible to justify that irony. The program was conducted pursuant to Executive Order 9066, which Franklin D. Roosevelt issued in February 1942, in the wake of Pearl Harbor. But the seeds of the program long pre-dated Pearl Harbor. One of the sorry facts I learned from Okihoro's essay was that as early as August 1936 FDR was advocating that the military compile a secret list of those Japanese "who would be the first to be placed in a concentration camp in the event of trouble." FDR deserves praise for his overall sympathy for the common man and woman, but as regards the Japanese he had a racist blind spot.

    Based in large part on her famous photographs taken for the Farm Security Administration during the Depression, Dorothea Lange was engaged by the government to document the "relocation" (the preferred euphemism) of the Japanese-Americans. The War Relocation Authority probably hoped that her photographs would generate support for its program, just as her Depression photographs had done for the FSA. But that would have required photographs of happy, smiling, contented incarcerates - subjects hard to find. Plus, Lange refused to be co-opted into promoting a lie. Instead, as a body of work her photographs "challenged the political culture that categorized people of Japanese ancestry as disloyal, perfidious, and potentially traitorous, that stripped them of their citizenship and made them un-American." So the WRA declined to publish the vast majority of Lange's photographs, instead quietly depositing them in the National Archive.

    IMPOUNDED tells the above tale in three sections. First there is an essay by Linda Gordon about Dorothea Lange that focuses primarily on her work for the WRA. Second is an essay by Gary Y. Okihoro that discusses the history of American discrimination against Japanese immigrants and especially the various manifestations of that racism during World War II. Third is a collection of slightly over 100 of the photographs that Dorothea Lange took in 1942 of Japanese-Americans (a) during the days before the evacuation, (b) being rounded up, (c) living in rather squalid conditions at various assembly centers, and (d) as imprisoned at Manzanar, the largest of the ten camps.

    Now why do I say the book is not wholly satisfactory? First, as other reviewers have noted, the photographs, as reproduced here, tend to be disappointingly small in size and of middling quality. Some of the more poignant and striking of the photographs can also be found, larger and better reproduced, in "Executive Order 9066" by Maisie and Richard Conrat (which, incidentally, I recommend over this book for those who are primarily looking for photographs of the internment program). Second, both of the authors - Okihoro more so than Gordon - are too tendentious and heavy-handed for my taste. It's a rather small point, and a condemnatory attitude is understandable, but the injustice of the internment program is manifest from any sober, objective recounting of the facts and does not need to be constantly underscored with judgmental cynicism and pathos. I would have preferred that the book left the propaganda to Lange and her more nuanced photographs.
    21 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on January 24, 2021
    How many people know that the US government impounded all people of Japanese ancestry in fenced in, guarded camps, living in conditions that I consider horrible? Even if you've heard this you might not know that Dorothea Lange, a well known photographer, was sent to these camps to show that the interred Japanese were not being mistreated. She followed orders: no pictures of the barbed wire fence, no pictures of soldiers with guns. Nonetheless when the people at the Dept of Defense saw her photos, they impounded them! They did not permit them to be released. For several decades after the end of WWII, after Dorothea Lange had died, they were hidden. Finally they were released to the library of Congress, with no announcement and no fanfare. But they were found and this book was produced. Get it and see what a misguided government policy can do, when fear of foreigners overwhelms rational judgement. With original comments by the photographer.
    6 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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  • Gordon Wilson
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great buy
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 11, 2023
    Wonderful read.
  • Marco Priori
    5.0 out of 5 stars interessante
    Reviewed in Italy on December 28, 2020
    storico
  • David Johns
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in Canada on August 14, 2014
    It's not about the photographs.
  • Mr. N. G. AUSTIN
    3.0 out of 5 stars A gap filler but falls short of its potential
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 11, 2009
    The book is not as well printed as it should have been - so the reproductions of rare Dorothea Lange images are of distressingly mediocre quality. This is a pity. Anybody interested in this period of Dorothea Lange's work will probably feel very frustrated by both their quality and number. The book's two editors/essayists are both historians and write interestingly on Lange's biography and its political context and on the day to day Japanese-American experience, but a third was needed; someone who has a primary understanding of and interest in her images and practice; the book shows the absence of a photographic curator.