The Wire

During the second world war the American government decided to round up 120 thousand Americans of Japanese heritage and placed them in ten intern camps. Despite the camps being in poor conditions, the war relocation authority commissioned Dorothea Lang, a documentary photographer, to take photographs of the camps and people in themLang did her job very well, in fact too well, after the War Relocation Authority saw her photos, they decided they were far too inflammatory for publication and they were confiscated. Now the photos have been collected and published in a book called Impounded and one of the Editors Professor Linda Gordon, professor of History at New York University explains why the WRA wanted a photographic record of the camps