Two
Views: Photographs by Ansel Adams and Leonard Frank opens February 19, exactly 75
years to the day after United
States President Franklin D. Roosevelt
signed Executive Order 9066 during World War II, authorizing the Secretary of War to
designate certain areas as military zones, and clearing the way for some
120,000 Japanese Americans to be incarcerated in camps scattered
throughout the American West. Canada also participated, establishing the
British Columbia Security Commission to forcibly relocate approximately 22,000
Japanese Canadians to hastily planned camps in the British Columbia interior,
and to work and road camps in other parts of the country. This compelling collection of
photographs — 40 by Ansel Adams and 26 by Leonard Frank — presents two views of
internment and incarceration in the early 1940s and provides an opportunity to
reflect on the nature of reactionary politics, racism, and forced separation,
and the resulting effects on victims.