 So the famed photographer, Ansel Adams, was a friend of the director who ran the Manzanar camp, one of 10 internment camps. And Ansel Adams asked if he could come visit the camp to shoot some photos. Now at the time, the War Relocation Authority, the federal government agency that was in charge of the camps, actually had an extensive project to document what life was like. But Ansel Adams just wanted to take his own photos, so he came out to Manzanar, which was an isolated place of stark beauty at the foot of the Sierra Nevadas, and shot an extensive series of beautiful black and white photos. These photos captured not just the majesty of the natural landscape, but the effort of Japanese Americans to recreate a sense of community, some semblance of a normal life with schools, newspapers, a bank, a post office and so on, to try to bring the sense for their families, for their children, that life would go on even behind barbed wire under gun towers and the watchful eye of soldiers. So Ansel Adams, because he was such a great photographer, was able to document some aspects of the internment that the government didn't want to have shown. They didn't want the barbed wire and the guard towers and the armed soldiers to be depicted, so they told Adams that he couldn't photograph those subjects directly. So what did he do? Well, he was very clever. He captured them in the background, in shadows. So in some of the photos, when you look, you can see just faintly that he's taking a photo of something, but in front of the photo you can see barbed wire, or on the ground you can see the shadow of barbed wire. Some of the photos even show the blurry outline of a soldier's shadow. And then for the gun towers, because he wasn't allowed to take photographs of them, he climbed on top of them and shot photographs looking down. That allows the viewer to infer that there must be some sort of very tall structure that you could climb up on top of to shoot the photos of. So what Adams wanted to do was show everything about the camps, both the sense that the camps were a place of confinement, loss of liberty, dignity, equality, yet coupled to that, the sense that here were people struggling under the circumstances to do the best that they could. The Manzanar camp hastily built with the quality of army barracks. These were just wood planks and tar paper ceilings. The wind, fierce wind in the deserts, winters, would blow through the cracks in these buildings that was chilling. Dust storms would arise in the summer as the temperature would climb well into the 100s. This was a place of hardship, a place where the photographs, because Adams had such artistry, it gives you a sense of beauty. But if you look closely, you can also understand what it must have been like to be confined, to have just a 20 by 20 room for an entire family, sometimes two families packed in there together with just a stove for heat with nothing that would help alleviate the brutal summers. A sense of what it was like to have just life inside a confined space. Inside these barracks were people suffered from tremendous doubt. They didn't know what would happen. Possessions had been taken away from them. Their bank accounts frozen. They had been put on trains and buses with the windows blacked out so people wouldn't know who was being led away. And they weren't told what would happen to them as the war went on for months and then eventually years, even though it became apparent that the United States would likely ultimately prevail. For these individuals, about 125,000 of them, two-thirds of them native-born citizens of this country, almost all of them of Japanese descent, would they be welcomed back in the hometowns from whence they had come? Because there had been such hostility, even before the war, people who wanted to drive them out, who said openly in a way that would surprise us today that California was for white men, for Christians only. So of course, many of the Japanese-Americans were very much assimilated. They loved baseball. They loved Hollywood movies and they were indeed Christians. There were many who wanted to exclude them and that's why there were alien land laws that forbade the first generation, those who had come from owning land. That's why there were naturalization laws that said if you were not a free white person, you could never become a citizen and equal a real member of this nation. And that's why there were laws about interracial marriage so that people who were of Japanese descent couldn't marry people who were white. And there were numerous other legal restrictions on their ability to obtain licenses to fish or to practice any type of profession all up and down the West Coast. So there was tremendous uncertainty, even though they tried, as best as they could to establish a sense of community and normal life, they wondered what beyond the barbed wire was left for them if the neighbors, the people whom they had called friends before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, would take them back, would accept them as equals.