Stories

Annika Singh '23 presented "Representing Displacement: Dorothea Lange in WWII" at the Bay Area Art History Undergraduate Symposium. She presented alongside students from Berkeley, Stanford, Mills College, St. Mary's, University of San Francisco, and California College of the Arts.

Annika's research focused on Dorothea Lange's photography of the evacuation of Japanese-Americans to internment camps and the conditions of life at the camps. Lange's narrative, constructed by her photographs, displays opposition to the internment and is why the War Relocation Authority, which originally hired her, never circulated the images. Instead, they hid the photographs away in the National Archives. A comparison of Lange’s photographs of the Manzanar internment camp with others taken by Ansel Adams in 1943 reveals a sharp contrast between the two photographers’ approaches to the internment and U.S. narrative of freedom and equal treatment under the law. Lange’s candid images capture raw and humanizing moments that generate sympathy from those who see them, while Adams’ photographs construct a story of contentment which sidesteps the civil rights issues raised by the internment order.