Toyo Miyatake's presence grows in L.A.'s Little Tokyo

On my recent trip to Los Angeles, I met with three people who are making a difference in the L.A Nikkei community, Bill Watanabe, executive director of the Little Tokyo Service Center and president of the Little Tokyo Historical Society, and Vicky Murakami-Tsuda and Yoko Nishimura of the Japanese American National Museum.

Little Tokyo is no longer the sleepy enclave of Nisei-run stores and restaurants that I remember, its whiff of modern-day Japan emanating from the New Otani Hotel. There are fewer Japanese residents now, a burgeoning Korean population, and an active night-life scene animated by hipsters of all nationalities. The wildly popular Kogi BBQ-to-go truck, which makes regular stops in Little Tokyo to dispense Korean-Mexican hybrid comfort food (kimchee quesadillas!), is emblematic of the new Little Tokyo.   

En route from Curry House in Weller Court to LTSC’s offices on East Third Street, Watanabe showed me another change, one that harks back to the even earlier time of the pre-War Little Tokyo Issei. A newly named street, Toyo Miyatake Way, and a full-scale bronze relief of the pioneering Issei photographer now draw the viewer's eye in front of the Sakura Crossing luxury apartment complex on San Pedro Street between East Second and Third Streets. Watanabe, whose passion is preserving Little Tokyo History, convinced Sakura Crossing’s developer, Related, that the street and relief would be an ideal way to give back to the community, and the new landmarks were inaugurated in February before a crowd that included Watanabe, city dignitaries, proud Miyatake family members and Related representatives.

Miyatake is most famous for smuggling camera parts into Manzanar, the World War II concentration camp where he and his family were imprisoned in April 1942. First surreptitiously (cameras were forbidden in all 10 concentration camps), then, as rules loosened and he gained the trust of the prison director, openly, Miyatake took 1,500 photographs of Manzanar. The relief, which is modeled on a photograph of Miyatake believed to have been taken right after the war, bears this quotation: “Smuggling a lens into Manzanar, this is my duty, to document camp life so this kind of injustice never happens again.”

Miyatake and his family could have relocated to Salt Lake City, Chicago, or New York, as some Japanese did to avoid evacuation and imprisonment amid the rabid anti-Japanese fervor that swept the West Coast after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Instead, the fine art and Japanese society portrait photographer, then 47, chose to stay. He was forced to shutter his Little Tokyo photographic studio, but requested that his family be evacuated and imprisoned with the Little Tokyo residents that he felt most kinship with, rather than his East Los Angeles neighbors. It was in Little Tokyo's effervescent cultural and arts scene of the 1920s where he first made his name, and became the go-to photographer to record births, graduations, weddings—any event of note in the personal and civic lives of L.A. Japantown's residents.

As his reputation grew, Miyatake and his wife Hiroko became tireless hosts to a stream of Japanese dignitaries from film stars to athletes. Before and after the war, a trip to Los Angeles by a celebrated Japanese national almost inevitably involved a visit to the Toyo Miyatake Studio to pose for a portrait. “The portrait file in his studio is in itself a history of cultural exchange between the United States and Japan,” wrote the Japanese photographer and editor Eikoh Hosoe; Miyatake played the role of a “private consular representative, taking care of the Japanese who visited the United States.” Miyatake also landed jobs as personal photographer to Thomas Mann and John Barrymore, and became a disciple of Edward Weston, whose work he tirelessly promoted.

Where Miyatake’s career would have gone had he not been imprisoned during World War II is unknowable, but his contribution to the documentation of the unjust and unconstitutional prison camp experience is clear cut. Happily, there seems to be a growing appreciation of Miyatake. Little Tokyo’s first tribute to him, sculptor Nobuho Nagasawa's  bronze replica of his hand-made camera, is on view in front of the Japanese American National Museum on East First Street. An exhibit of Miyatake’s photographs is showing, for a short time longer, at the Tolerance Education Center in Rancho Mirage, CA. I’m glad to see the addition of Toyo Miyatake Way and the bronze relief—further assurance that one of our cultural heroes will not soon be forgotten.

Friends With Differences: Lange and Adams at the Oakland Museum of California

When you are researching a topic, somehow relevant stories seem to appear all around you. So it was with this Wall Street Journal story today, on two photography sections in the newly renovated Oakland Museum of California. One is on the work of photographer Dorothea Lange, and one on Group f/64, a group of Bay Area photographers that included Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Imogen Cunningham.

The two exhibitions highlight two opposing currents in the fertile Northern California photographic scene in the first half of the twentieth century. Lange, who learned her craft as a studio photographer, was radicalized by the poverty she witnessed during the Depression and the migrant farm workers she photographed for the Farm Security Administration. She viewed herself as a documentarian; technique was secondary to her attempt to honestly portray the dispossessed.

Adams and his group argued for a move beyond the romantic, gauzy Pictorialism of the nineteenth century, and for photography as a pure art form. It could be abstract, reflecting the modernist themes emerging in the fine art world at the time, or realistic depictions of nature that, like Adams’ work, reflected the timeless and the sublime through subtle and exact calibrations of framing, aperture, light and developing techniques.

William Meyers’ Journal article discusses the sometimes prickly friendship between Adams and Lange, described by Sandra S. Phillips, the senior curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as “a friendship with differences.” These differences were most obvious in Lange’s and Adams’ treatment of the World War II California concentration camp for Japanese Americans, Manzanar. Lange portrayed the sorrow, loss and injustice of the mass imprisonment (an example of her work above, left), while Adams (portrait from Manzanar, below)fashioned a positive image of the Japanese as “loyal Americans” displaying their mettle through obedience and elevated by the majesty of their high desert surroundings.

Meyers notes that the differences between the two photographers live on in their treatment of their photographic legacy. Lange wanted to make the personal archive she donated to the Oakland Museum—including 6,000 prints and 25,000 negatives—available to the public. Adams’ archive is held at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, but is tightly controlled by the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust.

Although Adams donated his Manzanar photographs to the Library of Congress, he omitted several iconic images he took on his Manzanar trip: Winter Sunrise, The Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine California 1944 and Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California. These images had become a valuable source of income that Adams sought to protect.

In 1944 Adams published a cheaply printed, two-dollar paperback book of his Manzanar photos, Born Free and Equal. Featuring 64 photos and text he wrote himself, it was among the top-ten books sold in San Francisco that year, although it was poorly distributed beyond the Bay Area. In his later years, Adams claimed that the military had confiscated a large number of copies and destroyed them because of its perceived anti-Americanism. At the time of publication, some critics praised Adams for his moral courage while others vilified him for sympathizing with the enemy.

Perhaps as a result of the criticism received by Born Free and Equal or to keep the highly lucrative Adams’s legacy free of political taint, the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust refused to approve the re-publication of Born Free and Equal in 2002 by the small California press Spotted Dog. This caused much anguish for publisher Wynne Benti, who recalled that the months she fought to complete the project as among the most difficult of her life. “I remember being at the UCLA book festival,” Benti told me. “People walked away and refused to buy the book because it was not approved by the trust.” In the end, Benti was forced to leave out Born Free and Equal’s powerful nature photographs.

Stay tuned. I am putting the finishing touches on my piece on Adams, Lange and Manzanar prisoner/photographer Toyo Miyatake and hope to make it available soon!

Historian Linda Gordon’s new Dorothea Lange bio

I attended a fascinating discussion recently at the New York Public Library, featuring NYU history professor Linda Gordon in conversation with New Yorker writer Ian Frazier. The topic of discussion was Gordon’s extensively researched and beautifully written new biography, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (W.W. Norton & Co.).

Lange was a force of nature, a fiercely determined and ambitious woman who overcame a physical disability—a lame leg—to become a titan of documentary photography and a lifelong advocate for the dishonored and the neglected. Most famously, she chronicled the plight of migrant farm workers, southern sharecroppers and other victims of the Great Depression.

The portion of Lange’s work that initially interested me most, however, was the 800 or so photographs she took of the evacuation and imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Included are pictures of the California camp Manzanar, where my father spent part of his boyhood. The photographic documentation of Manzanar by Lange, Ansel Adams and a Japanese prisoner and photographer Toyo Miyatake, is a topic I have been writing about; I hoped to learn more from Gordon about the nature of the professional and personal relationship between Lange and Adams.

Lange made a name for herself with her work in the 1930s for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), and believed wholeheartedly in the FSA’s goal of creating a democratic agricultural policy. Yet when another government agency, the U.S. Army’s Western Defense Command, hired her to document the uprooting and incarceration of the Japanese Americans, she could not support the government’s actions. She was highly critical of what she saw, and her photographs reflected those views. Instead of circulating Lange’s photographs, the government impounded them during the war, later slipping them without fanfare into the National Archives. Gordon and co-author Gary Y. Okihiro wrote about these photographs in their 2006 book Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment.

In a slide show presentation before the Q&A, Gordon described how, despite her “enormous love and admiration for [President] Franklin D. Roosevelt” (with whom she shared the physical ravages of polio), Lange became convinced that the President’s treatment of Japanese Americans was “an atrocity.” The photographer and her husband, UC Berkeley economist Paul Taylor, were vocal critics of the Japanese imprisonment at a time when few whites spoke publicly against F.D.R.’s decision.

Gordon showed some of Lange’s photographs of the concentration camps, including a grizzled-looking Manzanar prisoner with his young grandson [Lange had a talent for showing the bonds between fathers and children], and others that captured the harsh conditions, sadness and despair of prison life. She compared Lange’s portraits to those of Ansel Adams, whom she described as “not an opponent of internment.” Adams wanted to portray the Japanese as “unthreatening” and “to prettify, to disguise the real meaning of the internment,” Gordon explained.

The relationship between Lange and Adams was not always a smooth one. “They fought a lot,” said Gordon, who shared examples of the type of lively insults the two friends and rivals often traded. Lange once commented that Adams, most famous for his heroic landscapes of the Sierra Nevada and the West, “made rocks look like people.” Adams, in turn, sniped that documentary photographers “were social scientists with cameras.” Yet despite their open arguments, the two shared a deep and lasting friendship, Gordon said. Adams visited Lange when she was sick, wrote admiring and complimentary letters to her, and even did darkroom work for her occasionally. In its volatile ups and downs, explained Gordon, their relationship was “almost familial.”

In Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, Gordon writes that “Adams and Lange quarreled all their lives,” as one observer noted, like feuding standup comics or the bickering partners on cop shows. Their political disagreements were “fundamental,” too. Lange was a natural champion of the oppressed. One-third of her photos, said Gordon, were of people of color, although government censorship hid this fact for years. Adams had a knack for befriending the rich and the powerful, and lived a life of what Lange considered unseemly luxury. His Manzanar photographs were his only professional foray into charged political or racial territory. Yet at the same time, Gordon writes, “Adams deeply respected, championed and promoted her photography.”In 1954, when Lange was asked by U.S. Camera to name the 25 greatest photographs of all time, she included an Adams’ photograph of an Alaskan mountain scene.

For me, knowing how differently their photographs of the World War II imprisonment have been accepted and interpreted over the years, Adams’ with intermittent hostility, and Lange’s with increasing admiration, the idea that these two photographers were lifelong friends is somehow touching, attesting to an artistic and professional bond that was deeper than the choices they made in the political and material worlds.


Although Gordon and Frazier covered many other facets of Lange’s life and work during the Q&A, I will briefly mention only one here: Lange’s most famous image, “Migrant Mother,” and the issue of Lange’s own role as a mother. Although this portrait of a migrant farm worker, Florence Thomas, and her three children has come to symbolize the hardship of the Dust Bowl “Okies,” Thomas was actually a Cherokee Indian. Lange “felt her anxiety,” said Gordon, “because it was hers as well.” The tale of Lange’s own “fraught motherhood” to two sons and a step-daughter, Gordon admitted, was one of the hardest parts of her life to write about. The photographer’s ambition and drive led her to put her two sons, Dan, 7, and John, 4, into the equivalent of foster homes while she traveled the West on photo assignments. Both sons, said Gordon, had “a store of bitter memories” of their childhood, “but also tremendous admiration and pride” for what their mother had accomplished.

It was only after Lange left her first husband, painter Maynard Dixon (Gordon describes him as “the husband from hell” who took little interest in his children and turned them over to Lange for tending) and married Tayolor that she was able to cease being the bread winner for the family and achieve greatness as a photographer, Gordon noted.

My initial interest in Lange was for her documentation of the Japanese evacuation and imprisonment. I now see her as a role model for any woman wrestling with the traditional roles of wife and mother and at the same time trying to make a difference, to leave a mark.