In 2006, a book collection of Lange’s wide portfolio of Japanese American internment was published under the title, “Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment.”

Manzanar Relocation Center, Manzanar, California. Grandfather and grandson of Japanese ancestry at this War Relocation Authority center.

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A grandfather and grandson of Japanese ancestry at the Manzanar Relocation Center in Manzanar, California.

Dorothea Lange / United States National Archives


Linda Gordon, a historian at New York University who edited the book, maintained that the temporary suppression of Lange’s photography was not by happenstance.

“The photographs were impounded because they were unmistakably critical,” she wrote in the Asia-Pacific Journal. “They unequivocally denounced, visually, an unjustified, unnecessary, and racist policy.”

Source: Asia-Pacific Journal