Photographs of life in Manzanar, an American internment camp for Japanese Americans

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, the US government ordered all Japanese Americans (two thirds of them American citizens) living on the West Coast to report to assembly centres for eventual transfer to internment camps.

Project Director Ralph Merritt hired photographers Dorothea Lange Ansel Adams to document life at the camp. Lange and Adams were joined by WRA photographers Russell Lee, Clem Albers and Francis Stewart. (Lange was fired after a few months for her "sympathetic" approach.) Two Japanese internees, Toyo Miyatake and Jack Iwata, secretly photographed life within the camp with a smuggled camera. Their images have been gathered together in a new book, Displaced: Manzanar 1942 - 1945.

More: Creative Boom