Dorothea Lange and Me

In February, 1942, Executive Order 9066 was signed by President Roosevelt. It resulted in the forced removal of Japanese American citizens and aliens from their homes and into internment camps. I made this project to honor those who experienced this unjust mass incarceration solely based on heir ancestral lineage, including my grandfather and his family - it wasn’t that long ago.

In the summer of 2018, I had the opportunity to photograph and respond to the Tule Lake internment camp where my family lived for four years, being stripped of all of their possessions excluding what they could carry in a suitcase. When I visited the camp, very little remained on the dry, desolate land, however I did have the chance to visit the prison within the prison as well as the few dilapidated buildings that remained. These images are a combination of my response to the site composited with some of Dorothea Lange’s iconic images of the camps during WWII. I hope in this Information Age - as we are constantly exposed to (new) information from different people’s varied perspectives based on individual experiences - that we are able to reasonably consider the humanity within the diversity that makes up human life and that we are able to actively practice compassion and pause for a moment to try to understand one another.