Open in 1942, the Manzanar War Relocation Center was one of 10 facilities where Japanese Americans were incarcerated by the United States government during World War II. In 1943, the influential photographer Ansel Adams was invited to photograph the facility. In this lesson, students examine five photographs from Ansel Adams's Photographs of Japanese-American Internment at Manzanar to consider the relative strengths and limitations of historical photographs and to answer the central historical question: What can Adams's photographs tell us about the living conditions at Manzanar?
Image: Photograph of the Miyatake family at Manzanar in 1943. From the Library of Congress.
