Reviewed by DAVID COZY On Feb. 14, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed "Executive Order 9066, which gave to the military power to designate areas from which 'any and all persons may be excluded' . . ." and thus "some 120,000 Japanese Americans — two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens . . . — were forcibly and summarily removed from their homes and placed in concentration camps for the duration of the war."
A cursory examination of American history — and of America today — makes any affectation of surprise that the United States was involved in such a sordid enterprise ingenuous at best. One is amazed to learn, however, that not only was the government determined to keep a photographic record of these camps, but that it also hired one of America's finest photographers, Dorothea Lange, to produce that record.
The government did, to be sure, have second thoughts: Lange's photographs of the camps were impounded and suppressed until the end of World War II, and although barriers to publication were later lifted, most of the photographs Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro have assembled in "Impounded," had never before been published. This book is important, therefore, both for the light it throws on a shameful moment in American history and for the light it throws on Dorothea Lange's career.