Size 31 x 31 cm Pages 197 Binding Softcover Publication Date 1984 First edition Publisher Bungeishunju Condition Good
Toyo Miyatake Behind the Camera, 1923-1979
During World War II, Miyatake made surreptitious photographs of Japanese Americans incarcerated by the US government. He saw little need to glorify, humanize, or even individualize the prisoners—because he was one of them.
In 1942, Toyo Miyatake left his studio in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo and brought his wife and four children to the Manzanar concentration camp in the central Californian desert. Cameras were prohibited, so Miyatake snuck in a lens and fashioned a wooden box into a body for his surreptitious camera. “As a photographer, I have a responsibility,” he told his teenage son Archie. “I have to take all the pictures in Manzanar to keep a record of what’s going on here.”