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Thursday, January 13th, 2022
| Time | Event |
| 9:00a | Why the U.S. Photographed Its Own World War II Concentration Camps (and Commissioned Photographs by Dorothea Lange)
During World War II, the United States put thousands and thousands of its own citizens into concentration camps. The wartime internment of Japanese Americans is a well-known historical event, and also an unusually well-documented one — not just in the sense of having been documented copiously, but also with exceptional power and artistry. Much of that owes to the astute photographic observer of early 20th-century America Dorothea Lange, who had already won acclaim for her Great Depression-symbolizing Migrant Mother. Published in 1936, Migrant Mother was taken under the auspices of the U.S. Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration. In 1941, Lange abandoned a Guggenheim Fellowship to throw in with another government organization, the War Relocation Authority, and turn her lens on the interned. “After Japan’s bombing of the U.S. navy base at Pearl Harbor, a surprise attack that left over 2,000 Americans dead, Japanese Americans became targets of violence and increased suspicion,” says the narrator of the Vox Darkroom video above. Fearing the emergence of a “fifth column,” the government arranged the relocation of 120,000 Japanese Americans who had been living on the west coast into remote camps. “The Roosevelt administration wanted to frame the removal as orderly, humane, and above all, necessary.” Hence the creation of the WRA, a department charged with handling the removal, “and more importantly, documenting it, through propaganda films, pamphlets and news photographs.” The project could hardly have made a more prestigious hire than Lange, who proceeded to photograph “the rapid changes happening in Japanese American communities, including Japanese-owned farms and businesses shutting down.” Her work (see various examples here) captured the final days, even hours, of an established multi-generational society about to be dismantled by the mass evacuation. The Army disapproved of the narrative created by Lange’s candid photos, many of which were seized and impounded. The offending images depicted armed U.S. soldiers overseeing the removal process, “temporary prisons used while the concentration camps were built,” food lines at the assembly centers, and Japanese Americans in U.S. military uniform. Releasing Lange from the program after just four months, the WRA kept most of her photos out of the public eye. They stayed out of it until a series of exhibitions in the 1970s, which revealed the true nature of the concentration camps. That term is most associated with the Holocaust, to whose sheer destruction of humanity the Japanese American internment cannot, of course, be compared. But as Lange’s photographs show, just having the moral high ground over Nazi Germany is nothing to brag about. Related Content: 478 Dorothea Lange Photographs Poignantly Document the Internment of the Japanese During WWII How Dorothea Lange Shot Migrant Mother, Perhaps the Most Iconic Photo in American History Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japanese Cartoons During WWII, Then Atones with Horton Hears a Who! Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. Why the U.S. Photographed Its Own World War II Concentration Camps (and Commissioned Photographs by Dorothea Lange) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 12:00p | Bob Dylan’s Famous Televised Press Conference After He Went Electric (1965)
A too-cool-for-school rock star emerged from seemingly nowhere when Bob Dylan went electric at Newport with his touring band, the Band — a Dylan unrecognizable to the earnest folkies who followed Bob Dylan the Greenwich Village troubadour and protest singer. Where did the real Dylan go — the Dylan every singer/songwriter with an acoustic guitar tried to become, until the coffee shop scene sagged with thousands of Dylan-wannabees? Dont Look Back, warned D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 documentary on Dylan in his mid-sixties heyday. “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you,” said Satchel Paige, giving Pennebaker his title and Dylan a career outlook. Those who stay stuck in the past — even the very recent past — would never get it, like Mr. Jones in “Ballad of a Thin Man,” a song critic Andy Gill described as “a furious, sneering, dressing-down of a hapless bourgeois intruder into the hipster world of freaks and weirdoes which Dylan now inhabited.” Those who looked for answers found them blowing in the wind, even when they went straight to the source. Just above, see the only fully televised press conference Dylan ever gave, for KQED, the educational TV station in San Francisco. In attendance were members of the local and national press, reporters from several high school papers, Dylan’s entourage, and famous friends like Allen Ginsberg and promoter Bill Graham. It’s as much a performance as the next night’s show at the Berkeley Community Theater would be. “The questions,” notes Jonathan Cott, editor of The Essential Interviews, “ranged from standard straight press and TV reporters’ questions to teenage fan club questions to in-group personal queries and put ons, to questions by those who really had listened to Dylan’s songs.” Dylan’s demeanor during the interview was perfectly captured by Cate Blanchett’s Oscar-nominated performance of a character named “Jude Quinn” in Todd Haynes’ 2007 art-house biopic, I’m Not There. In scenes inspired by the KQED press conference, Blanchett-as-Quinn toys with the press, just as Dylan threw labels like “folk rock” back at them and refused to get drawn into discussions of philosophy or politics. “I think of myself more as a song and dance man, y’know,” he says in mock self-effacement, his gaze impenetrable behind Ray-Bans and clouds of cigarette smoke.
Dylan liked I’m Not There, a film that tells his story through six fictional characters, played by six different actors. (“Do you think that the director was worried that people would understand it or not?” he said. “I don’t think he cared one bit.”) Unlike “Jude Quinn,” his post-folk manifestation in the mid-sixties did not burn out and die in a motorcycle accident, and he didn’t sneer at every question, though he did say he wrote “Ballad of a Thin Man” as a “response to people who ask me questions all the time. You just get tired of that every once in a while…. I figure a person’s life speaks for itself, right?” But precisely what we do not find in Dylan’s music is biography. He keeps his interviewers (including Ginsberg, at 33:00 and Graham, at 25:31 ) guessing, often grasping after a soundbite that will sum up the new sound and image. Perhaps the most truthful one he gives them comes in response to the question, “What are you thinking about right now?” Dylan stares down at his cigarette, and the now-Nobel-prize-winning singer/songwriter says, “I’m thinking about this ash… the ash is creeping up on me somewhere — I’ve lost — lost touch with myself so I can’t tell where exactly it is.” Read a full transcript of the press conference here. Related Content: The Top 10 New Year’s Resolutions Read by Bob Dylan Tangled Up in Blue: Deciphering a Bob Dylan Masterpiece Josh Jones is a writer based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Bob Dylan’s Famous Televised Press Conference After He Went Electric (1965) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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