Two Views: Photographs by Ansel Adams and Leonard Frank

The traveling exhibition Two Views: Photographs by Ansel Adams and Leonard Frank is now showing through May 17 at the Whatcom Museum, Old City Hall, in Bellingham.

Organized by the Nikkei National Museum and Cultural Centre in Burnaby, B.C., this compelling and thought provoking collection of black and white photographs by American photographer Ansel Adams and German-Canadian photographer Leonard Frank depicts two different perspectives of internment and incarceration of people of Japanese descent in the United States and Canada in the early 1940s following the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Adams’ photographs are beautifully composed, intimate portraits of life in the internment camp of Manzanar, in California. He focuses on the internees as people and shows inmates engaged in various activities: playing volleyball, exercising or performing their occupations as farmers, seamstresses, nurses or scientists. He also portrays family life in the internment camp.

Adams took the time to get to know his subjects.

He regularly includes their names in his titles.

In his individual portraits his subjects are for the most part relaxed and smiling.

Adams’ viewpoint is often from a lower position, looking up, which accentuates their stature and helps to create a sympathetic view.

According to the Library of Congress website (https://www.loc.gov/collections/ansel-adams-manzanar/about-this-collection/) a longtime employee of his parents was in poor health and still was summarily picked up and sent away.

This event angered Adams and moved him to document these people he saw as brave and persistent, surmounting the wretched conditions of forced incarceration.

His compassion imbues his images with a sense of optimism.

Adams’ visual gift is exemplified in Mr. Matsumoto and a group of children. The entire frame is filled with a group of children gathered around a smiling Mr. Matsumoto. At once I feel the cohesion. Balance is achieved by the central placement of the group, and also by its geometric shape, a triangle. Adams makes use of the converging lines of the handrails to draw the viewer’s eye upward, culminating in the main figure, further creating dynamic balance.

Frank’s images are equally exquisite. But rather than conveying a sense of optimism, as we see in Adams’ images, Frank’s photographs are stark and impersonal. His focus is on the buildings and structures of internment camp sites, not on the prisoners themselves. He presents living arrangements and spaces rather than the people who inhabited them. When he includes people, they are small and insignificant or display deadpan expressions. Unlike Adams, Frank titles his photographs by the structure: Building A, Building B. While the beauty of Franks’s prints is indisputable, the bleakness is disturbing.

Frank’s Building E, Men’s Dining Room shows a dark, cavernous room divided by wooden posts. Though high windows line the walls they seem to bring in little light. The frame is filled with long wooden tables set with identical metal plates and cups turned over on them, all lined up in rows and ready as a regiment. Not a soul is seated at the tables. Inconspicuous, on the far right side of the image, nearly off the frame, as if marginalized, a single individual stands, expressionless.

It is easy to grasp the inherent power of both photographers’ images. But the real strength of this exhibition is delivered in its totality. Both photographers viewed together present a sense of the whole. What Adams shows Frank does not; what Frank shows Adams does not.

In “seeing Two Views: Photographs by Ansel Adams and Leonard Frank” I come away with a single, deeper view of war internment. And together they summon us to reflect on our history as well as our present, on political reactivity, racism and forced separation, and the consequences for the victims.

Jane Alynn is a poet, essayist and photographer. She is the author of two collections of poems.

Larry Bullis was a photographer for Sunset Magazine and covered a number of regional stories, including the 1978 La Conner Smelt Derby.