Home»Death Valley- Manzanar

These photographs were taken on a five day trip to Death Valley and the Manzanar Historical Site, via Shoshone and Lone Pine. They were all taken on Hasselblad X1D II and 907X-CFV50 2 bodies with Hasselblad XCD lenses.

The landscape is stunning, surreal, and geologically fascinating. Death Valley itself is a great plane of salt, now lying several hundred feet below sea level --see the photograph labelled Sea Level.

Manzanar is the historical remains of the place of internment of Japanese people (varying between 5,000 and 10,000) during WW2. Many of them were natural born American citizens. Save for the visitor center, which is the old community hall that the Japanese inhabitants built, and the monolithic Memorial site there are virtually no remains of Manzanar, the town that had barracks housing thousands of families. The 5700 acres that was the site of Manzanar are now largely returned to the natural state of the surrounding landsscape. The Memorial, with its chains of origami cranes on one of the surrounding posts, is a silent reminder of those troubled times.

The photograph of the Memorial here follows the footsteps of Ansel Adams who made a similar composition here while photographing Manzanar and its inhabitants during the war. His book Born Free and Equal is an eloquent tribute to the resilience of the Japanese people and the injustices and complications of the Manzanar experience.

The picture sequence follows our path from the village of Shoshone close to the southeast border of the park, through the main area around Furnace Creek, and then west and north to Lone Pine and Manzanar.