Episitolary Letter (cr #1)

Mrs. Dorothea Lange,

Reading your book on the interment of Japanese Americans is something that strikes a chord. It must have been the absolute toughest assignment you have had to date, yet you seemed to work at it so effectively and with so much emotion that the point you made stuck in everybody who have read the book or seen the pictures. The pictures themselves tell the ultimate story of how a country built with the labor and sweat of immigrants, who is land of the free and home to the brave, would treat its own citizen’s. All because of suspicions that had no true grounds; one man’s nervous hunch caused thousands of people to loose their job’s, money, respect, and their home; caused thousands of people to suffer for years in interment camps all over “this great nation of ours.” It is a though reality to accept for many people who have witnessed this and even for your friends and colleagues.

You took this assignment to help the war effort and the US government, but when you were first approached with the assignment what were your thoughts? Did you go into the job with a thought of this being another documentary similar to the days of The Great Depression? If I was in your position and offered to do this assignment I don’t think anything could have prepared me for what awaited me. Yet you took this and bit your lip and did the best job you could have. You decided that instead of documenting what the government wanted you documented what the people being interred were going through in the rawest form.

Though who would have ever thought that our country, who kicks the door down of any country or nation that creates oppression, would kick down the doors of its own citizens? The biggest blunder in the history of the US next to the unfair treatment and near EXTERMINATION of the Native American people’s, and nobody says a single thing. The same thing was happening by the Nazi’s, only the US did not go so far as Hitler. Yet I shudder to think what could have happened if the interment had gone on in total secret what could have happened. I wish I could go back in time and supply you with the technology we have today to give your pictures and story a voice to scream out across the world about the injustice that is happening.

I think it would have been an interesting assignment to follow the people who were interred after they were released and photograph their lives and struggles of having to start over from scratch. But people would see this and still think of how the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and would not think about the other innocent that died in camps and suffered. Neither the sailors and marines that died at Pearl Harbor nor the Japanese American citizen’s who were interred and who died in the camps deserved their fate. No matter the color of their skin or ethnic background. I know Ansel Adams was also shooting alongside of you for a while, as much as I love his work, he was not suited for the job that demanded a certain eye and amount of compassion. He went in to the camp set on documenting the camp the same way he took pictures in Yosemite and Yellowstone. Yet this assignment demanded something much more out of anyone despite the government’s strict instructions.

I think you deserve to be recognized for what you did and held in the highest esteem. The world needs more role models like you, somebody who can take a simple task and turn into what it needs to become, a statement, an emotion, and voice for the voiceless. I only wish we could have met in person.

Sincerely and respectfully,

Greg Dzierzkowski