Tanforan Assembly Center - Prelude To The Internment

Dorothea Lange: Library of Congress

May 8, 1942: Nearly 8,000 Bay Area residents of Japanese ancestry were preparing to relocate to the Tanforan Assembly Center south of San Francisco, where they, along with Japanese Americans across the country, were moved to one of the ten internment camps located in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Arkansas. Nearly all of them lost everything they owned: their homes, businesses, and personal possessions.

August 27, 2022: To mark the eightieth anniversary of the opening of the Tanforan  Assembly Center, a plaza was created at the San Bruno Bart Station featuring a bronze statue depicting two girls waiting in Hayward to be bussed to San Bruno. Famed Life photographer Dorothea Lange, well known for her images from the Great Depression, photographed sisters Miyuki and Hiroko Mochida as they waited for the bus, each carrying only what she could fit in one small suitcase.

The Assignment: The dedication of the plaza was scheduled to begin at 1:00 pm on Saturday, so true to form, I drove down to the plaza on Friday at 12:30 pm to scout out the venue. This would give me a chance to evaluate the light and find a "perch" from which to photograph. I found that the statue was located in one corner, facing towards the Bart Station entrance and away from the middle of the elevated plaza. I found that if I positioned myself at the very edge and used a wide angle lens, I could choose either a low angle to accentuate the statue itself, or a high angle to emphasize the crowd. From my shooting position, the statue would be perfectly back lit, so supplementary flash would be an absolute necessity.

Ribbon Cutting: The press release for the event stated there would be a ribbon cutting, even though there was no evidence of an "entrance", the usual location for such a ceremony. As it turned out, the cutting was only symbolic and located some distance away from the plaza. When the cutting was announced, I left my perch and quickly positioned myself in front of the red ribbon. I managed to get to a vacant front-row chair and waited for the actual slice. This shot caught me a little by surprise, as the ribbon was already floating away when the shot was made. The photo is a one-shot affair, since you cannot use the burst mode because an electronic flash couldn't keep up with the camera. Timing was everything, and it was a little off today.  But I had a usable image, but it lacked any real context to the event. I rushed back to my perch to wait for a better shot that included the statue. Incidentally, this group shot was a straight-out-of-camera (SOOC) shot. Had I submitted the image, the exposure would  have been adjusted in post production to recover details hiding in the underexposed areas.

The Unveiling: As you can see from this photo there was more space behind the statue than there was in the front. The organizers offered an interesting twist. The unveiling would be made from the rear so that more people could see it happen, after which they were encouraged to circle the statue and view it from the front. This eliminated the possibility of my taking a frontal photo of the moment of the unveiling, so the photographers standing with me had to wait for their own money shot to arrive. The gathering crowd provided the context and background I needed, so I shot quickly and frequently. 

The Technique: With my feet firmly on the ground, I held my camera over my head for some "Hail Mary" shots. With the LCD panel tilted down, I did my best to include the entire statue in the frame. I made nearly a dozen exposures, hoping that I'd find the perfect image when I scrolled through them later. I got lucky with this photo. So many of the guests had rapt expressions when viewing the statue, which meant that if you could see their faces, they were actually looking at the back of the statue, not the front. The camera was a Fuji X-T2 with the 18-55 F 2.8-4.0 kit lens, which I carry because of its compact size and light weight. The flash was a shoe-mounted Flashpoint Zoom LI-on X with its head tilted up slightly to minimize overexposure of  the nearest subjects. The flash's round head design provided a very gentle transition at the edges. The guests at the lower edge of the frame needed very little exposure adjustment, but otherwise, the photo was very much SOOC. Unfortunately the published image made the bronze appear more golden than it actually was.

I finally left the venue at 4:00 pm. It had been a long, hot day.   

Sandra Shaw, inspired by Dorothea Lange's photo, created the likenesses of the Mochida sisters in great detail, even down to their family name on the two small suitcases. Her work is incredibly nuanced, capturing the fear and anxiety of two little girls caught up in the anti-Asian hysteria of the time. It is an incredibly moving sculpture, a reminder of the dangers of racial and cultural prejudices, and the innocent victims they claim.