Kozol: The American government purposefully utilized photography – a medium perceived to be objective – in order to craft a sense of Japanese-American identity that simultaneously othered, recognized and rendered invisible those affected by Executive Order 9066.

Creef: The dominant visual narrative of the Japanese American experience within internment camps stems from the FSA, WRA and Office of War Information’s consistent interest in documenting the inhabitants of the camps, giving a face to the feared other, condemning the government’s actions and struggling to catalogue the camp experience.

Howard: In disrupting ideals of family, internment camp life overturned concepts of sexuality, gendered divisions of labor, and domesticity

Throughout these readings, I am struck by the notion of national identity, and specifically the ways in which WRA, FSA and Office of War Information photography aimed to locate interned Japanese Americans within American identity. While Professor Elena Creef speaks to the idea of the “national American consciousness” and John Howard mentions the “national family,” I wonder how national identity can represent a homogeneous, unified entity in the face of the blatant discrimination of internment camps.[1] Furthermore, many of the photographs reflected a certain American-ness and “familiarity,” raising the question of what project these images aimed to accomplish upon viewing by the government, the American public and the interned citizens.[2] Such an ideal is reminiscent of Benedict Anderson’s concept of the imagined community and the ways in which citizens imagine their nationality and nationalism. According to the author, nationalism is fundamentally imagined because no citizen will ever interact with every compatriot, but yet feels a fundamental affinity and camaraderie along national lines.[3] In this context, do the photographs commissioned by the American government work toward the conception of a national identity that includes the citizens interned during World War II? If not, what purpose did these photographs hold to their contemporary viewers? As a modern glimpse into the past, what can these photographs reveal about the trajectory of the American identity?