This week’s readings focused on the portrayal of Japanese Americans during their relocation to internment camps as a result of wartime racism during World War II. The lack of documentation of this tragedy presents an issue as it overlooks the history of the minority in America. This creates a sense of present and past invisibility for Japanese Americans as the War Relocation Authority (WRA) transferred the racial group out of the public eye and now, when one attempts to look back towards this dark period of American history, not enough documentation exists to explain the Japanese American experience of racism. The photographs that do exist waver on the line of reality and exaggeration. A conflict occurred among the photographers, government officials, artists, or internees who smuggled in cameras, to depict the reality of the internment experience. In the photographic book Born Free and Equal, Ansel Adams depicts close-up portraits of smiling Japanese Americans as schoolgirls and service, usually military, men and women. The department of WRA, which authorized this book, took a similar approach in its photography, using the smiling internees as war propaganda to show the American public that the program was working to create loyal American citizens out of the Japanese Americans. Adam’s purpose, although different, still overlooked the reality of internment camps to debunk the notion that Japanese Americans were treacherous and dangerous like the Japanese, the enemy of the U.S. in WWII. He sacrifices the authenticity of the Japanese American experience to disprove the racist stereotypes. But photographers, such as Dorothea Lange, an authorized photographer, and Toyo Miyatake, an internee who smuggled in a camera, captured the truth in the racism that existed behind the camp walls. Their concern was not to portray loyal American citizens but rather the unseen emotions and experience of the internees. Thus, the rare documentation that does exist struggles between distorting an unreal image of Japanese American internees as loyal assimilated citizens to hide the discrimination and segregation of the United States government and representing the real (realest to our knowledge) image of Japanese Americans as historical subjects of American hysteria and wartime racism.