Ansel Adams Captures the Struggle and Beauty of a Japanese-American Internment Camp

His Black-and-White Photographs of Everyday Life Showed These Families’ Strength and Resilience

Any list of renowned 20th-century American photographers has to include Ansel Adams. His black-and-white landscapes of the American West are instantly recognizable, thanks in part to all those posters and calendars. What’s less well-known about Adams is that he tried his hand at documentary photography during World War II, when he focused his camera on scenes of life in the Japanese- American internment camp in Manzanar, California.

His black-and-white-photos include images of people going about their daily lives—schoolchildren during a fire drill, farmers at work in a potato field, a …