Amateur photographer Bill Manbo and his family were relocated and detained in a Japanese-American internment camp at Heart Mountain, Wyoming during World War II. “They lived in sparse barracks. Food, laundry and latrines were communal.” It was here where Mr. Manbo began his hobby of photography and documented his family and the camp detainees.
New York Times
By Bill Manbo and Eric L. Muller
Published: June 23, 2012
“With his camera and Kodachrome film, Bill Manbo captured scenes of beauty, action and pleasure: the splash of a diver at a swimming hole, the smiles of ice skaters, the concentration of little boys shooting marbles, the bustle of a scout parade, the clash of sumo wrestlers….But a sense of his displeasure with incarceration lurks beneath the surface, as in an image of his little boy, grasping barbed wire.”
“Mr. Manbo searched in his surroundings for beauty and excitement, a refuge from the pressure and monotony of confinement. He used his camera to draw his family together, to document some semblance of an ordinary life in extraordinary circumstances and to create for his young son a visual legacy of a normal childhood.”
Read more on the NY Times article.
Learn more about the documentary, “Through A Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People” at USA Projects.
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