The First Witnesses: Art Made When the Camera Was Banned

When my filmmaking partner and I were researching our documentary about Miné Okubo, one detail stuck with me more than anything else: when Japanese Americans were forced into incarceration camps in 1942, cameras were on the list of banned items. The government would take the official photos. The government would write the official reports, using words like "evacuation" and "relocation centers" that made prison sound like a moving company.

In other words, the record of what happened was supposed to belong to the people who caused it.

Except people kept making their own records anyway. At Angel Island, at Tanforan, at Manzanar, and decades later after a murder in Detroit, people used whatever they had — a carving blade, a pen, a smuggled camera lens, 16mm film — to write down their own version of events. These are four of those stories, and honestly, most of them I never learned about in school. That's kind of the point of this blog.

The poems in the walls

Between 1910 and 1940, hundreds of thousands of immigrants — most of them Chinese, arriving during the Chinese Exclusion Act — were detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay. Some were held for weeks. Some were held for years. They were interrogated over and over, separated from their families, and given basically no way to tell their side of anything.

So some of them carved poems into the barracks walls.

The poems are in classical Chinese, and they record everything the immigration files leave out: the grief, the anger, the humiliation of being locked up within sight of the country they had crossed an ocean to reach. Most of the writers never signed their names. They were writing for the other detainees, and maybe for whoever came after. When I think about what "art as testimony" means, this is the most literal version I can imagine — people carving their experience directly into the building that imprisoned them, because there was nowhere else to put it.

Miné Okubo's sketchbook

Okubo was a Berkeley-trained artist when Executive Order 9066 sent her and her brother to the Tanforan Assembly Center, where families were housed in converted horse stalls, and then to the Topaz camp in Utah.

Cameras were banned. Nobody thought to ban drawing.

She ended up making around two thousand sketches of daily life in the camps — the lines for everything, the latrines with no partitions, the dust storms, all the small daily humiliations that official reports don't mention. In 1946 she published about two hundred of them with her own captions as Citizen 13660, named after the number the government assigned to her family. It was the first personal account of the incarceration published by someone who lived through it, and it's still one of the only real visual records made from the inside.

That contrast is what our whole documentary ended up being about. A government document says "relocation." Okubo draws a family sleeping in a horse stall. You can decide for yourself which one is telling the truth.

Tōyō Miyatake's homemade camera

Miyatake was a professional photographer with a studio in LA's Little Tokyo before the war. When his family was sent to Manzanar, he smuggled in a camera lens and a film holder, and then had a carpenter friend in camp help him build a wooden camera body around them.

He shot in secret at first, early morning and dusk, when guards were less likely to be paying attention. He told his son he felt a duty to record what was happening so it could never happen again. Eventually the camp administration found out — and, surprisingly, ended up letting him keep photographing. His pictures now sit alongside the official images of Manzanar taken by outside photographers, and his show things the sanctioned ones don't. There's one of three boys standing at the barbed wire fence, looking out. An outside photographer wouldn't have taken that picture. Someone on the inside did.

Okubo took a risk with a pen. Miyatake took one with actual contraband.

A film camera in Detroit

Skip ahead forty years. In 1982, a Chinese American man named Vincent Chin was beaten to death in Detroit by two white autoworkers who blamed Japan for the auto industry collapsing. His killers got probation and a fine. Not a single day in prison.

Filmmakers Christine Choy and Renee Tajima-Peña did what Okubo and Miyatake had done — they recorded. Their documentary Who Killed Vincent Chin? captured the case, the community's grief, and the beginning of a pan-Asian American civil rights movement while it was actually happening, not from some safe historical distance.

I have a personal connection to this one. My dad was a teenager in the Detroit area around the time of the murder, so this film never felt like distant history to me. It felt like something that happened to people my family knew.

What these four have in common

A carving blade, ink, a hidden lens, a film camera. Different tools, different decades, but the same basic act: I was here. This happened. Here is proof.

But here's the thing I keep getting stuck on. A poem carved inside a locked barracks. A private sketchbook. Negatives developed in secret. None of this was public when it was made. Most of it wasn't supposed to exist at all.

So how did any of it end up in museums and textbooks? How does hidden testimony turn into the way a whole country remembers its past? Because it almost didn't — the Angel Island poems came within one demolition order of being gone forever.