Theorizing Circulation in Visual Rhetoric Through Dorothea Lange’s Images of Japanese American Internment

During WWII, the forced evacuation and incarceration of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast was initiated through Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1942. The War Relocation Authority (WRA) was created to oversee the process of evacuating, registering, and finally, transferring Japanese Americans to permanent internment camps. Two-thirds of the internees were U.S. citizens; the American-born children of Japanese immigrants who came to the West Coast and were not permitted to naturalize. Building upon past success in social documentary photography of rural poverty (see Finnegan, 2003), the WRA hired Dorothea Lange to document the internment process. The photographer was given only a few specific guidelines: no images of barbed wire, no visible fences or guard towers, and no photographs of resistance (Gordon & Okihiro, 2006). Despite Lange's notoriety and the importance of her images, many of her 760 photographs were impounded by the U.S. government due to their sympathetic portrayal of Japanese American internees. Nevertheless, a limited number of Lange's images circulated in WWII and contemporary visual culture, though often in limited or de-contextualized ways. These images demand scholarly interrogation for the ways in which they illustrate the problematic relationship between circulation and the construction of publics (Asen & Brouwer, 2001; Warner, 2002). Scholarship in visual rhetoric addresses journalistic photographs and their important connections to citizenship, public memory and warfare (see Biesecker, 2007; Hariman & Lucaites, 2007; Lucaites & Hariman, 2002; Skow & Dionisopoulos, 1997). Often, memorializing of WWII seeks to present the period as one of unity and collectivity, working to obscure the experiences of incarcerated Japanese Americans (Biesecker, 2002). Scholars note that, while Lange's images "are the only photographs that capture the individual and collective experience of confusion, anxiety, and grief," they are largely "absent from the litany of World War II images that comprise its iconic history" (Tajima Creef, 2004, p. 47; Sturken, 1997, p. 64). The main purpose of this article is therefore to document the ways in which Lange's WWII images of internment have circulated through the visual cultures of past and present. In this essay, I analyze the non-circulation and de-contextualized circulation of Lange's images through the public sphere, focusing attention on how scholars of visual communication can perform analysis of texts that never circulated or circulate absent from their original context. Specifically, I examine the politics of circulation, looking at the mechanisms by which texts are deployed and silenced and the problematic relationship between notions of circulation and the construction and maintenance of publics. Using the notion of rhetorical circulation as a theoretical underpinning, I interrogate how and why only a select few of Lange's images tended to be disseminated and where they appeared in 1940s print culture. I then look at how and why the majority of her images did not circulate, and, if they did circulate, remained largely confined in bureaucratic contexts. This case study demonstrates that circulation as an orienting concept presently emphasizes movement. However, the politics of non-circulation, coupled with the circulation of compelling images out of context, may be equally important. This case study also has implications for pedagogy and visual literacy. Often, visual images serve as a referent for abstract terms such as citizenship and justice. Such concepts can potentially be concretized through visual representations (Moriarty & Kenney, n.d.). Viewers, who bring their unique socio-political and cultural positionality to bear upon their interpretation, must be exposed to a variety of images to develop their ability to evaluate the persuasive power of imagery (Avgerinou & Pettersson, 2011). …