VIRTUAL MANZANAR -- WAR RELOCATION CENTER
National Historic Site
by Michelle Bienias
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."
Friedrich Nietzche
The remains of one of the most shameful acts committed by the United States government can be found in California’s Owens Valley at a place called Manzanar. Here and at nine other locations throughout the U.S., one hundred thousand people, most of them American citizens, were suddenly thought of as "a threat to national security" and were rounded up and held in concentration camps during World War II. People were evacuated from their homes and stuck on buses that took them to the camp in the middle of the desert. They stayed there for so long that they had kids and raised families, building ponds and gardens, planting trees, making something from nothing. When the war was over, they were each given 20 bucks and said to go home, but by then they had nowhere to go. In 1944 Ansel Adams published a book on Manzanar called 'Born Free and Equal',which was not published again until 2001, sixty years later. The book includes an extensive series of photographs he made there during WWII. Included here is a review about the book from the Museum of Modern Art.
The Manzanar National Historic Site includes a Virtual Tour featuring 42 360-degree panoramas and an interactive map of the compound. Although the 800 buildings and more than 11,000 internees are long gone, foundations, trees, gardens and rocks remain and give a strong sense of the isolation the prisoners must have felt in this barren desert landscape.
Janie Fitzgerald, who together with Robert West created the VR Tour, describes how the project happened: "a group called the Manzanar Committee organizes a yearly pilgrimage to Manzanar. Hundreds of people ride buses three hours northeast of Los Angeles. Many of those who attend the yearly pilgrimage had been imprisoned at Manzanar. In April of 2002, we attended the pilgrimage equipped with a 360 OneShot system and a Coolpix. We wanted to document the entire site in one day and this was easily possible with the 360 OneShot optic. The VR photography only took an afternoon to make about fifty panoramas of the entire site. The National Park Service saw our VR work of Manzanar and was interested in acquiring the project for their site and education programs. It's important to know that Manzanar happened, and can happen when fear is in the air, such as is now seen in the media today. Most people may never be able to visit Manzanar so seeing it in VR could add to an understanding of what happened."
VR photography by Janie Fitzgerald of Axis Images, site built by Robert West
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