Images cour­tesy of the Library of Con­gress.

Actor George Takei was once best known as Star Trek’s Mr. Sulu. He still is, of course, but over the last cou­ple decades his friend­ly, intel­li­gent, and wicked­ly fun­ny pres­ence on social media has land­ed him a new pop­u­lar role as a civ­il lib­er­ties advo­cate. Takei’s activist pas­sion is informed not only by his sta­tus as a gay man, but also by his child­hood expe­ri­ences. At the age of 5, Takei was round­ed up with his Amer­i­can-born par­ents and tak­en to a Japan­ese intern­ment camp in Arkansas, where he would live for the next three years. In an inter­view with Democ­ra­cy Now, Takei spoke frankly about this his­to­ry:

We’re Amer­i­cans…. We had noth­ing to do with the war. We sim­ply hap­pened to look like the peo­ple that bombed Pearl Har­bor. But with­out charges, with­out tri­al, with­out due process—the fun­da­men­tal pil­lar of our jus­tice system—we were sum­mar­i­ly round­ed up, all Japan­ese Amer­i­cans on the West Coast, where we were pri­mar­i­ly res­i­dent, and sent off to 10 barb wire intern­ment camps—prison camps, real­ly, with sen­try tow­ers, machine guns point­ed at us—in some of the most des­o­late places in this coun­try.

Takei and his fam­i­ly were among over 100,000 Japanese-Americans—over half of whom were U.S. cit­i­zens—interned in such camps.

Into one of these camps, Man­za­nar, locat­ed in the foothills of the Sier­ra Nevadas, cel­e­brat­ed pho­tog­ra­ph­er Ansel Adams man­aged to gain entrance through his friend­ship with the war­den. Adams took over 200 pho­tographs of life inside the camp.

In 1965, he donat­ed his col­lec­tion to the Library of Con­gress, writ­ing in a let­ter, “The pur­pose of my work was to show how these peo­ple, suf­fer­ing under a great injus­tice, and loss of prop­er­ty, busi­ness and pro­fes­sions, had over­come the sense of defeat and dis­pair [sic] by build­ing for them­selves a vital com­mu­ni­ty in an arid (but mag­nif­i­cent) envi­ron­ment.”

Adams had anoth­er pur­pose as well—as schol­ar of the peri­od Frank H. Wu describes it—“to doc­u­ment some aspects of the intern­ment camp that the gov­ern­ment didn’t want to have shown.” These include “the barbed wire, and the guard tow­ers, and the armed sol­diers.” Pro­hib­it­ed from doc­u­ment­ing these con­trol mech­a­nisms direct­ly, the pho­tog­ra­ph­er “cap­tured them in the back­ground, in shad­ows,” says Wu: “In some of the pho­tos when you look you can see just faint­ly that he’s tak­ing a pho­to of some­thing, but in front of the pho­to you can see barbed wire, or on the ground you can see the shad­ow of barbed wire. Some of the pho­tos even show the blur­ry out­line of a soldier’s shad­ow.”

The pho­tographs doc­u­ment the dai­ly activ­i­ties of the internees—their work and leisure rou­tines, and their strug­gles to main­tain some sem­blance of nor­mal­cy while liv­ing in hasti­ly con­struct­ed bar­racks in the harsh­est of con­di­tions.

Though the land­scape, and its cli­mate, could be des­o­late and unfor­giv­ing, it was also, as Adams couldn’t help but notice, “mag­nif­i­cent.” The col­lec­tion includes sev­er­al wide shots of stretch­es of moun­tain range and sky, often with pris­on­ers star­ing off long­ing­ly into the dis­tance. But the major­i­ty of the pho­tos are of the internees—men, women, and chil­dren, often in close-up por­traits that show them look­ing var­i­ous­ly hope­ful, hap­py, sad­dened, and resigned.

You can view the entire col­lec­tion at the Library of Con­gress’ online cat­a­log. Adams also pub­lished about 65 of the pho­tographs in a book titled Born Free and Equal: The Sto­ry of Loy­al Japan­ese Amer­i­cans in 1944. The col­lec­tion rep­re­sents an impor­tant part of Adams’ work dur­ing the peri­od. But more impor­tant­ly, it rep­re­sents events in U.S. his­to­ry that should nev­er be for­got­ten or denied.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Dis­ney Fought Fas­cism with Pro­pa­gan­da Car­toons Dur­ing World War II & Avert­ed Finan­cial Col­lapse

Dr. Seuss’ World War II Pro­pa­gan­da Films: Your Job in Ger­many (1945) and Our Job in Japan (1946)

Ansel Adams Reveals His Cre­ative Process in 1958 Doc­u­men­tary

Dis­cov­er Ansel Adams’ 226 Pho­tos of U.S. Nation­al Parks (and Anoth­er Side of the Leg­endary Pho­tog­ra­ph­er)

Dr. Seuss Draws Anti-Japan­ese Car­toons Dur­ing WWII, Then Atones with Hor­ton Hears a Who!

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC.

You’ve like­ly heard the rea­son peo­ple nev­er smile in very old pho­tographs. Ear­ly pho­tog­ra­phy could be an excru­ci­at­ing­ly slow process. With expo­sure times of up to 15 min­utes, por­trait sub­jects found it impos­si­ble to hold a grin, which could eas­i­ly slip into a pained gri­mace and ruin the pic­ture. A few min­utes rep­re­sent­ed a marked improve­ment on the time it took to make the very first pho­to­graph, Nicéphore Niépce’s 1826 “heli­o­graph.” Cap­tur­ing the shapes of light and shad­ow out­side his win­dow, Niépce’s image “required an eight-hour expo­sure,” notes the Chris­t­ian Sci­ence Mon­i­tor, “long enough that the sun­light reflects off both sides of the build­ings.”

Niépce’s busi­ness and invent­ing part­ner is much more well-known: Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, who went on after Niépce’s death in 1833 to devel­op the Daguerreo­type process, patent­ing it in 1839. That same year, the first self­ie was born. And the year pri­or Daguerre him­self took what most believe to be the very first pho­to­graph of a human, in a street scene of the Boule­vard du Tem­ple in Paris. The image shows us one of Daguerre’s ear­ly suc­cess­ful attempts at image-mak­ing, in which, writes NPR’s Robert Krul­wich, “he exposed a chem­i­cal­ly treat­ed met­al plate for ten min­utes. Oth­ers were walk­ing or rid­ing in car­riages down that busy street that day, but because they moved, they didn’t show up.”

Vis­i­ble, how­ev­er, in the low­er left quad­rant is a man stand­ing with his hands behind his back, one leg perched on a plat­form. A clos­er look reveals the fuzzy out­line of the per­son shin­ing his boots. A much fin­er-grained analy­sis of the pho­to­graph shows what may be oth­er, less dis­tinct fig­ures, includ­ing what looks like two women with a cart or pram, a child’s face in a win­dow, and var­i­ous oth­er passers­by. The pho­to­graph marks a his­tor­i­cal­ly impor­tant peri­od in the devel­op­ment of the medi­um, one in which pho­tog­ra­phy passed from curios­i­ty to rev­o­lu­tion­ary tech­nol­o­gy for both artists and sci­en­tists.

Although Daguerre had been work­ing on a reli­able method since the 1820s, it wasn’t until 1838, the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art explains, that his “con­tin­ued exper­i­ments pro­gressed to the point where he felt com­fort­able show­ing exam­ples of the new medi­um to select­ed artists and sci­en­tists in the hope of lin­ing up investors.” Photography’s most pop­u­lar 19th cen­tu­ry use—perhaps then as now—was as a means of cap­tur­ing faces. But Daguerre’s ear­li­est plates “were still life com­po­si­tions of plas­ter casts after antique sculp­ture,” lend­ing “the ‘aura’ of art to pic­tures made by mechan­i­cal means.” He also took pho­tographs of shells and fos­sils, demon­strat­ing the medium’s util­i­ty for sci­en­tif­ic pur­pos­es.

If por­traits were per­haps less inter­est­ing to Daguerre’s investors, they were essen­tial to his suc­ces­sors and admir­ers. Can­did shots of peo­ple mov­ing about their dai­ly lives as in this Paris street scene, how­ev­er, proved next to impos­si­ble for sev­er­al more decades. What was for­mer­ly believed to be the old­est such pho­to­graph, an 1848 image from Cincin­nati, shows what appears to be two men stand­ing at the edge of the Ohio Riv­er. It seems as though they’ve come to fetch water, but they must have been stand­ing very still to have appeared so clear­ly. Pho­tog­ra­phy seemed to stop time, freez­ing a sta­t­ic moment for­ev­er in phys­i­cal form. Blurred images of peo­ple mov­ing through the frame expose the illu­sion. Even in the stillest, stiffest of images, there is move­ment, an insight Ead­weard Muy­bridge would make cen­tral to his exper­i­ments in motion pho­tog­ra­phy just a few decades after Daguerre debuted his world-famous method.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First Pho­to­graph Ever Tak­en (1826)

The First “Self­ie” In His­to­ry Tak­en by Robert Cor­nelius, a Philadel­phia Chemist, in 1839

Ead­weard Muybridge’s Motion Pho­tog­ra­phy Exper­i­ments from the 1870s Pre­sent­ed in 93 Ani­mat­ed Gifs

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

It may well be that the major piv­ot points of his­to­ry are only vis­i­ble to those around the bend. For those of us immersed in the present—for all of its deaf­en­ing sirens of vio­lent upheaval—the exact years future gen­er­a­tions will use to mark our epoch remain unclear. But when we look back, cer­tain years stand out above all oth­ers, those that his­to­ri­ans use as arrest­ing­ly sin­gu­lar book titles: 1066: The Year of Con­quest, 1492: The Year the World Began, 1776. The first such year in the 20th cen­tu­ry gets a par­tic­u­lar­ly grim sub­ti­tle in his­to­ri­an Paul Ham’s 1914: The Year the World End­ed.

It sounds like hyper­bol­ic mar­ket­ing, but that apoc­a­lyp­tic descrip­tion of the effects of World War I comes from some of the most elo­quent voic­es of the age, whether those of Amer­i­can expa­tri­ates like Gertrude Stein or T.S. Eliot, or of Euro­pean sol­dier-poets like Wil­fred Owen or Siegfried Sas­soon.

In France, the hor­rors of the war prompt­ed its sur­vivors to remem­ber the years before it as La Belle Epoque, a phrase—wrote the BBC’s Hugh Schofield in the cen­te­nary essay “La Belle Eqoque: Paris 1914,”—that appeared “much lat­er in the cen­tu­ry, when peo­ple who’d lived their gild­ed youths in the pre-war years start­ed look­ing back and rem­i­nisc­ing.”

We’re used to see­ing the peri­od of 1914 in grainy, drea­ry black-and-white, and to see­ing nos­tal­gic cel­e­bra­tions of La Belle Epoque rep­re­sent­ed graph­i­cal­ly by the live­ly full-col­or posters and adver­tise­ments one finds in décor stores. But thanks to the full col­or pho­tos you see here, we can see pho­tographs of World War I‑era Paris in full and vibrant color—images of the city 110 years ago almost just as Parisians saw it at the time. Icons like the Moulin Rouge come to life in bright day­light, above, and light­ing up the night, below.

Ear­ly cin­e­ma Aubert Palace, below, in the Grands Boule­vards, shim­mers beau­ti­ful­ly, as does the art-deco light­ing of the Eif­fel Tow­er, fur­ther down.

Below, hot air bal­loons hov­er in the enor­mous Grand Palais, and fur­ther down, a pho­to­graph of Notre Dame on a hazy day almost looks like a water­col­or.

The pho­tographs were made, writes Messy N Chic, “using Autochrome Lumière tech­nol­o­gy between 1914 and 1918 [a tech­nique devel­oped in 1903 by the Lumière broth­ers, cred­it­ed as the first film­mak­ers]…. [T]here are around 72,000 Autochromes from the time peri­od of places all over the world, includ­ing Paris in its true col­ors.”

Not all of the pho­tographs are of famous archi­tec­tur­al mon­u­ments or nightlife des­ti­na­tions. Very many show ordi­nary street scenes, like those above, one depict­ing a num­ber of bored French sol­diers, pre­sum­ably await­ing deploy­ment.

The Paris of 1914 was a Euro­pean cap­i­tal in major tran­si­tion, in more ways than one. “Moder­ni­ty was the mov­ing spir­it,” writes Schofield; “It was the time of the machine. The city’s last horse-drawn omnibus made its way from Saint-Sulpice to La Vil­lette in Jan­u­ary 1913.”

Schofield also points out that, like Gild­ed Age New York, “the pub­lic image of Paris was the cre­ation of roman­tic cap­i­tal­ists. The real­i­ty for many was much more wretched… there were entire fam­i­lies liv­ing on the street, and decrepit, over­crowd­ed hous­ing with nonex­is­tent san­i­ta­tion.”

Moder­ni­ty was leav­ing many behind, class con­flict loomed in France as it erupt­ed in Rus­sia, even as the glob­al cat­a­stro­phe of World War I threat­ened French elites and pro­le­tari­at alike, who both served and who both died at very high rates.

You can see many more of these aston­ish­ing­ly beau­ti­ful full-col­or pho­tographs of 1914 Paris—at the end of La Belle Epoque—at Vin­tage Every­day and Messy N Chic.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Paris Had a Mov­ing Side­walk in 1900, and a Thomas Edi­son Film Cap­tured It in Action

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

Paris in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Eif­fel Tow­er, Notre Dame, The Pan­théon, and More (1890)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. 

In his­to­ries of ear­ly pho­tog­ra­phy, Louis Daguerre faith­ful­ly appears as one of the fathers of the medi­um. His patent­ed process, the daguerreo­type, in wide use for near­ly twen­ty years in the ear­ly 19th cen­tu­ry, pro­duced so many of the images we asso­ciate with the peri­od, includ­ing famous pho­tographs of Abra­ham Lin­coln, Edgar Allan Poe, Emi­ly Dick­in­son, and John Brown. But had things gone dif­fer­ent­ly, we might know bet­ter the hard­er-to-pro­nounce name of his one­time part­ner Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, who pro­duced the first known pho­to­graph ever, tak­en in 1826.

Some­thing of a gen­tle­man inven­tor, Niépce (below) began exper­i­ment­ing with lith­o­g­ra­phy and with that ancient device, the cam­era obscu­ra, in 1816. Even­tu­al­ly, after much tri­al and error, Niépce devel­oped his own pho­to­graph­ic process, which he called “heli­og­ra­phy.”

He began by mix­ing chem­i­cals on a flat pewter plate, then plac­ing it inside a cam­era. After expos­ing the plate to light for eight hours, the inven­tor then washed and dried it. What remained was the image we see above, tak­en, as Niépce wrote, from “the room where I work” on his coun­try estate and now housed at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Texas at Austin’s Har­ry Ran­som Cen­ter.

At the Ran­som Cen­ter web­site, you can see a short video describ­ing Niépce’s house and show­ing how schol­ars recre­at­ed the van­tage point from which he took the pic­ture. Anoth­er video offers insight into the process Niépce invent­ed to cre­ate his “heli­o­graph.” In 1827, Niépce trav­eled to Eng­land to vis­it his broth­er. While there, with the assis­tance of Eng­lish botanist Fran­cis Bauer, he pre­sent­ed a paper on his new inven­tion to the Roy­al Soci­ety. His find­ings were reject­ed, how­ev­er, because he opt­ed not to ful­ly reveal the details, hop­ing to make eco­nom­ic gains with a pro­pri­etary method. Niépce left the pewter image with Bauer and returned to France, where he short­ly after agreed to a ten-year part­ner­ship with Daguerre in 1829.

Sad­ly for Niépce, his heli­o­graph would not pro­duce the finan­cial or tech­no­log­i­cal suc­cess he envi­sioned, and he died just four years lat­er in 1833. Daguerre, of course, went on to devel­op his famous process in 1839 and passed into his­to­ry, but we should remem­ber Niépce’s efforts, and mar­vel at what he was able to achieve on his own with lim­it­ed mate­ri­als and no train­ing or prece­dent. Daguerre may receive much of the cred­it, but it was the “sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly-mind­ed gen­tle­man” Niépce and his heli­og­ra­phy that led—writes the Ran­som Center’s Head of Pho­to­graph­ic Con­ser­va­tion Bar­bara Brown—to “the inven­tion of the new medi­um.”

Niépce’s pewter plate image was re-dis­cov­ered in 1952 by Hel­mut and Ali­son Gern­sheim, who pub­lished an arti­cle on the find in The Pho­to­graph­ic Jour­nal. There­after, the Gern­sheims had the East­man Kodak Com­pa­ny cre­ate the repro­duc­tion above. This image’s “pointil­lis­tic effect,” writes Brown, “is due to the repro­duc­tion process,” and the image “was touched up with water­col­ors by [Hel­mut] Gern­sheim him­self in order to bring it as close as pos­si­ble to his approx­i­ma­tion of how he felt the orig­i­nal should appear in repro­duc­tion.”

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The First “Self­ie” In His­to­ry Tak­en by Robert Cor­nelius, a Philadel­phia Chemist, in 1839

The First Known Pho­to­graph of Peo­ple Hav­ing a Beer (1843)

The Old­est Known Pho­tographs of Rome (1841–1871)

Some of the Old­est Pho­tos You Will Ever See: Dis­cov­er Pho­tographs of Greece, Egypt, Turkey & Oth­er Mediter­ranean Lands (1840s)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness