Forward
Matthew Coolidge

Looking at a road map of California, scanning for historic clues hidden in the state’s geography, few roads are as alluring as Highway 395, the artery that runs through the Owens Valley. This region is the backside of the Golden State, a place of shadows situated between 14,000-foot peaks that obscure the rising and setting sun. The Owens Valley is the other side of the coin, the rest of the story.

Though the popular fictions of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown have made Los Angeles’s water conspiracy story a noir cliché, it was here in the Owens Valley where the real tale played out. And here where it continues, as signs demarcating the land as property of the Department of Water and Power remind us. The landmarks of this battle, the aqueduct Intake and the Alabama Gates spillway, lie quietly doing their work, as if this story, now nearly one hundred years old, were remembered as fiction.

At Manzanar, one of ten World War II relocation centers, historic erasure is failing. The land, once owned by the DWP and long ago cleared of its US Army-style barracks, is now administered by the National Park Service. Signs labeling the former functions of building foundations are cropping up like interpretive mushrooms. The dusty site is now a driving tour.

But just as the past is slowly retrieved at Manzanar, the present and future continue to unfold in regions that surround it. After the war, many of the camp’s buildings were removed and relocated throughout the Owens Valley – an inversion of the way in which 10,000 Japanese-Americans had been removed from their homes and concentrated at this camp. Many of these buildings, as we learn in this book, remain in the communities of the region, though their origins may now be forgotten, even by those who use them. Each of the buildings is an architectural face that speaks of the assimilation of this dark side of the American story. Each is an expression of the complexities of our national condition.

In the museum of America, material artifacts of our culture/s are spread all over the place; they surround us whether we notice them or not. Photography can isolate objects and places from the continuum of space, presenting them for notice and collective consideration. In selecting this subject, these buildings, these photographs, Andrew Freeman has curated a collection of truly remarkable and compelling objects. He has allowed the medium to serve his purposes perfectly, clearly operating with knowledge of the precedents of architectural photography, and the compounded complexities of conceptual art.

The Center for Land Use Interpretation is pleased to assist in the presentation of this unique project, although the credit for it goes solely to Andrew Freeman. The Manzanar project was his vision, and he has executed it with the intellectual depth and creative professionalism that he brings to all of his endeavors. If in some way we at CLUI have helped out, we’re honored to have done so. Despite the careful photographic and contextual considerations that went into this quiet epic of a book, the work resounds with the clarity of the obvious: Look at it. Here it is.