Barracks in Diaspora
Elizabeth Wiatr

A title can serve to describe an artwork’s content, illuminate its conceptual impetus, or complicate readings. The title of Andrew Freeman’s (Manzanar) Architecture Double does each of these, but most of all it amplifies the frisson of the photographic project itself.

First there is the parenthetical “Manzanar.” Manzanar is simply the name of an early twentieth-century farming community and, later, a World War II internment center, one of the ten prison camps where Japanese Americans in the Western United States were legally compelled to live from 1942 to 1945. But as the most famously photographed of all the internment centers, and the only one many people outside the Japanese American community know by name, Manzanar often stands in for the larger history of Japanese American internment. Framed by the graphic arcs in Freeman’s title, the word becomes unstable, a ghostly aside. The parentheses and colon interrupt the reading process ever so slightly, serving to remind that there are as many different Manzanars as there are forms of representation and historical memory. The rest of the title is linked to (Manzanar) at a remove, as Freeman’s photographs are linked to the historical Manzanar at a temporal, spatial, and representational remove. Although these photographs depict many of the residues of Manzanar as they exist today in the surrounding Owens Valley, the photos are not solely “about” Manzanar and what became of its structures. Rather than a documentary project on the afterimage of Manzanar, this book is a photographic exploration of spatial, historical, and eidetic knowledge, and of the power structures woven into everyday life, both in the shadow of Manzanar and far beyond it.

The subtitle, Architecture Double, hints at the many levels of doubling present in Freeman’s photographs as well as in the history of Manzanar. A photograph is of course a double of what was photographed, and Freeman’s images are rigorously architectonic, as systematic as the images of filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. Manzanar barracks are physical traces of Japanese American internment; Freeman’s photographs, then, are traces depicting other traces.

If “architecture double” is read as a compound noun, like “body double,” it suggests a surrogate or copy of an original. The Manzanar structures that populate these photographs were mass-produced, and thus all copies to begin with, as are the mobile homes and shipping containers that appear at the edges and in the interstitial spaces of many of the photographs. Copies or not, these photographs spark a desire to know which structures are the real article and which aren’t, a desire heightened by the presence of stand-ins of uncertain provenance and the uncanny resemblance between buildings of military and non-military origin. Freeman’s lapidary framing emphasizes these resemblances by confounding them. The roofline of a former Manzanar staff barrack [#11.6.02 - Apartments (storage), Lone Pine, California. N°36°36.298’, W118°03.598’] shades into the roofline of an adjacent house, as the oblique angle formed by the barrack’s roof inclines toward another barrack-shaped house in the background. The fence in the front, one of those simulated picket fences sold in rolls, is another double, a functional imposter that marks a boundary but possesses neither the solidity nor the sentimental cachet of its referent. As Freeman’s work calls into question what an original is and why it matters, a viewer is lead into a mise-en-abyme, or hall of mirrors, inhabited by Authenticity, the modern specter that has particularly haunted the medium of photography.

“Architecture double” also implies proliferation and variation. Manzanar structures were relocated and reused, and thus have had double (or multiple) functions—military and civilian, secular and sacred, in extraordinary circumstances and very ordinary ones. Freeman’s images navigate between these realms, often showing the space between to be a continuum rather than a divide, the relationship a dialectic. A lamppost bisects an image of St. Vivian Catholic Church [#1.12.03 - Zegwaard Hall, Saint Vivian Catholic Church, Independence, California. N36°48.277, W118°12.080’], separating two incongruous buildings: the A-frame church on the right, a design more commonly associated with alpine recreation than worship, and the church social hall on the left, a barrack that appears as temporary and unconnected to the land as the church is rooted. The jeep, another World War II artifact that has migrated into American culture, bridges the space between the barrack-cum-social hall and the ski chalet-cum-church. Space is usually the privileged domain of architecture, time that of photography, but the two merge in this photograph. The static frontal shot and slightly panoramic aspect ratio of Freeman’s image palpably freeze time; the absence of people precludes fleeting narratives and small dramas. Instead, through the viewing process, the spatial elements reveal layers of time: the immediacy of a lamppost, the promise of eternity in the church, geologic time in the background, and, in the jeep and barrack, modern time that folds back upon itself, like the time of memory.

Conceptual artists of the 1960s and early 1970s, in particular Ed Ruscha, Dan Graham, and Robert Smithson, also photographed vernacular architecture as a way to explore its cultural significance and investigate questions of time, space, site, seriality, and the nature of art objects and their institutions. But these artists took deadpan snapshots and presented them in magazine spreads and offset books; their forms of representation and display were vernacular, along with their iconography. Although Freeman’s gaze is equally deadpan, these are not snapshots but extraordinarily precise photographs shot with a view camera and 6 x 9. Their precision serves an important function, for even more today than in the 1960s, photographs are enveloped in effects created by the proliferation of photographs—endless tropes and clichés, familiar iconic and ironic readings of signs, a distanced, sometimes sardonic gaze on the part of the viewer. The photographs collected in (Manzanar) Architecture Double succeed at cutting through the chatter of these effects by soliciting a dilated and close examination.

HISTORICAL MEMORY, OR, THE COMMEMORATIVE AND THE COMMONPLACE

Figure 1, Construction process at Manzanar		Figure 2, Relocation of Barracks for veteran's housing, East Los Angeles, 1946

On April 24, 2004, the National Park Service debuted its new interpretive center at the Manzanar National Historic Site in conjunction with the Japanese American community’s 35th annual pilgrimage to the site. Visitors exchanged testimony and reaffirmed social ties as they viewed exhibits, thus engaging in the rituals of “common memory,” the popular form of remembrance historian Saul Friedlander has argued tends to “restore or establish coherence, closure, and possibly a redemptive stance.” In its quest for closure and redemption, common memory represents the past as knowable, sometimes with a cautionary message to learn from our mistakes, and the hopeful implication that we already have. In its American versions, common memory speaks from within a telos of progress and tends to invoke redemption through biological metaphors such as “healing.” It less often questions its own representations, even as direct memory of a specific past withers with time, becoming more indirect, more thoroughly mediated by those representations.

While common memory was being enacted that day at Manzanar, someone made an offer on a house in the town of Independence, six miles north. The real estate deal was unrelated to the Manzanar events, just one of the many thousand such transactions that occur every month in California. It was singular only because the house was originally one of the barracks at Manzanar, its origin made a selling point in a real estate flyer, which read: “This property has much charm and history. It was moved from Manzanar in 1949, the home was completely replumbed . . .” I asked the seller what it meant to her that her house had come from Manzanar. “Oh, you know, it’s just history,” she replied. In contrast to the restorative history being constructed at the National Park Service ceremony, the seller’s mention of history implies a greater remove, history transported to the present as banal fact or object of nostalgia. Behind this commonsense notion of history lurks instrumental reason, the logic central to the creation of Manzanar and its dispersal after the war.

Freeman’s photographs evoke a rather more complicated sense of history, and one that asks questions. The four-panel view of the southern Owens Valley maps the various forces that have shaped the valley, and serves as mise-en-scene by providing spatial and conceptual contextualization for the remainder of the images. At first glance, the four-panel view could be a conventional landscape, possibly an inheritor of the tradition of nineteenth-century landscape photography. Railroads and other signs of technology figured prominently in many nineteenth-century landscapes; here arcs of power lines frame the view as State Highway 395 slices across the valley. But photographs from the nineteenth century represented the land through a conquesting, and usually romantic, lens. In Freeman’s decidedly unromantic panorama, the land is already fully colonized.

Other photographic projects, such as Richard Misrach’s Bravo 20, have similarly foregrounded traces of human intervention or destruction in the American West. But while they show the idyll of nature violated, the idyll is evoked even more insistently in its violation. In Freeman’s four-panel landscape there is no purity, no idyll. Nor is the land as it is represented here especially picturesque. Sparse scrubland is sandwiched between water and power—or, more precisely, between absence of water in the Owens Lake, dry since 1927, and major power lines. The water that might have been in the lake has been displaced to the Los Angeles Aqueduct, which snakes its way through the lower right of the image, bearing over fifty percent of the water used in this city. For almost a century the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power has altered the ecology of the Owens Valley, drying up the lake by diverting its feeds and transforming the land for a hundred miles to the north by siphoning groundwater. Just as the lakebed merges with the sky and haze in the photographs, softening the usually sharp line of the horizon, the boundary between what is untouched and touched is indistinguishable. The haze is a reminder of the alkaline dust that winds sweeps up from the lakebed and blow many miles to the north. Accounts of life in Manzanar often mention the dust that blew through cracks in the tarpaper walls of the barracks—some of it possibly this same dust. Although a minor nuisance compared to loss of liberty, its recurrent mention in testimonies serves as a visceral reminder of hardship. Here it serves as an invitation to investigate larger connections.

The patch of green in the lower right is both evidence of what water can produce in an arid region and a hint that we have no idea what the land might look like in its “natural” state. Even before Los Angeles began its colonization of the valley, Native Americans had transformed the land, their comparatively modest marks then effaced by nineteenth-century ranching and mining. Overgrazing and irrigation altered the vegetation. Photography came to the West after major transformations had begun, though it was instrumental in encouraging them. In a sense, it came both too late and too early. The high-voltage power lines running across the top of the image and the smaller distribution lines following a dirt road in the left panel indicate the mutual presence of local and more distant economic and political interests. At times they have been locked in conflict over water, power, profit, and regional autonomy; at other times their interests have intersected.

The Owens Valley has long been a site where dreams and nightmares converge, and each of the dreams enacted on this terrain had its nightmarish side, or was somebody else’s nightmare. The dream of homeownership and the pastoral ideal met the dream of profitable colonization in George Chaffey’s failed development of Manzanar, promoted in 1910 as an orchard community for European-American settlers. Two hundred miles south in Los Angeles, thirsty land syndicates and a soaring population—attracted to the area by developers’ images of garden living in an edenic climate, a more urban version of Chaffey’s pitch—looked farther afield for new sources of water. William Mulholland’s engineering dream of an ample supply of water for all the territory Los Angeles could ever incorporate impelled the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to buy land and groundwater rights across the Owens Valley, including out from under Chaffey’s Manzanar. The infrastructure that remained at Manzanar, some of it never used in Chaffey’s day, made it a suitable site for a city of 10,000, when the xenophobic dream of an Anglo-Saxon America and wartime paranoia found the need. Earlier appropriation of resources by Los Angeles had limited development and population in the area, which further contributed to Manzanar’s suitability as a site for internment. Utopian visions of planned communities found perverse if logical expression in a hastily planned prison camp, rationally constructed on a grid. And postwar dreams of homeownership, promoted by the Veteran’s Administration and Federal Housing Authority after WWII, led to the dispersal of Manzanar barracks and their rehabilitation for civilian use.

The flow of time across this palimpsest of a landscape, like the flows of historical memory, is labyrinthine and polyvalent rather than linear. This more complex view of time, as well as the photographic view, contrasts with earlier views of Manzanar, in particular those of Ansel Adams. Almost all Adams’s views of Manzanar are shot looking westward, with snow-capped Mount Williamson dominating the frame to emphasize geological time. Cataclysm remains safely in the Pleistocene, its remains manifested as harmonious beauty, to help convey Adams’s view that Japanese American internment was but a brief, unfortunate episode that would pass, as surely as the built environment of Manzanar would disappear:

When all the occupants of Manzanar have resumed their places in the stream of American life, these flimsy buildings will vanish, the greens and flowers brought in to make life more understandable will wither, the old orchards will grow older, remnants of paths, foundations and terracing will gradually blend into the stable texture of the desert.

Adams’s opposition between flimsy, ephemeral human structures and stable, enduring nature wraps the land and Manzanar in romantic constructs even as it spurns man-made constructions. But the “flimsy buildings” proved to be more resilient than his vision allowed, vanishing from the site only to reappear elsewhere, a one-year vanishing act requiring labor, legal contracts, government agencies, publicity, and desire.

As the physical remains of Manzanar migrated, they became diasporic, in both senses of the word. Diaspora, from the ancient Greek meaning a scattering or sowing of seeds, has a dual sense of dispersal, of breaking apart and separating, and of sowing and planting, of sending forth to grow. To think about the idea of diaspora in terms of buildings, or photographs of buildings, might be regarded by some as sacrilege, as could representing Manzanar outside the customary tropes of social history and cultural sentiment. The word “diaspora” appears in the Old Testament to discuss the dispersal of the Jews, and it generally refers to a community of people who at one point were displaced or scattered from their homeland, but who still share a common history and identity marked by this origin and dispersion, as do the buildings in Freeman’s photographs. In its most prevalent usages, the concept of diaspora emphasizes an origin story rooted in oppression, victimization, and loss. Yet while the concept can be exercised conservatively, it also can be exercised more creatively, to suggest the ways culture and meanings migrate and circulate, travel through history, fragment, double back on themselves, and mutate.

In this sense, Freeman’s Manzanar photographs construct a mini-diaspora and map a diasporic typology by selecting, grouping, and ordering objects that share formal and functional characteristics, as well as origin. These images invite scrutiny and comparison, as other photographic series have done in the medium’s extensive history of typological projects, from the work of August Sander to that of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like the Bechers’ work, these are photographic studies of exteriors. But unlike the Bechers’ industrial imagery, their water towers and coal bunkers, these barracks functioned even more explicitly to create social order. And beyond the formal and functional characteristics generally common to members of a typology, the idea of diaspora here adds others: Manzanar’s temporal and geographical origins; the concept of home—even, or especially, in its absence; and the importance of past identity to present, through the course of movement and rehabilitation.

DISPERSAL

Figure 3, Signage on barracks, Santa Anita, 1942		Figure 4, Steamline Moderne barrack, Tule Lake, 1942

How many Manzanar buildings might there be out in the world? Hundreds or many more, depending on how one counts them and what counts as a Manzanar building. During the war there were 504 internee barracks at Manzanar, plus a few hundred other buildings. By the early summer of 1946, some 100 structures and their furnishings had been sold to government agencies and private purchasers, and removed from the site. Many of these structures were relocated to nearby towns, while others were disassembled, moved to the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds in Pomona, and from there used in Federal Public Housing Authority projects in California, Arizona, and Utah. Most coveted by prospective buyers were the dozens of “Caucasian” barracks (staff housing). While these may have been preferred for racist reasons or because they lacked the taint of having housed prisoners, they also were better constructed than internee barracks, with plumbing, wood siding over the tarpaper, and more interior partitions, electrical outlets, and windows. Caste still found expression in architecture, even when the basic form was the same.

Following initial sales and transfers of Manzanar buildings in the spring and summer of 1946, the War Assets Administration (WAA) hired a contractor to demolish the remaining structures for scrap material, which was then dispersed widely under the aegis of the Federal Public Housing Authority. Part way through the demolition process, in November 1946, with 237 internee barracks still to be demolished and a second extension on the land lease from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power set to expire in six weeks, officials of the WAA decided to speed up the wrecking process by dismantling the prefabricated buildings in their original eight- and ten-foot sections rather than breaking them down fully. [Figure 1] The balloon-frame buildings were, in essence, modular and reproducible, of a piece with modern industry. With the advent of machine-cut boards and mass-produced nails in the early nineteenth century, balloon-frame construction became the norm in the U.S.; the same balloon-frame construction that then made possible the rapid growth of towns and cities from Chicago to San Francisco, made Manzanar and its dispersal possible.

While sectioning buildings served instrumental ends by saving money and time in demolition, government officials also argued that it would allow every buyer “to re-erect the structure in less time with less additional materials required to complete the structure.” Expediency contributed to greater structural integrity as the last Manzanar structures migrated into the world in larger pieces, even when the final product may have used only a few of those pieces. The house in [#10.2.03 - Residence, Lone Pine, California. N36°36.362’, W118°03.644’] is one of the pint-size barracks that probably resulted from sectioning. Days after the decision to section the remaining buildings, a streamlined sale system was established so that individuals could more readily buy Manzanar structures, and architects drew up stock plans for the barracks’ afterlife. Over the final weeks of November 1946, nearly 200 Manzanar barracks were purchased by California veterans, mostly in the surrounding region.

Since Manzanar was just one site of Japanese American internment—and just one aspect of the militarization of the country which began in World War II—the genealogy of internment barracks extends far beyond the Owens Valley. In a 1946 press photograph [Figure 2] a barrack is being moved to East Los Angeles from the Los Angeles County Fairgrounds, for reuse as veterans’ housing. Although the provenance of this building is uncertain, its windows are identical to those used in barracks at the Santa Anita Racetrack and Los Angeles County Fairgrounds, the two Southern California assembly centers where thousands of Japanese Americans were sent while relocation camps were being built. As a likely sibling to the buildings in Andrew Freeman’s photographs, the barrack in East Los Angeles is part of the diaspora beyond the boundaries of Freeman’s project.

POSTWAR HOUSING

Barrack cities, like Manzanar, resemble other planned communities designated for specific populations: military personnel, Native Americans, workers in company towns— people marginalized culturally, socially, economically, and politically. The recognizable, rarified spaces of barrack cities, and their demographics, foster the belief that to live on the outside is to be untouched by the forces that create and sustain those cities. The foundations of this conceptual boundary begin to erode as physical boundaries are transgressed, when pieces of these cities migrate to recombine with structures and townscapes elsewhere.

The sale of barracks from Japanese American internment camps was, however, an unremarkable event in 1946. Surplus war buildings were being sold off throughout the U.S., in part to help alleviate postwar shortages of housing and construction materials, but also to build consensus by extending aid to veterans, primarily white male veterans. The Depression was over, people hoped, and government, the media, and real estate interests had latched onto homeownership as a way to promote consumption and a new, more consumer-based image of citizenship. Lack of affordable housing was a hot issue immediately after the war, in those years rife with class conflict (a story that has been grossly diminished by media depictions of the postwar era). In 1946 veterans and their families camped out in Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park to protest the lack of housing, and that same year a community of ten thousand units of recycled Quonset huts was set up in nearby Griffith Park to salve the housing crisis.

Under a Federal bill mandating relocation and re-use of wartime structures for veterans’ housing, over half a million apartments, houses, and college dormitories were created out of war-related structures in the U.S. in 1946 alone. By 1946 accounts the Manzanar buildings and materials were simply generic materials, unmarked by the particular nature of their use and as neutral as the language the government and newspapers used to describe their “depopulation” and “disposal”—in a world where orders became “operative” rather than being ordered and carried out by people who might bear responsibility for their actions.

Although there were scandals related to the “disposal” of barracks from internment camps, they revolved not around ethical or conceptual questions but around whether sales privileged insiders and big investors rather than individual veterans and local schools. In the end many schools got their barracks, and the idea of using barracks for schools has since become second nature—there is scarcely a public school in California that doesn’t hold classes in trailers and other barrack-like structures. Initially installed as a stopgap measure to accommodate population growth in the short term, these “portables,” as they are sometimes called, have become permanent fixtures that transform the social spaces of schools. Increased use of these structures minimize the delineated spaces of hallways and breezeways, crucibles for so many of the social dramas of school life. Gone too, in many cases, are the lockers that typically line hallways, individuating students’ claims on institutional space. It would be going too far to call this transformation of school space the Manzanarization of public education. Yet the parallel suggests that the post-Fordism reflected in school architecture can be mapped back onto the dispersal of Manzanar, and outward to the ambiguous space in a photograph of a barrack/athletic building at Independence High School [#11.17.01 - Field maintenance building & Snack Den (home of the Cubs) Independence, California. N36°48.093’, W118°11.722’].

INCORPORATION

Figure 5, Landscaping by inmates		Figure 6, Post war housing tract, Los Angeles County, 1946 Poston, 1942

If architecture brings into visibility and thus makes legible economic, social, and power relations, one of the striking characteristics of many towns in the American West, to an outsider, is the narrowness of the visible spectrum of class. One side of the tracks isn’t always appreciably different from the other. In many cases there don’t appear to be any sides—everything looks more or less working class, because capital has accumulated elsewhere or in land and other forms that aren’t readily visible. Protean in their simplicity, Manzanar barracks could easily blend into the postwar landscape of towns in the Owens Valley because they were not all that different from the buildings that were already there, and those that would come. The V.F.W. Hall in Lone Pine [#11.2.01 - VFW Post 8036, Scout troop building on Gene Autry Lane, Lone Pine, California. N36°36.129’,W118°03.804’], for instance, integrates three generations of equally abject buildings, one predating Manzanar, one from Manzanar, and one more recent.

In essence, barracks are ur-buildings—basic, elemental architectural forms devoid of ornamentation; architectural floating signifiers. Their adaptability, as evidenced in Freeman’s photographs, brings to light the semiotics of built space in the region. At times it conforms to widely recognized patterns: government buildings generally communicate the importance of State and the Law through monumentality, and the Inyo County Courthouse in Independence, with its classical columns and imposing staircase, is suitably magisterial. Beyond the courthouse, though, the structures that appear most permanent in Independence and the nearby town of Lone Pine are two schools, two small hotels, and a funeral home—all places of transience and passage. Private residences are functional above all, reducing to its zero degree Le Corbusier’s adage that houses are machines for living in. And commercial and residential structures often resemble one another. Prison barracks also can be machines for praying in, when two are set alongside each another, with a third stacked on top [#10.31855.33.03- Foursquare Church at 5th and C Streets, Trona, California. N35º44.810’, W117º23.828’].

Even though vernacular Western architecture isn’t all that different from barracks, and barracks became a seamless part of townscapes in the Owens Valley, the rapid influx of hundreds of barracks into a county with such a small population may have informed local aesthetics. A War Relocation Authority photograph of landscaping at another internment center in Poston, Arizona, suggests that the forms of one’s built environment do indeed bleed into one’s aesthetic sense (or, possibly, prisoners’ assumptions about their captors’ aesthetic sense) [Figure 5]. This whimsical island world, built by internees in 1942, is a place for reverie and imaginative projection, a haven from the disruptive strangeness of prison life in a desert. Islands also have been the favored settings for musings on the nature of government and society by Europeans, including Thomas More and William Shakespeare. Just as their islands were in many ways dystopic, there is trouble in paradise here, for all the dwellings in this maritime scene look like barracks. The barrack surrounded by a fence reads as a microcosm of the world its creators inhabited, though that fence is a permeable boundary, perhaps a sign of resistance.

HOME AND THE UNCANNY

Home is a cherished trope in American culture, repository of a vast array of fuzzy notions: morality, rootedness, continuity, stability, family, community, the American dream. Houses often convey those ideas, or at least the idea of those ideas, through conventions of craftsmanship, design, landscaping, and maintenance. Yet the raw functionalism of houses in the region, in particular the migratory military barracks, undercuts that American euphemism “home,” a term applied ubiquitously to the building called a house. In a language riddled with economic metaphors, under an economic system where private property is sacrosanct, rootedness, the affective and social ties associated with dwelling, can be bought (even though pockets of linguistic resistance to the equivalence of house with home still exist, primarily for dogs, dolls, and renters, who occupy and rent only houses, never homes). The barracks that became normalized and integrated into the postwar landscape belie this myth and its accompanying mental images. The transformed barracks lack aesthetic appeal or even much idiosyncratic customization, which they occasionally had in their rarified original environments, either through signs [Figure 4] or structural modifications [Figure 5]. It is symptomatic that none of these barracks has been turned into even a third-rate modernist structure, for the aspirations of that sensibility are comparatively rare, both in the region and in the U.S. as a whole.

An image like [#11.12.02 - Golden State Cycle, 1220 North Main Street, Bishop, California. N37°22.436’, W118°23.689] presents a quotidian scene that is extraordinarily familiar, and for that reason discomfiting. It resonates with scenes across America, where luxury objects and dereliction coexist peacefully, a P.O.W. flag might cast its shadow over a pro-war sign, and patriotism could mean a Yamaha dealership with a Manzanar barrack in the back lot. Conventional beautification redolent of development throughout the country —new asphalt and cement, a swath of lawn and saplings—abuts the jumble of gas tanks, vehicles, and commercial buildings. Like the Logas sign, which is complete and sensible in its own environment (Logas is a fuel distributor), logos is a crucial letter away. The playful constellation of orange and red, forming a halo around the barrack, serves as anodyne to this otherwise austere scene.

In this photograph as in many others in this book, the profoundly banal becomes uncanny. According to Freud, a feeling of uncanniness emerges when the familiar and comfortable reveals itself as unfamiliar and strange. The uncanny has a special connection to architecture and the concept of home, the root of the words heimlich (canny or homey) and unheimlich (uncanny), each of which also has a double meaning. Heimlich means “belonging to the house . . . familiar, intimate . . . arousing a sense of agreeable restfulness and security as one within the four walls of [one’s] house.” The sense of privacy and security that is heimlich leads to its second meaning: concealed, kept from sight. The unheimlich is that which is strange and unfamiliar and thereby creates unease or discomfort, as well as the revelation of what was formerly concealed. By depicting exteriors of familiar structures so freighted with history, Freeman’s photographs engage the viewer in play with the uncanny.

Since the 1930s few aspects of the cultural landscape of the U.S. have escaped scrutiny, documentation, or memorialization by photographers with their cameras. From the detritus of modernity to the built environment of highways, suburbia, corporate parks, and commercial strips, to social ritual enacted at rodeos and cafes, funerals and birthday parties, sites of work and leisure. Nothing, it seems, is beyond the pale of photographic representation, and, often, nostalgia. Yet the images in this book resist nostalgic readings, for nostalgia requires uselessness, or unchanging use—use as it once was, or as prior use is imagined, as in the case of a functioning diner. The ruins among Freeman’s photographs are caught in a temporal web, woven in with images of the many functioning buildings. Although we’ve seen it all, these scenes reveal blind spots by forcing a viewer to look, really look, at things so often overlooked on the way to looking at something else, and by embedding them in the larger context of Manzanar.

Walter Benjamin once asked, “Is not every square inch of our cities the scene of a crime?” If one looks at a number of former Manzanar barracks or travels around looking for them with the architectural template in mind, something strange starts to happen. Pretty soon many other buildings—most other buildings—begin to look like Manzanar barracks. The new housing developments that continue to crop up on the outer fringes of metropolitan areas, including the McMansions. The shacks and cheaply built structures common throughout the U.S., particularly in many Western towns. Every trailer and doublewide park, home to some 22,000,000 Americans. The countless postwar housing tracts that created suburb upon suburb, of which the Levittowns are but one example. [Figure 6] Andrew Freeman’s photographs lead one to wonder if Manzanar might not be everywhere, inconspicuous yet ubiquitous.