Whispered Silences: Japanese American Detention Camps, Fifty Years Later Photographs Document Remains Of Wartime Experience

Whispered Silences: Japanese American Detention Camps, Fifty Years Later, opens Saturday, May 3, 1997 at the Japanese American National Museum. Part of the Shithsonian Institution Travelling Exhibition Service (SITES), the Museum is one stop in the exhibit’s North American tour.

Fourty-four contemporary platinum-palladium prints were taken by photographer Joan Myers and evoke the wartime experiences of Japanese Americans, as told through the weathered objects, abandoned gardens and building fragments ofthe detention camps. Meyers found the photographic subjects at the 10 relocation centers where the U.S. government held 110,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

The images, such as a cracked rubber toy car, a grave marker for a pet and other remnants of community life behind barbed wire, are accompanied by detainee’s first-hand accounts of their experiences, along with text written by Dr. Gary Okihiro, professor of history and director of the Asian American studies program at Cornell University.

The exhibit runs through September 14, 1997 in the Museum’s Legacy Center Gallery. For more information call the Japanese American National Museum at (213) 635-0414. The Museum is located at 369 East First Street in Los Angeles Little Tokyo.