Estelle Ishigo’s “Determination, rain or shine” depicts a solitary Japanese American woman standing against a cold wind in a World War II incarceration camp. The sketch’s rough lines mirror the barrenness of the camp itself: snow covering the ground, low barracks in the background, and a woman dressed for the weather as her scarf whips against the air. Despite the weather, the woman stands upright, displaying her resilience, cutting through the desolation.
This drawing resonates with Dorothea Lange’s work documenting Japanese American internment. In “Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning”, Lange is shown as an artist who refused to look away. Her photography is viewed through a moral vision, with an insistence on seeing people not as subjects but as fellow people caught in unjust systems. She wants to extract the universality of the situation, not the circumstances.
Ishigo, Estelle. Determination, rain or shine. ca. 1942–1945. UCLA Library Special Collections.
In Lange’s “Grab a Hunk of Lightning”, she shows photographs of tagged families waiting for relocation, called “Members of the Mochida family awaiting evacuation bus”, which echoes the quiet but loud endurance Ishigo captures in the drawing. The Mochida family, consisting of adults and children, stands stiffly, each wearing an official identification tag. Lange captures what others may see as invisible, as something that needs to be visible: the dignity held within displacement. As Robert Coles notes in “Doing Documentary Work”, true documentaries enter the lives of others not to use them but to learn from them, “our documentary efforts to learn from others about what they were doing…and our efforts to fit what we had learned…into a presentation…”(Coles 43). The Mochida family, standing together and facing the camera, embodies this ethical exchange. Lange’s photograph forces us to see the humanity and strength behind this historical wrong, a strength we might otherwise choose to ignore. She uses her craft to gain knowledge and transform documentation into empathy.
Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning. Directed by Dyanna Taylor, performance by Dorothea Lange, American Masters, PBS, 2014.
Dorothea Lange, Members of the Mochida family awaiting evacuation bus…, May 8, 1942, Hayward, California. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration
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