PORT TOWNSEND — A slate of panelists will discuss Manzanar and the photographs decades later of the infamous site by Brian Goodman during an art salon at 7 p.m. Nov. 17.
Northwind Arts Center and Port Townsend School of the Arts will present Art Salon: Shared Experiences of Manzanar, another in their continuing online series. The live, free event can be joined through Zoom. Go to PtArts.org or NorthwindArts.org for the event link.
The first, and one of the largest, camps established by the U.S. government in response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Manzanar internment camp in Owens Valley on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevadas in California, closed on Nov. 21, 1945.
Port Townsend photographer Brian Goodman photographed the desolate site over decades. His work culminated in a book and an exhibit now on display at Northwind Arts Center at 701 Water St., in Port Townsend, “Manzanar: Their Footsteps Remain — 40 years of Photography.”
Panelists Michael Adams, Clarence Moriwaki and Duncan Ryuken Williams will join Goodman in an informal conversation about Manzanar’s history and its relevance to modern times.
Writer and photographer Kerry Tremain will moderate the discussion.
“Like pottery shards discovered in an archaeological dig, these images give us clues to the story of a people who experienced intolerable indignities, fear, and racism while struggling for survival,” Goodman said.
Seventy-five years later, “it’s more important than ever that we look back at places like Manzanar and learn from our history,” organizers said.
“We must educate ourselves and teach our children to look beyond their fear, to be compassionate and tolerant. And we need to fight for our rights and the rights of our fellow human beings.”
A sentry post guarded the camp. (Brian Goodman)
Panelists
Adams is the son of the late photographer Ansel Adams. He was born in the Yosemite Valley and educated at Wasatch Academy in Mt. Pleasant, Utah, and Stanford University. He received a bachelor’s in geography from Fresno State College, and an M.D. from Washington University School of Medicine.
In addition to his private medical practice, he also has served as a fighter pilot for the U.S. Air Force and the California Air National Guard in Japan and New Mexico, and as a flight surgeon/pilot physician in Germany and Fresno, Calif.
Adams is chairman of the board of the Ansel Adams Gallery, now in its 118th year of operation in Yosemite Valley. He is an assistant clinical professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco Medical School, Department of Medicine, and teaches in the UCSF Fresno Residency Training Program.
He also has been an advisor to the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, Tucson, where the Ansel Adams photographic archive is located. He is a council member of the Yosemite Conservancy.
Goodman has been making photographs for over 50 years. In 2015, he retired from commercial photography to concentrate exclusively on fine art. His work can be seen in galleries, photography and contemporary art shows and exhibits, and private and commercial collections, across the country and internationally.
Moriwaki, who lives on Bainbridge Island, is the president of the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Community and member of the Speakers Bureau at Humanities Washington.
He served as a spokesperson for the Clinton Administration and was a Strategic Planning Committee Member at the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation.
“Peace Monument” is one of many photographs taken by Port Townsend photographer Brian Goodman at the site of Manzanar.
Williams is the author of several books on Buddhism and Japanese culture, most recently “American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War” (Harvard University Press, 2019), which was third on the LA Times Bestseller List for Nonfiction.
The book describes the wartime religious persecution of Japanese Buddhists — when 80 percent of Japanese Americans were of that faith — and their struggle to expand religious freedom in the internment camps and in America.
Williams, who was born in Tokyo to a Japanese mother and British father, is a graduate of Reed College and Harvard University, where he earned a doctorate in religion. He is currently professor of religion and East Asian languages and cultures at the University of Southern California and the director of the USC Shinso Ito Center for Japanese Religions and Culture.
Tremain, Art Salon moderator, has worked as a writer, editor, art director, and designer of books and magazines, as a curator of exhibitions, and as a founder and director of arts organizations.
During 10 years at Mother Jones magazine, he served as art director, creative director and executive editor, and was the founder and director of Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography, which raised $5 million to provide grants to photographers globally.
He served as editor-in-chief of the award-winning California magazine, and he has written articles for several other magazines, including an investigative report on the Presidio that was a National Magazine Award Finalist.
He has curated exhibitions in Paris, Mexico City, and San Francisco, most recently Yosemite: A Storied Landscape at the California Historical Society, for which he also created an interactive multimedia e-book.
