One of the annual photo contest winners was this aerial view of the WWII-era
Topaz concentration camp near Delta, Utah. Image description by photographer by
Chang Kyun Kim follows. For anthropology colleagues teaching complex societies, this instance is one of the many instances of harm to remember. Today there are the USA camps near the Mexican border, both in USA and with the coercion of the Mexican government also based on Mexican land. And there are also the industrial scale and logic of the Chinese concentration camps in Xinjiang, filled with China's own citizens who follow the way of Islam, chiefly among the Uyghur-Chinese.
Image Description: The lower part of the image shows the massive grids where the prison barracks of Topaz War Relocation Center that incarcerated 10,000 Japanese people living in U.S. were constructed. I tried to show the long lasting artifact and the harsh landscape that surrounds the camp site. It was taken with my drone in Nov 2019 in Delta, Utah.
This is part of a series (description by photographer follows).
Series Description: This series is about Japanese internment camps that were built in remote and harsh areas of the United States during the Second World War. These camps imprisoned 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry - more than 60% of them were U.S. citizens.
Working on the project reminded me of the racial antagonism we have witnessed in recent history, and led me to consider how radically our view can alter when war and terror affect our lives. History can always be repeated if not properly recalled or told. The pictures here were taken between 2018 and '19 in California, Arizona and Utah. For the aerial shots, I used a drone to capture the camp sites - these locations are so harsh and remote that no one would try building anything here.
No comments:
Post a Comment