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The following images were made by Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information photographers during World War II and are part of the famous FSA photography series that I  have written about here.  The color photographs–which were made in the first decade or so of the use of this new medium–represented only about 1,600 of the collection of 160,000 images in the FSA archive, and are far less known than their black-and-white complements, many of which are new iconic symbols for this period.  The color images are beautiful works, and somehow seem to bring these historic images a little closer to the present.

This series are some of the few color images made of daily life in the Japanese Relocation Camp at Tule Lake in 1942/3.  The internment (“relocation”) of American citizens of Japanese heritage in “reservations” is a result of Executive Order 9066, signed into power by Franklin Roosevelt on 19 February 1942.  I’ve written about this episode in several places on this blog, including here. 

Japanese-American camp, war emergency evacuation,[Tule Lake Relocation Center, Newell, Calif.] 1942 or 1943.