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[Thesis Performance Information]

[Dedokoro|http://danm.ucsc.edu/~abtollef/dedokoro/Dedokoro_Heart_Mountain_2/index.html]

From August 2005 to August 2007, I documented four Japanese American internment camps to collect images for a graduate thesis about the haiku written by poets inside the camps during WWII.

I Traveled to Heart Mountain Wyoming, Rhower and Jerome in Arkansas, and in the following year I made a trip to Tule Lake in northern California. While taking photographs in these four historic locations of former Japanese-American internment camps I was met with immediate challenges with both the material artifacts slowly sinking into the earth, and the process of decay turning the once recognizable into something strange. What remained were only few barracks that stood on the open fields outside the town of Powell Wyoming, across the railroad tracks and in view of Heart Mountain, a little butte that bears some resemblance to the shape of a hat. At all four locations there is very little left to actually photograph, even less since the windows and doors of the buildings at Heart Mountain where closed up. I did not have the opportunity to photograph the interiors of any of the structures from the inside like the late Matsumi Hayashi did in the 90’s with her stunning photomontages. I had to be happy with the view from outside through the plexiglass and wire mesh the department of interior installed as a measure against the hanta virus and the rattlesnakes.

The other challenge I faced was trying to recognize anything at all meaningful lying there in the dirt since this tragedy didn’t happen to me how could I recognize in something twisted and malformed its original significance and purpose? At Heart Mountain , a smoke stack towers above the cotton field, as is the case at Rhower, and Jerome. The smoke stacks and the fields don’t belong together. Decay with time, transforms our technology into something strange. While technology is still useful it is mundanely recognizable. A barbed wire fence for instance once taut and racing off to a vanishing point, after sixty years, becomes a twisted rusted scribble, a gesture of time and collapse. The technological answer for how to exclude 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry forced to live under appalling conditions among them were children, the elderly, and men and women all of whom were never charged nor tried: the barbed wire fence, at these historic locations in the present, dives in and out of the earth like stitches on a wound.

Material artifacts such as crumbling architecture, parts of quickly poured foundations, timbers weather beaten and lichen covered, rusted nails and asphalt shingles, all of these parts of a larger system, were installed by workers following instructions in an organized chain of production; workers that were swept along in the wave of propaganda and fear to construct a machine of racism along side the Japanese Americans who, in many cases had to finish constructing their own prisons.

Archeological data can reconstruct the past only after it is given some kind of analysis. An artifact is an object whose meaning is open until a curator interprets the information of the archeologist, and places the artifacts in the context of other objects that help to reinforce the curator’s meaning.

My photographs attempt to bring the viewer to the level of a close observer of the textures of decay and transformation showing how the barracks at the  Heart Mountain camp location are covered in many layers of green asphalt shingles or there are cicada husks on the tombstones at the memorial at Rhower, or the field of cotton next to the cemetery.The photographs document details that struck me as a witness at the various historic sites. I'm not with out bias- so the details that I documented are also a reflection of me - Perhaps these photographs place the viewer in the position of a curator filtering data through different subjectivities...and through my lens

My goal is that by creating movies out of these stills I can demonstrates something unseen: the surrounding environment outside the frame of any one individual photograph, calling attention to a broader territory outside the frame of the photograph.


Alan Tollefson
Santa Cruz CA 2007
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