Manzanar

I've been a fan of Ansel Adams photos since my college days when I first saw them. He captured the majesty of Yosemite like no one else. I wasn't aware that he ever photographed people.

While we were in Hawaii, we visited the Honolulu Academy of Arts and saw an exhibit of photos that Ansel Adams made of the Japanese interment camp at Manzanar in California. It was heartbreaking to see the pain inflicted upon these folk - mostly American citizens - simply because of their ancestry. One photo that still haunts me is of a mother holding the Congressional Medal of Honor she received for her son who had sacrificed himself to save his colleagues by diving on a hand grenade. She received the medal while living behind barbed wire and after having had everything she owned taken away from her. And here we are talking about profiling people because they look Arab or are Muslim... and history threatens to repeat itself.