Ansel Adams photographs on display at Port Townsend museum

Published 12:01 am Sunday, August 26, 2012

PORT TOWNSEND — “Ansel Adams: A Portrait of Manzanar” will be held at the Jefferson Museum of Art & History, 540 Water St., through Labor Day Weekend.

The exhibit, created by the Bainbridge Island Historical Museum and winner of awards of excellence from the Washington Museum Association and the Western Museum Association, tells the story of the Manzanar War Relocation Center.

It is illustrated by black-and-white photographs taken in 1943 by the legendary American photographer Ansel Adams, who died in 1984.

‘Overwhelming’

“The response to the exhibit has been overwhelmingly positive,” Bill Tennent, Jefferson County Historical Society executive director, said this week.

A standing-room-only crowd listened to Clarence Moriwaki, president of the Bainbridge Island Japanese-American Exclusion Memorial Association, present background during the opening lecture Aug. 3, Tennent said.

The exhibit originally was scheduled to end last Saturday but interest has been so high, the historical society decided to continue it.

“We are pleased that the Bainbridge museum was willing and able to extend its stay,” Tennent said. “This is a topic that people find fascinating and relevant to the world situation today.”

Tennent said some former internees and their families have visited the exhibit several times and that one family is now researching its history using historical society collections.

Bainbridge Island

Manzanar Relocation Center in California had a particular connection with Bainbridge Island.

It was the first destination for Bainbridge Islanders who were the first Japanese-Americans affected by Executive Order 9066, which ordered American citizens and legal immigrants of Japanese ethnicity confined in relocation centers such as Manzanar during World War II.

The relocation order was posted on Bainbridge Island on March 24, 1942, and on March 30 of that year, about 275 ethnic Japanese residents were sent to Manzanar.

By the time Adams began his photography project, the Bainbridge internees had been moved to Minidoka, Idaho, where some of the Jefferson County ethnic Japanese had been relocated.

A companion exhibit documenting the experience of the 27 Japanese-Americans removed from Jefferson County is mounted in the Port Townsend City Council chambers at 250 Madison St.

Museum open daily

The Jefferson Museum of Art & History is open daily from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

Admission is $4 for adults and $1 for children from 3 to 12 years old; it is free to members of the Jefferson County Historical Society.

Admission also is free the first Saturday of every month for Jefferson County residents.

For more information about the exhibit, visit www.jchsmuseum.org.