Fig 1: Hansel Mieth, The March of Dimes Dance, 1943, gelatin silver print. Collection of Ron Perisho, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/834460.
The March of Dimes Dance by Hansel Mieth (Fig. 1) is a photograph taken in 1943 depicting a fundraising dance at Heart Mountain War Relocation Center, one of the camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II.1 Mieth, a German American photographer sent to document camp conditions by Life magazine, produced photographs which presented profoundly compassionate images of her subjects that reflected their humanity and dignity in the face of imprisonment.2 By focusing her camera on the people, rather than the prison architecture and bleak landscape of Heart Mountain, Mieth created a look into an intimate, profoundly ordinary moment of American life, while still portraying the inescapable carceral nature of the camps through the lack of free space in the shot and barren decor in the background, while the static positioning of the dancers conveys how young Japanese Americans’ life plans were stalled by imprisonment. Attending this Western style gathering allowed the young people to participate in a familiar community activity, while the social rules of a dance allowed men to temporarily embody active masculine roles that they were denied while imprisoned.
Mieth’s empathy for the prisoners is evident in the subjects and composition of her camp works, and this compassionate approach to the assignment resulted in only three of her Heart Mountain photographs ever being run by Life magazine, with most deemed unsuitable.3 While her images did fufill their original purpose of documenting camp life for the general public, Mieth’s approach to the assignment subverted the expected positive portrayal of the situation, as the photographs displayed a profound humanity often denied to Japanese Americans in this period.
Internment, a practice referring to the detention of enemy aliens during wartime, impacted German, Italian, and Japanese nationals living in the United States during WWII, but only in the case of the Japanese did it extend to all persons of Japanese ancestry.4 This included citizens born in America, (at that time, Japanese immigrants could not become naturalized citizens), down to those of 1/16th Japanese blood.5 Mieth and her husband were both of German ancestry. During their time at Heart Mountain, the couple undoubtedly reflected on their own identities in relation to the Japanese and Japanese Americans, contrasting their own freedom with the imprisonment of their subjects. Regarding the harsh winter conditions she observed in the camp, Mieth said “my heart bled for the poor people made to endure those Arctic conditions, just because they were decreed enemies and dangerous…I was outraged at seeing them at the mercy of the elements.” 6The compassion she held for those she photographed is evident in the work she created while at Heart Mountain and is clearly communicated through features of The March of Dimes Dance.
At first, the scene that the photograph depicts is one of ordinary 1940’s era American life. The shot focuses on couples dancing in a plain room, while men in the background play brass instruments and a woman plays the piano in the right foreground. The lighting is harsh and dramatic; with the light from an exposed lightbulb hitting the face of one of the young men in the middle, illuminating him starkly. The dancers’ attire is casual, with many of the men in plaid shirts and several of the women in pants. The image’s tight framing casts the event in an intimate light. The viewer sees a room filled with dancing couples, but occupied as they are with their partners, none of them meet the camera’s gaze. The title of the image mentions a then recently founded charitable organization focused on helping mothers and infants that the dance is being held to raise money for. By holding a Western style charity dance, young people in the camp are continuing to engage with popular elements of American life, displaying the familiarity with and enjoyment of Western culture that many Nisei (the second generation of Japanese immigrants to America) held.
After a closer look at the photograph’s details: the bare bulb, rough wood floors, and low hanging ceilings, put together with the date the photo was taken and the subjects’ East Asian features, its historical circumstances become subtly present. While the prisoners had access to schools, employment, and social activities within the camps, they lacked freedom. Dances such as this took place hemmed in by barbed wire and watchtowers with armed guards.7 The lack of open space in the shot creates a tight location that one cannot escape. The entirety of the shown space is filled with dancers and musicians. There are no windows in the room, and the photograph lacks free space. In this image, Mieth emphasized that the restrictive conditions of incarceration were inescapable, even when the camera was trained away from the camp’s more militaristic features.
The positions taken by the dancers show them standing straight and still. Detention was a massive interruption of life plans for all, but particularly so for young adults whose transitions into the workforce, higher education, or married life were stalled with no given end date. One prisoner described their situation as:
[We] did our best to make life pleasant and productive, but it was mostly a time of suspended expectations…No matter what I did, I was still in an artificial government-spawned community on the periphery of the real world…a dismal, dreary camp surrounded by barbed wire in the middle of a stark, harsh landscape that offered nothing to refresh the eye or heal the spirit.8
While a dance is all about movement, the shot lacks the energy of moving bodies or swirling clothing. The mood that the image transmits is an immobile one, reflecting the stagnation which those incarcerated were forced into until their release.
Imprisonment created a profound sense of emasculation in Japanese men. Men in the camps, having lost their previous jobs, were no longer the providers they had formerly been. The organization of group imprisonment meant that they were no longer the unquestionable heads of their families. Structures such as communal meals in the camp’s dining hall disrupted hierarchical family dining rituals. Fathers no longer had their meals prepared and set out by their wives while the presided over their children, but were now expected to serve themselves while sitting side by side with everyone else in the community, regardless of gender or status.9 Men of the older generation also had their authority displaced due to a lack of the necessary cultural knowledge to navigate the American prison camps they had been placed in. As former camp prisoner Harry Kitano wrote, "the Issei [first generation of Japanese immigrants in America] father was at a cultural disadvantage—his Nisei son understood the American culture better than he did."10 Due to their positioning, the men in the shot seem to have their arms wrapped protectively around the women. Social situations such as this allowed them to briefly embody conventional masculine roles again, as men traditionally invite a partner to accompany them to dances, ask women to dance during the event, and lead their partner physically.
The perspectives in Mieth’s photography reveal why much of her work at Heart Mountain was not approved for publication. Popular depictions of the Japanese in WWII propaganda posters were cartoonish in their racism, often showing them as yellow skinned and buck toothed, with slit eyes and animalistic features.11 The repeated popular associations between the Japanese and animals contributed to the social acceptance of their treatment during the imprisonment period, such as when during the early phases of forced removal, some Japanese Americans were relocated to temporary shelters constructed in former horse stalls around racetracks 12.
Three years before Mieth was sent to Heart Mountain, Life magazine ran the article “How to Tell Japs from the Chinese,” which contrasted the two groups, using pictures of the “Chinese public servant” versus the “Japanese warrior.” The magazine stated that one way to tell the two apart was to note that the Chinese “wear the rational calm of tolerant realists” whereas, “Japs show humorless intensity of ruthless mystics.”13 While articles and depictions such as these were nominally focused on the Japanese in Japan, these racial features were shared by their American counterparts. As evidenced by the imprisonment of generations of Japanese American citizens, Japanese villainy became a hereditary and permanent trait, with all Americans of Japanese ancestry linked to the current Japanese government and suspected of harboring allegiance to the Emperor of Japan. This was something which, according to Mieth’s own employer, was reflected in their physiognomy. In The March of Dimes Dance, none of the subjects gaze back at the camera. This is unlike in the Life article images, where both the Chinese and Japanese men look straight into the camera, allowing space of their eyelids, nose width, and browbones to be analyzed by the viewer as belonging to an ally or an enemy. Conversely, Mieth’s subjects deny the viewer their attention, with each person engaged in dancing, playing music, or, like the man standing without a partner on the left side of the photograph, just absorbed in their own thoughts. When Mieth photographed the prisoners, her shots did not reveal the garish faces of the yellow skinned enemy seen in the posters. The humorless intensity of ruthless mystics is nowhere to be found on the illuminated faces of her subjects. Had her images been published, American viewers would have seen the Heart Mountain population engaged in many of the same activities as other Americans, lacking the monstrous nature ascribed to them in wartime propaganda.
In The March of Dimes Dance, Hansel Mieth captured a snapshot of life in a Japanese incarceration camp. Without directly showing the more glaring aspects of imprisonment, the work nevertheless conveys the sense of confinement and of being frozen in time which the prisoners experienced. By focusing her camera on the people, rather than the prison surroundings, Mieth gave her viewers an intimate look at a moment of community taking place amongst people who were routinely demonized in American media, while still portraying the inescapable carceral nature of the camp through the tight space in the shot, the background decor, and the positions of her subjects.
