Photography student Alyssa Lyman shares lessons learned at Topaz
Working as the photographer for the College of Fine Arts and Communications has given me the unique opportunity to photograph some pretty neat things, but one of my favorite experiences was last February when I accompanied BYU film students on a field trip to the Topaz War Relocation Site.
On a cold Saturday morning, we hopped in the BYU vans and drove the 90 miles down to Delta, a small town in southern Utah where over 9,000 Japanese Americans were housed from 1942-1945 during World War II. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt signed an executive order which forced more than 120,000 Japanese Americans out of their homes and into relocation camps.
None of these Americans were ever convicted or charged with any crime.
Inside the Topaz Museum in Delta, Utah. (Alyssa Lyman)
This site is of particular interest to film students because one prisoner, California businessman Dave Tatsuno, used a smuggled camera to document camp life while confined there. His film later became the second amateur documentary to be selected for the National Film Registry and was deemed “culturally significant” by the Library of Congress. Tatsuno’s film and what remains of the Topaz Camp stand as a reminder of the injustice that happens when people act out of prejudice and fear.
I’ve always known that film and photography can be influential. Tatsuno’s film was definitely that — a lot of what we know about the inside of the camp is thanks to the footage that he captured. As I walked around the Topaz museum and the remains of the camp, I was both amazed and shocked by what I saw. Museum director Jane Beckworth, who grew up in Delta, told us, “nobody thought they were dangerous when they got here.”
On the museum walls, I read a quote by Gordon Hirabayashi, a civil rights leader who resisted Japanese American internment: “We had the Constitution to protect us in 1942. It didn’t because the will of the people wasn’t behind it.”
While I am heartbroken by what the Japanese people went through because of the American prejudice at the time, I am grateful that we have documentation of it to remind us of these events and prevent things like this from happening in the future.
Alyssa Lyman is a photography major with a Spanish minor from Chaska, Minnesota. She plans to graduate in 2021 and hopes to work as a photojournalist.
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