Marina Berio: Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President

“Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President” is an indictment of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, in the form of an artist’s letter addressed to him six feet under at his final resting place in Hyde Park. Each lesson addresses a different aspect of the photographic record, and its efficacy or failure at relating the truth of the incarceration of over 120,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry during World War II.

The author begins with a family story about the detainment by police of her grandfather for taking pictures of clouds while celebrating his daughter’s birthday. She proceeds with a discussion of pictures that were left behind, lost, burned or not taken, and then asks FDR what his context for his 1936 use of the term “concentration camps” in a memo about Japanese Americans in Hawaii. She relates her family’s experience of travel to Heart Mountain, Wyoming, and tells the story of Toyo Miyatake’s hidden camera, and George Hirahara and Yone Kubo’s clandestine underground darkrooms. “Ten Photography Lessons for a Dead President” also touches on anti-miscegenation laws, baby pictures, and the work of official War Relocation Authority photographers, including Dorothea Lange and Hikaru (Carl) Iwasaki, who was a friend of her grandfather’s.

The letter contains a brief cross-cultural history of concentration camps and ends with a deeply intersectional look at some aspects of the history of white supremacy in America, comparing FDR’s treatment of Japanese Americans with other histories of forced exclusion, segregation, and racially discriminatory legislation. Finally, Berio ends with a timely assessment of how FDR’s use of executive orders presages the actions of the current administration.