E.O. 9066 Internment 1942-1946 [poster caption title]

[N.p., likely Pasadena, Ca.]: Stone S. Ishimaru, 1993. Very good.. Photographically-illustrated poster, 32.5 x 22 inches. Minor wear, small area of discoloration in lower margin likely from removed label. A very rare poster featuring photographs from ten of the Japanese-American internment camps, created by Stone S. Ishimaru (also known as Saburo Stone Ishimaru), a noted Nisei photographer from Southern California. The camps featured here include (from the top down): Amache, Gila River, Heart Mountain, Jerome, Manzanar, Minidoka, Poston, Rohwer, Topaz, and Tule Lake. Each of the camps is featured in strips, each containing five to six photographs of (truncated) various camp scenes. The camps are also named around the outside border of the poster.

Saburo Stone Ishimaru (1923-2018) was a Nisei photographer and teacher born in El Centro, California. During the Second World War, he was incarcerated at the Poston internment camp for two years, where he developed a passion for photographing inside the camp for the War Relocation Authority. Following the war, he enlisted in the U.S Army as a photographer, documenting the American occupation of Japan. After his honorable discharge, Ishimaru earned both a B.A. and M.A. from USC. He worked the remainder of his career as an educator, media consultant, and archival and historical coordinator for the Los Angeles Unified School District for almost fifty years.

In the 1980s and '90s, Ishimaru published several photobooks on Japanese-American internment, including Concentration Camps U.S.A., War Relocation Authority - Manzanar Relocation Center, and War Relocation Authority - Rohwer Relocation Center, among others. The present poster may be advertising another such book by Ishimaru, but we find no record of a printed book under this title. More likely it was intended to publicize a local exhibit of internment camp photographs, which Ishimaru was known to do around South Pasadena. Ishimaru passed away in 2018 at the ripe old age of ninety-five. We could locate no other copies of this poster in OCLC, though Claremont College holds a copy. (Inventory #: 5616)