Oakland Exhibit Puts You Behind Dorothea Lange's Camera in 1942

In the spring of 1942, Dorothea Lange stood on the streets of Oakland with a Graflex camera and photographed Japanese American families waiting to be taken away. This fall, at the Oakland Museum of California, you can raise a replica of that camera to your eye and watch the scene play out again in augmented reality. BeHere / 1942: A New Lens on the Japanese American Incarceration, by Tokyo-based media artist Masaki Fujihata, runs through December 27, 2026, in the museum's Great Hall and outside in Oak Street Plaza.

It is one of the more unusual ways anyone has found to present incarceration history, and it raises a hard question: what does it mean to restage a forced removal in the place where it happened?

What is BeHere / 1942?

The exhibition takes archival photographs by Lange and Russell Lee, both of whom documented the removal of Japanese Americans for the federal government, and enlarges and animates them. Inside, visitors handle a replica of Lange's Graflex and look through its viewfinder to trigger an augmented reality recreation of families boarding buses. Outside in Oak Street Plaza, a life-size image of evacuees boarding buses is paired with an AR view on iPad, showing the buses and people in motion as they were in 1942.

The figures are not computer generated from scratch. Fujihata filmed real people in period clothing in Tokyo and Los Angeles, including community elders and descendants of people who were incarcerated. A new three-screen video installation features Bay Area residents, some with family ties to the incarceration and others affected by current anti-immigrant policies.

"When the public comes here to experience it, they will see it as something that happened in this space," Fujihata told Berkeleyside, as reported by SFist.

Fujihata first built a Los Angeles version in 2022, after studying Lange's archive through UCLA's Yanai Initiative for Globalizing Japanese Humanities. The Oakland edition is presented with the Yanai Initiative, the Japanese American National Museum, the Oakland Museum Women's Board and the Japanese American Community Foundation.

What happened in Oakland in 1942

The exhibition works because it is local. In 1940, Oakland's Japanese American community numbered 1,790 people, according to census figures cited by SFist, many of them living in Chinatown and West Oakland, a short walk from where the museum stands now. In 1942, under Executive Order 9066, they were ordered out. Families gathered with whatever they could carry and were sent first to the Tanforan detention center, a converted racetrack in San Bruno, before transfer to the camps.

Nationwide, about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry were incarcerated in ten camps, many of them for roughly three and a half years.

One of Lange's best known images was taken nearby: a storefront at Eighth and Franklin in Oakland's Chinatown with a sign reading "I AM AN AMERICAN," put up by its Japanese American owner before the family was removed. The museum says some of Lange's photographs were taken close to its current location, which is the whole premise of the AR in the plaza. The buses in the viewfinder are pulling away from the same ground you are standing on.

The photographs the Army did not want seen

Lange's place at the center of this show carries its own history. She was hired by the War Relocation Authority to document the removal, but many of her photographs showed something the government did not want shown. The Army censored 119 of her images, and the majority were never published at the time. Most of that work reached a wide audience only decades later, collected in the 2006 book Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment.

That gives the replica camera an edge. Visitors are not just looking at history. They are looking through the instrument the government paid for and then tried to bury. The museum frames the show as a study of the power between photographer and subject, and that relationship is part of what you are being asked to notice.

Why a reenactment works here

There are fair reasons to be wary of restaging trauma as an immersive experience. It can flatten people into spectacle. What keeps BeHere / 1942 on the right side of that line is who is in the frame. The figures in the viewfinder are played by descendants and elders from the community, not anonymous models, and the new video centers Bay Area voices rather than an outsider's narration.

It also refuses to keep the story safely in the past. By putting people affected by today's immigration enforcement in the same room as the 1942 images, the exhibition makes an argument most incarceration history only gestures at: that removing people from a community on the basis of who they are is not a closed chapter.

That connection is not abstract for Japanese American institutions right now. The Japanese American National Museum, a partner on this show, has been closed for renovation since January 2025 and, as we reported, reopens in January 2027 with a gallery aimed at the present. While its own doors are shut, exhibitions like this one carry the memory work outward into museums that are not dedicated to Japanese American history at all.

How to visit

BeHere / 1942 is on view at the Oakland Museum of California through December 27, 2026. General admission is $25, $22 for seniors, and $18 for youth ages 12 to 17 and students with ID. Members and children 12 and under get in free. The Oak Street Plaza portion is outdoors, so the AR experience there can be paired with a walk through Oakland's Chinatown, a few blocks away, where many of the families Lange photographed once lived.

Go with someone who remembers, if you can. The point of the exhibition is that this happened here, to families whose descendants are still part of the Bay Area.