Legacies on the Land: Photographs by Joan Myers and Patrick Nagatani

Fears about national security peaked after the Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in December 1941. President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order to remove approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans and people of Japanese descent from their homes on the West Coast to “relocation centers” further inland.

In the 1990s, two American photographers based in New Mexico, Joan Myers (b. 1944) and Patrick Nagatani (1945-2017), traveled independently to find what were relatively unmarked sites of World War II detention camps and photographed their remains.

Myers, a photographer of American landscape and culture, was interested in the hidden histories of the people who struggled to continue their lives in these uncomfortable, unfamiliar places. Her images capture the scarce traces of their residence on the land and the poignancy of the everyday objects they left behind.

Nagatani, whose parents and grandparents were among the incarcerated during the war, traveled to the ten primary relocation sites, which he refers to as concentration camps. His images highlight the beauty and banality of these places, largely deserted today and marked primarily by ghostly remnants like a rusted toy, concrete slab, or tombstone.

Augmenting these photographs from the museum’s collection is a painting by New Mexican artist Jerry West (b. 1933), whose father and uncle worked at an internment facility in Santa Fe, one of four confinement sites in New Mexico (now designated by a marker on a hill at the Frank S. Ortiz Park). As a boy, West would visit these places and in his later depiction of them, show the stark contrast between the prison-like barracks and the mountain landscape.

The exhibition coincides with the exhibition Reclaiming the Future: The Legacy of Japanese American Incarceration, on view at the museum’s Vladem Contemporary from September 5, 2026 through March 28, 2027.