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After President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the incarceration of more than 110,000 Japanese-Americans on February 19, 1942, the U.S. War Relocation Authority hired photojournalist Dorothea Lange to document the internment in Northern California. Lange’s establishing shots are of Japanese families. It demonstrates the connectedness of the Japanese to the American life—portrayed with other white children, with American flags, in markets, etc. It reinforces the idea that the Japanese were actually American citizens. Her photographs emphasize the Japanese were normal workers—essentially the Japanese had already been assimilated in American culture. Her photographs demonstrate that the Japanese were just ordinary people, like any other American citizen. 



Her photographs also show the process of internment and relocation. Images demonstrate that the government  dehumanized the Japanese and processed them as items or things. There was no separation between citizens and aliens. Putting all the Japanese in a universal class of enemies. Lange is showing a process by which the U.S. government took relatively American families and turned them into a mass production of people. She demonstrates the racial profiling that was occurring during this time. The government hired Lange to take photos in  to show to the  white Americans that the Japanese were being treated correctly--the opposite was portrayed.