US Highway 50, Granada, Colorado and the Amache Internment Camp

Amtrak a Passing Shadow, Granada, Colorado, US Highway 50
acrylic
8 1/4 x 23 1/4 x 3 3/4 inches

In 2005, I began photographing US Highway 50.  My focus was a section of highway known as the Loneliest Road in America that traverses Nevada.  Raised in Utah and Nevada, I grew up crossing the Great Basin.  An area of interior drainage, the rivers never make it to the sea.  Instead, they vanish in shallows of stagnation.  The Great Salt Lake is a good example of this.  My parents lived at opposite ends of the 500 mile divide of mountains and valleys.  Highway 50 was the connection between Fillmore, Utah and Reno, Nevada.  In 2012 I extended the highway theme to include Colorado.  This past fall, I covered the rest of the highway on a road trip that took me all the way to Maryland.  This is not a project to be completed in a single season.  It will likely involve the rest of my life, but I really like the idea of covering the breadth of the nation from the vantage point of a single highway.

I wanted to capture all the towns along the way.  As I traveled, I realized that kind of exactness would never actually happen.  Maps never entirely capture the idea of habitation.  What constitutes a town or community is not always straightforward.  With all the clusters that happen along the way, the abstraction of a map was necessary.  I missed some towns because I didn't know I missed them.  Sometimes I turned around to fix the mistake, and sometimes I didn't.  Then there was the problem of cities and the surrounding suburbs.  I confined cities to skylines and downtown intersections.  I didn't hit museums or spend much time dining out.  This wasn't about tourism, although it often touched forgotten places, the kind of places only known to those coming home to houses shadowed by freight trains on tracks that preceded miles of automotive travel.

Heading west out of Kansas, the sun had just come up.  In Granada, Colorado, grain elevators bathed in morning sunlight.  I pulled over just in time to catch a passing Amtrak.  I didn't realize or imagine that Granada had been the site of an internment camp.  That knowledge came to me later at a rest area.  However, I recently caught it on my way home from Maryland.  There wasn't much. There never is.  The only standing structure was not from the past, but rather the reconstruction of a guard tower.  Signs at the entrance provided a brief history.  The Granada Relocation Center also known as Amache held 10,000 people of Japanese ancestry from August 1942 to October 1945.  This was one of ten camps that held 110,000 prisoners.  Two thirds of the prisoners were American citizens.  The interesting part about the figure is that another internment camp has the number at 120,000.  I noticed the discrepancy because there happens to be a camp not far from where I live.  Out in the desert of west Millard County, Utah are the remains of the Central Utah Relocation Center also known as the Topaz Internment Camp.  Whatever the number, wartime seemed to inflame racism, a racism that many are never willing to acknowledge. 

The reconstruction of a guard tower at the Granada Relocation Center,
 also known as the Amanche Internment Camp.

The Central Utah Relocation Center, also known as the Topaz Interment Camp.