@WakeUpCall – ‘The Age of Incarceration’ with Morgan Lieberman

Amy talks with documentary, commercial, and editorial photographer Morgan Lieberman about ‘The Age of Incarceration,’ where she captures the testimony and experiences of nine of the last survivors of Japanese American incarceration, 80 years after the war ended and these people were released.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Let's say good morning to the creator of the Age
of Incarceration, LA based photojournalist Morgan Lieberman. Good morning, Morgan.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Good morning. How are you.

Speaker 1 (00:10):
I'm great. I would love for you to tell us
about your new project, The Age of Incarceration. Can you
explain what it is a little bit?

Speaker 2 (00:21):
Definitely. Yeah. So a few years ago, I was reflecting
on my Jewish identity and how I grew up with
so much awareness and grief associated with the Holocaust, And
around this time I recognized that I had a huge
lack of education about what was happening on American soil,
simultaneously with the Japanese American community, specifically on the West Coast.

(00:46):
And it became this never ending onion of layers upon
layers of an overwhelming amount of injustice that is really
deeply underrepresented in a race from the history books and
the media landscape I felt was an often invisible topic
was on how mass incarceration affected one hundred and twenty

(01:07):
five thousand Japanese American citizens and people of Japanese descent
in America, and I wanted to explore how the specific
kind of trauma impacted the rest of their lives. So
I began documenting and interviewing Japanese American incarceration camp survivors
and this all started out of exploring my own Jewish

(01:30):
identity and finding this bridge with this community.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Okay, So, and you started documenting it, taking photos and videos,
and then you've put it all together, and that's where
we end up with the age of incarceration. So it's
it's not only pictures, but then it's video with audio
of the interviews and that kind of thing. Or is
it completely visual?

Speaker 2 (01:56):
Yeah, So it's a multi component. It's portraits of the
survivors in their own homes and as well as that,
there's video interviews because I felt like hearing their voices
is so humanizing and I feel that I'm very empathy
driven in all of my journalistic endeavors. Also documenting their

(02:19):
personal archives that have never been published before that I
was dropped to think, Oh, these aren't even in any museums,
but they're just sitting, you know, in their garage. And
to see them at a young age in these pictures
and to watch them grow up in these the three
year process being incorporated in these you know, American born

(02:42):
concentration camps, I felt was really, really powerful for the narrative.
And then I also went to three different and former
incarceration sites across the West in Wyoming, Arizona, and California,
and that included post in Mansenar and Heart Mountains, and
I actually I documented and interviewed nine different survivors that, yeah,

(03:06):
we're in camps across the West as well as Arkansas,
so yeah, it's very all encompassing. There's also an eleven
page essay that I wrote alongside Tommy Cohennimura, who was
my editor. She was fantastic to work with. And this
is the first time that I was really challenging myself
as a writer because that kind of context is so

(03:28):
important that you can't always gain in the interviews. So
there are so many details and so much context that
you can learn from from the essay as well.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
And Morgan, what do you hope people will take away
from this?

Speaker 2 (03:42):
Well, a lot of things that I hope that you know,
people are reflecting on the fact that this didn't happen
that long ago and what's happening right now is the
Alien Enemies Act was pretty much brought back by the
Trump administration and I was enacted by FDR and this
is allowing immigrants to be deported, and there's really no

(04:06):
constituentional rights that are happening right now with these arrests,
and that people are disappearing off the streets, and this
is a direct mirroring to what was happening in the forties.
So I really hope that people are paying attention to
what's happening right now, you're staying informed, and that you
read this feature and you realize that it is very

(04:27):
close to home, especially for everyone driving right now that
grew up in LA or lives in LA. That you
have to know that this history is around us. It's
just maybe not that obvious.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
Okay, And where can we go and see this?

Speaker 2 (04:42):
Yeah, so you can read Age of Incarceration on long
Lead dot com and it's an award winning journalism studio
that's dedicated to the telling long formed stories. And once
again long lead dot com. You can also google Age
of Incarcerations and long Lead and yeah, thank you so
much for having me and for helping me spread the word.

Speaker 1 (05:04):
Photo journalist Morgan Lieberman, a creator of the Age of Incarceration,
Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to getting to
see more of it. I've kind of took a peek
at it, but I want to see the rest of it,
and it's Age of Incarceration at on long lead dot com.
Thanks Morgan, thank you, and we'll leave you with That's

(05:25):
what I mentioned before. Those who forget the past are
destined to repeat it. I think it's interesting she's saying
like there's not a lot of record of those camps.
I know somebody whose grandparents had been relocated to one
of the camps. It's amazing and tragic. This is KFI
and kost HD two Los Angeles, Orange County, live from

(05:48):
the KFI twenty four hour newsroom. I'm Amy King. This
has been your wake up call, and if you missed
in any wake up call, you can listen anytime on
the iHeartRadio app.