Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal _______-Americans

A reconstruction of Ansel Adams's 1944 exhibition catalogue on Japanese American incarceration, in which Joseph Maida blanks out the names, faces, ethnicities and dates that fix the story to one group and one moment.

Adams's Born Free and Equal accompanied his Manzanar photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, in an exhibition curated by Nancy Newhall. Maida works over the catalogue's original sequence using Adams's vintage negatives and prints, and the title itself stays unfinished: The Story of Loyal _______-Americans. The project began in 2017, after Executive Order 13769, when Maida returned to the Manzanar archive following the death of an aunt, Katherine Takeshita, and the discovery of how the family was incarcerated during World War II. Convoke published the 114-page book in 2018 in an edition of 250, and it won an AIGA 50 Best Books award that year. A larger 2023 book, Born Free, Born Equal, reproduces it.

Maida is an artist, writer and educator with an MFA from Yale, and chaired the BFA Photography and Video department at the School of Visual Arts from 2018 to 2026. Earlier work includes New Natives, published as a monograph by L'Artiere in 2015, and the still-life series Things R Queer (2018).