I am an American, in an Oakland shop window

"I am an American" is a March 1942 photograph by Dorothea Lange for the War Relocation Authority of a sign in the window of the Wanto Co. store in Oakland. The sign reads "I AM AN AMERICAN" (Library of Congress LC-USZ62-23602).

What the window said

I AM AN AMERICAN

GROCERY FRUITS AND VEGETABLES WANTO CO.

The FRAME record states that the owner, a University of California graduate of Japanese ancestry, displayed the sign on December 8, 1941, and that Lange later photographed it for the War Relocation Authority. That December date and the graduate detail are the archive's account, cited here rather than re-investigated. The photograph's own catalog date is March 1942.

Whose appeal this is

This is not a government poster telling the country to fear Japanese Americans. It is a shopkeeper's claim, in public, that he is a citizen, made after the attack on Pearl Harbor and before the exclusion posters went up. The government enters the picture as the photographer's employer. The War Relocation Authority sent Lange to document the removal it was helping to run. The sign is the owner's speech. The camera is the agency's.

Put beside the April 1942 instructions, the window is the other sentence: a person asserting membership, and an office preparing to move him anyway. The bridge is Japanese internment propaganda. The slur sheets in the plant galleries are a third thing again. They should not be used as a caption for this window.