On January 5, 1942, a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into World War II, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) director Alfred Barr Jr. wrote a letter vouching for the “good character” of Soichi Sunami, a first-generation Japanese immigrant artist employed by the museum. This brief letter offered Sunami’s decade of photographing exhibitions at MoMA as a guarantee of loyalty to his adopted country. Though Japanese Americans on the East Coast were never interned like their counterparts on the West Coast, Sunami faced an unprecedented new level of racialized scrutiny. Barr’s——
