On 19 February 1942, just three months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Executive Order 9066 directed the forced removal of over 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes in the "western defense zone" and placed them in one of ten concentration camps located in isolated areas of Utah, Montana, Arkansas, Arizona, California, Colorado and Idaho. To document the environment of these camps, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) hired Dorthea Lange, Ansel Adams, and numerous others to photograph the entire relocation experience.

Dorthea Lange is perhaps best known for her photographs with the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, and her joint publication with her husband, the agricultural economist, Paul Taylor, titled An American Exodus. In February 1942, Lange was assigned by the WRA to record the experiences of San Francisco Bay area internees prior to and during evacuation. She followed the internees to the Topaz camp in Utah, but remained with the project only through the summer of 1942. An array of racial and civil rights issues emerged from the internment of the Japanese, which eventually led both Lange and Taylor to speak out openly against Executive Order 9066. Lange soon found herself at odds with her employer, primarily over the content of her photographs, which depicted dignified Japanese Americans in deplorable surroundings. Her work with the WRA is perhaps best described by New York Times critic A.D. Coleman, who praised Lange's use of "the photograph as evidence, not as graphic design or art....they happen to be superbly made pieces of evidence, documents of such high order that they convey the feelings of the victims as well as the facts of the crime."

Dean Yabuki began compiling the photographs taken by Lange in 1988 after seeing some in the Smithsonian Institution's exhibit commemorating the 200th anniversary of the United States Constitution. Noticing that the photos of the internment camps were not identified, he decided to track down internees from their photographs, identify them and tell their stories. He began the project by recounting the emotional experience of his own family in the Topaz Relocation Center. In the course of his research at the Still Branch of the National Archives, he discovered hundreds of Dorthea Lange photographs, many of which were previously unpublished.

Yabuki's completed exhibit was titled "'Captured Memories' 50th Anniversary Exhibit of the Dorthea Lange Photographs Chronicling the Removal and Internment of Japanese Americans" and was displayed in the lobby of the Asian Resource Gallery in Oakland, California during the months of May and June 1992.