Born Free, Born Equal by Joseph Maida & Ansel Adams, 2023

In Born Free, Born Equal, Maida revisits key civil liberties' determinations from the nation's founding through 2020 with Ansel Adams's empathetic images of wrongfully incarcerated Japanese Americans from the height of World War II raising vital questions about democracy, justice, memory, and photography in the United States today.

Available for purchase 11/07/23 US & Canada, 12/12/23 globally

Printed Media x Printed Justice by Joseph Maida, 2020

A set of twenty exhibition-ready posters, onto which Maida adhered pivotal US immigration, citizenship, and civil-liberties documents downloaded from the Internet. These documents highlighted pivotal determinations spanning the arc of the history of the United States. As a call-to-action, Maida mailed the poster sets with a letter of explanation to photography curators at institutions with a longstanding commitment to Ansel Adams’s work, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA); the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH); and the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), Washington, DC.

Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal ______-Americans Limited Edition, 2019

This hardcover, collector's version of Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal _____-Americans is a limited edition of 20 copies with some documents and photographs hand-placed. Each book is signed and numbered by the artist.

Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal ______-Americans by Joseph Maida & Ansel Adams, 2018

When donating his WWII photographs of interned Japanese-Americans to the Library of Congress in 1965, Ansel Adams wrote, “I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document and I trust it can be put to good use.” Responding to Adams' prompt, Joseph Maida, in 2017, reconstructed Adams' catalog Born Free and Equal, which accompanied Adams' 1944 MoMA exhibition curated by Nancy Newhall. In this book Maida incorporates Adams' vintage negatives and prints while obscuring specific faces, names, ethnicities, and dates. This collaborative volume illuminates the past's timely relationship to the present and punctuates the far-seeing power of Adams' original documents.

9 Strong Women Postcard Set by Ansel Adams, 2019

Joseph Maida's selection of portraits from Ansel Adams' Manzanar portfolio features 9 of the women, whom Adams depicted in his historic series about Japanese-Americans incarcerated in the United States during World War II. Each card includes a portrait initialed by Adams on the front with Adams' title of the work on the back.

 

“Maida's overlays and interventions onto the catalog's original sequence amplify the prophetic nature of this historic story. It is both a sensitive reanimation of a still-resonant chapter in American history and a hard-hitting meditation upon photography’s complicity with its outplaying.”

CHARLOTTE COTTON

“I grew up at the time of World War II. The irony was, we were fighting a war against racism and yet, by an Executive Order of President Roosevelt, people who had done nothing wrong—except they were of Japanese ancestry—were interned in camps far from their homes. That was a dreadful mistake.”

RUTH BADER GINSBURG

“By blindly accepting the Government’s misguided invitation to sanction a discrimi­ natory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security, the Court redeploys the same dangerous logic underlying Korematsu and merely replaces one “gravely wrong” decision with another.”

JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR

“I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document and I trust it can be put to good use.”

ANSEL ADAMS

 

Born Free, Born Equal complete collection:

  • Born Free, Born Equal, Image-wrap hardcover book, 18 pages, $55.00

  • Printed Media x Printed Justice: Exhibition-in-a-Box, a set of twenty exhibition-ready political posters (NFS)

  • Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal _____-Americans, Perfect bound with UV Softcover book, 114 pages, Sold Out

  • Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal _____-Americans, Special Edition Hardcover book, 114 pages, 5 loose prints, $195.00

  • 9 Strong Women Postcard set curated by Joseph Maida, $12.00

  • Limited edition Ansel Adams Print, $300.00

  • Limited edition Joseph Maida Print, $175.00

All publications may be purchased on www.convoke.nyc