Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans is a book by Ansel Adams containing photographs from his 1943–1944 visit to the internment camp then named Manzanar War Relocation Center[1] in Owens Valley, Inyo County, California.

The project and the accompanying book and exhibition at the MoMA created a significant amount of controversy, partly owing to the subject matter.

Before him, Dorothea Lange had visited all eleven Japanese-American internment camps[citation needed] while a staff photographer for the War Relocation Authority.

Adams's goal in the project was twofold: to stress the good American citizenship of the internees, as conveyed in the subtitle of the book, "The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans"; and to show their ability to cope with the situation: The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment…All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use.

[4] The new version of the book has on the front cover a photo of Joyce Okazaki (née Nakamura), one of the children Adams photographed.