This 27-by-65-inch horizontal panorama documents Lemon Creek Internment Camp in the Slocan Valley of British Columbia—one of the larger “interior housing centres” where Canada imprisoned Japanese Canadians beginning in 1942. The five-foot-plus width captures the landscape of forced relocation to this mountain valley site.

Created in 1996, the work documents one of the primary Slocan Valley camps that held over 2,000 Japanese Canadians at its peak. Unlike the “self-supporting” camps where families paid for their own detention, Lemon Creek operated as a government-administered facility with more direct control over its imprisoned population. Families lived in hastily constructed housing inadequate for British Columbia’s harsh winters.

The Slocan Valley concentration in southeastern British Columbia represented the Canadian government’s solution to the “Japanese problem”—relocating an entire population from coastal areas to remote interior locations where they posed no imagined threat. The valley’s isolation made escape impractical and communication difficult, effectively severing imprisoned families from their former communities.

The horizontal format captures the valley landscape that framed daily existence for Lemon Creek’s imprisoned population. The photo collage technique fragments this scene while preserving the spatial relationships between surviving camp elements and their mountain setting. The natural beauty of the Slocan Valley served as both prison walls and cruel contrast to the circumstances of those confined there.

Lemon Creek, like other Slocan Valley camps, has largely vanished from the landscape—structures demolished, land repurposed. This panorama preserves evidence of Canadian incarceration that the physical environment no longer clearly reveals.