Lily Havey

Photo: Michael Havey

Lily Havey's interest in ghost towns spans decades. When her son Michael was 9 or 10 they began searching for ghost towns to photograph; the earliest ones are captured on Kodachrome slides. In the ensuing years as time permitted she alone, or with Michael, located towns in Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, California, Mexico, Hawaii, and Japan. When she learned that the Amache Relocation Camp in Granada, a World War II concentration camp, was officially a ghost town, she inquired whether she might include this site in the current ghost town project offered by Another Language. Her interest in the place is highly personal: she was incarcerated there as a ten-year old and lived there until the end of the war. She has made a number of trips there beginning in 1998, the latest being a pilgrimage in the spring of 2014 to photograph the reconstructed guard tower and water tower.

She has a book recently published by the University of Utah Press, "Gasa Gasa Girl Goes to Camp: A Nisei Youth Behind a World War II Fence," depicting her four year incarceration at the Santa Anita Assembly Center and at Amache. Some photographs and watercolors accompany the text. Further information is available on Facebook. In the ghost town project she hopes to combine old and new photographs with new paintings waiting to find expression.