In 1966 the Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective devoted to Dorothea Lange—its first-ever solo exhibition of work by a female photographer. Lange’s photographs have now become part of our collective memory of the Great Depression. Migrant Mother (1936)—a portrait taken in a pea pickers’ camp in California of a woman holding her baby and surrounded by her children—is perhaps one of the most reprinted images in history. But beyond her better-known photographs of the Depression and the Dust Bowl migrations, Lange produced a vast archive of events and crises in the American twentieth century, from the Japanese internment camps to the arrival of the first Mexican braceros and the racial and economic inequality in the judicial system. Many of those photographs were censored by the US government for decades, or simply not published by the magazines that had originally commissioned them.
In January 1934 Lange gave up her Montgomery Street studio and sent out a change-of-address note to all her clients. The front of the leaflet said: “New Season/1934/Dorothea Lange/Photographs/of People/New Place/2515/Gough Street…” Inside, she printed the Francis Bacon quote she cherished: “The contemplation of things as they are…” Lange had changed the course of her work completely, away from commercial portraiture. Now she was mostly photographing people in the streets, where economic unease was swelling and with it political rage, fertile with possibilities.
West Coast longshoremen went on strike that May, joined later by sailors, engineers, firemen, oilers, and pilots. They demanded fair wages and hours, recognition of their union, and union control over hiring (which was, until then, done at the whim of bosses in large hiring halls). Demonstrations in San Francisco soon turned violent: the California National Guard was deployed and there was a heavy police presence. At one demonstration, police fired on strikers and killed two men.
A general strike followed, during which more than 150,000 workers shut down the city for four days. Lange documented the strike. One of her photographs shows a policeman in profile, arrogant and impassive; behind his face is a sign that reads, “Tax the rich for unemployment insurance.” Another shows a worker from the shoulders up, his eyes almost invisible under the shadow of his cap; behind him, a sign reads, “Feed us!” Still another shows a policeman standing, statue-like, hands clasped at the height of his stomach, a thumb tucked in between the buttons of his overcoat, legs in a kind of fencing stance; behind him, an orderly crowd holds up multilingual signs with anti-imperialist proclamations.
During the summer of 1934, the Group f/64 photographer Willard Van Dyke exhibited some of Lange’s photographs of the strikes and protests in his Oakland studio. It was the first time her documentary work was ever shown in a public space. Paul Taylor, a progressive agricultural economist and Berkeley professor who had done extensive work on Mexican labor in California, saw the show and was taken by Lange’s photographs. He asked her for permission to use some of them to illustrate an article he had written on the strikes for the left-wing journal Survey Graphic. A couple of months later, the two traveled with a group of photographers—including Van Dyke and Cunningham—to document the new bartering communities that the Unemployed Exchange Association (UXA) had formed across California as a response to the Depression. After a few months of collaboration, Lange and Taylor each filed for divorce from their respective spouses and started living together in San Francisco with Lange’s two sons.
In the midst of the Depression came the Dust Bowl, one of the most severe environmental crises in US history. The southern Great Plains had once been fertile grasslands, but during the long colonization of the West, farmers started deep-plowing the ground, spurred on by successive governments that offered settlers plots of land and encouraged ever more productivity and efficiency. Farmers plowed over the topsoil so frequently and fervently that they ended up displacing the region’s native grasses forever. There was nothing to hold the ground together anymore, so when droughts came and strong winds followed, enormous “black blizzards” of dust spread across parts of Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Thousands of families had to flee their homes.
Lange and Taylor were the first to begin photographing and interviewing the Dust Bowl migrants arriving in California. Taylor was working for the California State Emergency Relief Administration, one of Roosevelt’s early New Deal agencies, and he invited Lange to join the team. She was hired as a “typist” because the administration’s payroll had no provisions for a “documentary photographer.” I presume this would have been handled differently for a man. But Lange was in fact there to take photographs, while Taylor talked to people and took field notes. They documented the influx of rattle-trap jalopies, the stunned faces of the newly arrived families, the temporary tent settlements. The caption of a photograph that Lange took in Bakersfield, California, of a sharecropper family with their kids and belongings in tow reads, “We got blowed out in Oklahoma.”
Lange and Taylor put together a report about migratory labor that helped secure federal funding for temporary migratory camps to house displaced farm workers. Lange’s photographs were also instrumental in the creation of the Historical Section of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a New Deal agency put together in 1937 as a response to the agricultural devastation of the Dust Bowl. After seeing Lange’s photos of the camps, Roy Stryker, the head of the Historical Section, hired a group of young photographers—Lange, Walker Evans, and Arthur Rothstein among them—who over the next few years produced a public archive of more than 80,000 photographs of the Depression.
Lange and Taylor continued to develop and perfect their method: taking photographs, interviewing, and logging field notes in a shared journal that later helped them put their work together coherently. Their respective words and photographs were not two separate projects later assembled artificially, but rather grew together, intricately woven. The culmination of their work from the 1930s was an astonishing book, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939)—now almost impossible to find—which assembles a narrative of human struggle against the machinery of capitalism, always swallowing labor in order to produce fortunes for the few and destitution for the many.
The book documents lives shattered by the cotton industry, rural poverty, migration to urban centers, depletion of natural resources, mechanization—and also the absurdity of it all, encapsulated in a photograph of a barbed-wire fence separating two identical expanses of dusty emptiness. The book includes introductory essays by Taylor, photographs by Lange, and captions, most of them direct quotes—fragments of conversations—from the people they approached:
“There’s lots of ways to break a man down…
We’re trying not to, but we’ll be in California yet…
If you die, you’re dead—that’s all.
The people ain’t got no say a comin’.”
“How do you tell others about what you think is worth telling, that you have either discovered, or uncovered, or learned…and that you think is meaningful,” Lange asks the camera in the film footage from 1963—“not moral, but meaningful?” That is, perhaps, both the most basic and complex question in the creative process: How do we organize the chaos of our individual experience into a narrative that carries collective meaning? Perhaps taking a series of photographs is similar to the process of taking notes for a novel or an essay. The hardest part comes later, when those notes have to be revised—most discarded, some kept—and then assembled into a larger narrative. And when getting that larger narrative right directly affects the people whose lives and struggles you are documenting, as was the case with Lange’s work, the responsibility is not only aesthetic but also political.
In a letter to Szarkowski from June 1965, Lange wrote:
“Am working on the captions. This is not a simple, clerical matter, but a process…. They are connective tissue, and in explaining the function of the captions, as I am doing now, I believe we are extending our medium.”
She was indeed extending the medium. Lange’s work from the 1930s, particularly in An American Exodus, allows us to see and almost hear the early ruins of American capitalism and the bodies it ravages. Combining images and words—where the words were the voices of the people portrayed and not the authoritative voice of the artist, curator, or editor—was a way of understanding documentary photography as a vehicle for a multiplicity of voices. In some ways, Lange’s method prefigures that of contemporary journalists like Svetlana Alexievich: there is a choral quality to her way of documenting, a collection of voices speaking in different tones and with distinct textures about a common concern.
The next decades were dramatically different for Lange. She won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1941—the first woman photographer ever to receive one—to document cooperative religious communities, but the war thwarted her plans, and she continued working for the government. The New Deal programs were fizzling out, however, and nothing like the FSA’s photographic project was repeated. In 1942 the Office of War Information was created, and it absorbed the FSA. The next year, the federal government defunded the WPA, which had employed more than eight million people to build public works.
Then, following two executive orders from Roosevelt, the government created the War Relocation Authority, the agency responsible for interning approximately 120,000 people of Japanese descent. All these bureaucratic rechristenings are enough to give a clear sense of the direction the country was about to take. The US was spinning itself out of the Great Depression by steering toward a war economy, the mass incarceration of minorities, military attacks and interventionism abroad—in other words, toward a future that is now our present.
During the next few years, Lange worked for the Office of War Information, which was openly an instrument of government propaganda, nationally and abroad. Her work was heavily surveilled and controlled, she was often accompanied by a soldier on her assignments, and all her negatives had to be sent to the government. In 1942 she photographed the first braceros—Mexican men brought into the US to work when the labor shortages of the war began. The braceros, who were called “guest workers” in the US but referred to themselves as “los enganchados” (the hooked ones), were put to work in dismal conditions, picking and canning produce on farms and building railroads. They suffered constant discrimination, and when the war was over and they were no longer needed, they were deported through a series of federal maneuvers, such as “Operation Wetback” in 1954.
Lange possibly sought to bear witness to their circumstances—the kind of approach she had been taking in her assignments for an entire decade. But the only photographs that appeared at the time are of the braceros’ arrival, showing cheerful young men smiling and waving from trains (see illustration at the bottom of page 18). These were published in 1943 in Survey Graphic with an accompanying article that claimed that “workers are being shipped from Mexico to the United States—not as unwilling forced labor, but as neighbors to help with the harvest.” It is unclear if those were indeed the only photographs that Lange was able to take, or what she may have thought of the way that, this time around, someone’s words and her pictures were paired.
After she photographed the braceros, the War Relocation Authority commissioned Lange to photograph the internment process of Japanese-Americans. She was hesitant to take the project on, but saw in it an opportunity to denounce what the government was doing. She photographed, in her own words, “baffled, bewildered people” standing in long lines in the streets, waiting for inoculations, as the government set the confinement plan into motion; then, people in front of an “ocean of desks” being interviewed—interrogated—and handed numbers in place of their family names; and, finally, people carrying their luggage and wearing their best clothes on the day of the forced relocation.
All of Lange’s negatives and prints for this project were impounded by the government. “They had wanted a record, but not a public record, and [the photographs] were not mine. I was under bond,” she said. These brutal documents of this country’s hatred toward the Japanese-American community remained mostly inaccessible until 2006, when they were all finally released.
Lange believed that a documentary photograph could only reveal something about the event it documented if it contained something larger than that event:
“A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph per se. It is a photograph which carries the full meaning and significance of the episode or the circumstance or the situation that can only be revealed—because you can’t really recapture it—by this other quality.”
Her photographs possess that “other quality,” and imprint themselves in the observer’s mind in such a way that they come back—an involuntary echo—when something in the world resembles them or evokes their atmosphere. In the South Texas Family Residential Center, currently the largest ICE detention center for undocumented mothers and their children, there is an eerie echo of the Manzanar Relocation Center, which Lange photographed during the Japanese internment. And therein lies not only the power but also the importance of a documentary gaze such as Lange’s: it reminds us how everything contains a trace left behind by a previous event, which will in turn continue to reverberate and ripple into the future.
In 1945 Lange stopped working for the government. The Office of War Information had asked her to photograph the first conference of the nascent United Nations, but she did not complete the task. She had become ill, and her health deteriorated over the next few years, forcing her to live with chronic pain and intermittent hospitalizations. She was less active as a photographer during the late 1940s and 1950s, though in 1952 she cofounded Aperture, the nonprofit institution and magazine devoted to photography, and worked on and off for Life magazine, often with frustrating outcomes.
One of her last large undertakings for Life, which she worked on between 1955 and 1957, was a photo-essay called “Public Defender.” In one photograph, The Defendant, a Black man sits on a chair in a courtroom, resting his face on one of his hands—an enormous, strong hand; a desperate, helpless hand. His other hand, barely visible, is tucked between his knees (see illustration on page 19). Lange, as she had done before in her work, sought to document what usually goes unseen or is willfully ignored. This time, her gaze observed racial bias against Black people in the American judicial system, and the crucial part public defenders can play in guaranteeing that those who cannot pay their way through the system get as fair a trial as possible. (It was only three years later, in 1963, that the Supreme Court ruled, in Gideon v. Wainwright, that states have to provide an attorney to defendants who cannot afford their own.)
Though some of the photographs from that series were included in the syndicated magazine This Week in 1960, Life decided not to run “Public Defender.” For almost two decades, starting in the early 1940s and into the late 1950s, Lange’s work had been surveilled, censored, misused, impounded, or simply rejected.
“Out of those materials I want to extract…the universality of the situation, not the circumstance,” Lange says on camera as she is preparing for the retrospective at MoMA in the early 1960s. Documentary photography teaches us to observe things historically, understanding the connections between systemic inequalities deeply rooted in the past, the events and crises of our present, and the possible futures that our present foreshadows. Studying Lange’s photographs today, it’s impossible not to wonder: How would she be documenting the Black Lives Matter protests and police brutality against communities of color? What photograph would she have taken in 2016—eighty years after Migrant Mother—of a migrant mother in a detention facility? How would she have captioned a photograph of children locked in one of ICE’s cages at the border? What would she have revealed to us about the lives of agricultural workers—mostly Mexican, Central American, and undocumented—feeding America through the Covid-19 pandemic while living under the threat of deportation?
Dorothea Lange died at the age of seventy in October 1965—just three and a half months before the opening of the MoMA retrospective. “Those darkroom terrors, they still remain,” she said toward the end of her life. I think of her working in her successive darkrooms: the New Jersey chicken coop; the Sutter Street “matrimonial bureau”; the Montgomery Street studio from which she looked out the window onto the Depression-ridden streets; the Gough Street studio where she developed her Dust Bowl prints; and her last studio, in the home she shared with Taylor in Oakland, where she looked back at her life’s work to put together a coherent narrative.
Perhaps Lange’s fears came from a deep consciousness of her responsibility. After documenting nearly a half-century of crises and the lives of those most deeply affected by them, Lange understood, possibly too well, the enormous responsibility that comes with telling any story, but especially the story of other people’s struggles. Fear is an embodied knowledge, an almost physical intuition of possible outcomes learned through past experience. It can spin into paranoia, paralyze us, shock us into impassivity. But it can also be a powerful drive, as I suppose it was for Lange, who with all her “darkroom terrors” was still able to document what many others had not yet seen or wanted to see. Fear allows us to give shape to things that we were unwilling to see or unable to name. Fear is a specific form of intelligence that comes when hindsight, insight, and foresight collide.
Things as They Are. By Valerie Luiselli. The New York Review, November 19, 2020.
In the midst of the Great Depression, the American photographer Dorothea Lange crossed the street from her San Francisco studio to photograph unemployed men in a breadline. Lange’s instinct not to shrink from misery but to embrace it evidenced her profound sense of empathy. If we’ve grown a bit immune to it these days, the havoc wreaked on American life — on global life — by the COVID-19 crisis lends Lange’s humanist vision renewed relevance. This spirit is behind the Museum of Modern Art’s current exhibition, Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures. The show, which spans Lange’s entire career and is her first major museum survey of her work in 50 years, stresses the social context in which she produced her images.
The
Museum of Modern Art in New York opened,
on February 9, the first major retrospective on the photography of Dorothea
Lange in 50 years. Lange’s work photographing poor Americans for the Farm
Security Administration (FSA) during the Great Depression is well known.
Perhaps most famous is the photograph known as the “Migrant Mother.” Most US
viewers have seen the picture in one form or another. It has been widely
anthologized, used in posters, and even became a postage stamp. Dubbed the
“Mona Lisa” of Depression-era photography, it is one of two or three
photographs that represent that era.
We can look at the photo as an iconic representation of true American grit in the face of adversity. But a photograph also performs an act of transformation; it takes a moment fluid in time and fixes it into a timeless image. Thus, Lange’s photo has turned an impoverished woman (who only much later was identified as Florence Owens Thompson) into an object — whether of admiration, pity, or fascination — for the consumption of a more affluent public. But what if we try to return the picture to its fluid moment, as an encounter between two people — Lange and Thompson?
Let’s place the picture in the context in which it was taken. Lange had been a San Francisco portrait photographer working out of a commercial studio on Sutter Street near Union Square, in a high-rent building that housed a “distinguished art gallery” and an Elizabeth Arden beauty salon. She moved in wealthy and cultured circles, having come from an elite family; her father was a lawyer, member of the local board of trade, and was elected as a representative to the state house. Among Lange’s friends were Imogen Cunningham, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. When she had to close her studio during the Depression, she took to street photography of the poor and homeless, as many of her left-wing colleagues in the so-called “Cultural Front” were doing.
Although Lange usually took meticulous notes, she did not have any for the “Migrant Mother” picture taken in 1936. Twenty-four years later, Lange wrote up her recollections for an article in Popular Photography entitled “The Assignment I’ll Never Forget.” In this piece, she said that she had been “traveling in the field alone for a month, photographing the migratory farm labor of California” during a “cold, miserable winter.” As she was driving through Nipomo, near San Luis Obispo, she saw in passing — actually “barely saw […] out of the corner of my eye” — a “crude sign” that read, “Pea Pickers Camp.” She drove 20 miles further, all the while arguing with herself, then turned around and drove back. Parking the car, she grabbed her camera and entered the camp. Here’s her account:
“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”
The haunting and disturbing part of this account is when Lange describes the encounter as having “a sort of equality about it.” How could there be an equality between the well-dressed woman with her camera and the poor, rain-soaked migrant with her three children?
Perhaps we can understand this moment better if we take it in stages, almost as the two women experienced it. Lange tells us that she was in the camp for “only ten minutes.” But is that true? And is the spontaneous documentary quality of the experience she asserts also true?
Let us imagine her driving up in her nice car to this huddled camp of old beat-up vehicles. That action alone would have taken several minutes. Let us say that she saw Florence Owens Thompson and her children and then took out her camera. The world Lange lived in is not the snap-and-shoot world we occupy today. The Graflex Series D that she used came in a large box, which she would have had to open. She would then have had to open the camera itself, turning a knob to expand the accordion sides that connected the lens to the body. If she had a tripod, she would have had to set that up. She would have had to set the manual focus, lens opening, and shutter speed. Usually that would involve using a separate light meter to assess the available light. But perhaps she would intuitively know the proper settings after years of being a photographer. Then she would, for each shot, have had to insert a pre-loaded film cartridge into the back. If she did not have any pre-loaded cartridges, she would have had to sit in the car and load the film in the total darkness of a black fabric bag. For each shot she would have had to pull out a protective cover, shoot the picture, replace the protective cover, and then pull the cartridge out. In other words, the simple act of taking the picture would have been far more deliberate and cumbersome than her account implies.
And the session must have taken longer than she recalled. We happen to know that she took a total of six photographs (not five as she later stated). In the Library of Congress where “Migrant Mother” rests, there are five other photographs in the series. What is clear from them is that this encounter was anything but spontaneous. The impression Lange gives us is that she acted as a removed documentarian. But the reality is richer: the final photograph was staged for maximum effect and then altered in the darkroom for aesthetic reasons.
We can look at the photo as an iconic representation of true American grit in the face of adversity. But a photograph also performs an act of transformation; it takes a moment fluid in time and fixes it into a timeless image. Thus, Lange’s photo has turned an impoverished woman (who only much later was identified as Florence Owens Thompson) into an object — whether of admiration, pity, or fascination — for the consumption of a more affluent public. But what if we try to return the picture to its fluid moment, as an encounter between two people — Lange and Thompson?
Let’s place the picture in the context in which it was taken. Lange had been a San Francisco portrait photographer working out of a commercial studio on Sutter Street near Union Square, in a high-rent building that housed a “distinguished art gallery” and an Elizabeth Arden beauty salon. She moved in wealthy and cultured circles, having come from an elite family; her father was a lawyer, member of the local board of trade, and was elected as a representative to the state house. Among Lange’s friends were Imogen Cunningham, Frida Kahlo, and Diego Rivera. When she had to close her studio during the Depression, she took to street photography of the poor and homeless, as many of her left-wing colleagues in the so-called “Cultural Front” were doing.
Although Lange usually took meticulous notes, she did not have any for the “Migrant Mother” picture taken in 1936. Twenty-four years later, Lange wrote up her recollections for an article in Popular Photography entitled “The Assignment I’ll Never Forget.” In this piece, she said that she had been “traveling in the field alone for a month, photographing the migratory farm labor of California” during a “cold, miserable winter.” As she was driving through Nipomo, near San Luis Obispo, she saw in passing — actually “barely saw […] out of the corner of my eye” — a “crude sign” that read, “Pea Pickers Camp.” She drove 20 miles further, all the while arguing with herself, then turned around and drove back. Parking the car, she grabbed her camera and entered the camp. Here’s her account:
“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”
The haunting and disturbing part of this account is when Lange describes the encounter as having “a sort of equality about it.” How could there be an equality between the well-dressed woman with her camera and the poor, rain-soaked migrant with her three children?
Perhaps we can understand this moment better if we take it in stages, almost as the two women experienced it. Lange tells us that she was in the camp for “only ten minutes.” But is that true? And is the spontaneous documentary quality of the experience she asserts also true?
Let us imagine her driving up in her nice car to this huddled camp of old beat-up vehicles. That action alone would have taken several minutes. Let us say that she saw Florence Owens Thompson and her children and then took out her camera. The world Lange lived in is not the snap-and-shoot world we occupy today. The Graflex Series D that she used came in a large box, which she would have had to open. She would then have had to open the camera itself, turning a knob to expand the accordion sides that connected the lens to the body. If she had a tripod, she would have had to set that up. She would have had to set the manual focus, lens opening, and shutter speed. Usually that would involve using a separate light meter to assess the available light. But perhaps she would intuitively know the proper settings after years of being a photographer. Then she would, for each shot, have had to insert a pre-loaded film cartridge into the back. If she did not have any pre-loaded cartridges, she would have had to sit in the car and load the film in the total darkness of a black fabric bag. For each shot she would have had to pull out a protective cover, shoot the picture, replace the protective cover, and then pull the cartridge out. In other words, the simple act of taking the picture would have been far more deliberate and cumbersome than her account implies.
And the session must have taken longer than she recalled. We happen to know that she took a total of six photographs (not five as she later stated). In the Library of Congress where “Migrant Mother” rests, there are five other photographs in the series. What is clear from them is that this encounter was anything but spontaneous. The impression Lange gives us is that she acted as a removed documentarian. But the reality is richer: the final photograph was staged for maximum effect and then altered in the darkroom for aesthetic reasons.
In the first photo, we see Thompson with the three younger children who appear in “Migrant Mother,” but here in addition there is a teenage daughter sitting on a bentwood rocking chair. The final photo will omit this older girl, who does not seem to fit into the message this picture was designed to convey. The girl is wearing clothing that is not frayed or worn out. Her hair is a bit blowsy, but a headband adds some fashion. The position of the girl is almost certainly posed, and her direct regard creates an uncomfortable awareness of the moment. All of the subjects are looking at Lange, and the two younger girls are smiling. Clearly, this wasn’t a spontaneous series of photos: there must have been posing and composition.
A second photo has the camera moving a few steps closer. We can tell it is the second in the sequence because the rocking chair has been moved into the tent and the mark its rocker rails have left are clearly imprinted in the sandy earth. Again, we have to assume that Lange asked that the chair be moved. In the previous photo, a car jack on the chair prevented the girl from sitting on it in the normal manner. That object has been removed and is no longer visible. One younger girl is still staring at Lange, while the other has gone to the right of the tent, with only her legs and hat visible. Are the teenage girl and younger girl now attempting to avoid being photographed?
Several more photographs were taken closer up to Florence Owens Thompson. One is a more frontal and horizontal portrait in a Madonna pose, with her eyes averted from the camera. In this one we can see that she is wearing a wedding ring, which perhaps disrupts the assumptions built into a story about a single mother alone.
Another photo shows her breastfeeding, revealing a white breast in contrast to her darker, sun-exposed skin. Thompson’s face reveals a kind of pleasure and almost peace in the activity — again, a picture that might have been rejected later for its lack of consonance with assumptions about the starkness and hardship of poverty. In terms of their interactions, the woman might have been asked by Lange to breastfeed the baby. The duration of the encounter — the supposed quick snaps leading to the iconic photograph — had to have been longer than 10 minutes, in order to allow the baby (who is sleeping in all the other pictures) to wake up and begin feeding.
The final picture, the iconic one, is the most obviously posed. The two girls now face away from the camera. The woman has put her hand to her chin in a contemplative gesture often used in paintings featuring philosophers and other thinkers. In doing so, she has released her hold on the baby, who continues to sleep. Her other hand is holding the tent pole. This would mean that enough time has passed for the baby to stop breastfeeding and be still enough so that she could release it completely into her lap.
I hope I’ve shown that there is another story here, a more complex one than Lange presents. This alternative encounter represents a much richer set of human interactions between the five people in the photos and the photographer. Adding to what now seems a misleading backstory is the telling detail that, in the editing process, Lange altered “Migrant Mother” for aesthetic reasons. In the original shot, we see Thompson’s thumb and forefinger in the lower righthand corner, partially obscuring the baby. The thumb was dodged out of the “official” photograph, a decision that belies the notion of a purely documentary slice of reality.
Unlike the majority of Depression-era photographs whose subjects are anonymous and silent, this one has a history that allows us to see things from the other side of the lens. In fact, Florence Owens Thompson, some 42 years later, spoke about the image. Having seen it in a number of places, she wrote a letter to U.S. Camera magazine in which she said:
“This photo since has been displayed In the Palace of Fine Arts San Francisco, also Two Years ago it was called to My attention that it appeared in Look Magazine […and] in U. S. Camera. […] Since I have not been consulted […] I request you Recall all the un-Sold Magazines. […] You would do Dorothea Lange a great Favor by Sending me her address That I may inform her that should the picture appear in Any magazine again I and my Three daughters shall be Forced to Protect our rights. Trusting that it will not be necessary to use Drastic Means to force you to Remove the magazine from Circulation Without Due Permission to Use my Picture in Your Publication I remain
Respectfully,
Florence Thompson”
In a later interview with the Los Angeles Times (November 18, 1978), Thompson stated clearly, “I didn’t get anything out of it. I wished she hadn’t of taken my picture.” She added, “She didn’t ask my name. […] She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did.” In another interview (cited in Marie-Monique Robin’s 1999 book The Photos of the Century), Thompson complained, “I’m tired of symbolizing human poverty when my living conditions have improved.”
Because the photographic object talked back, and because U.S. Camera magazine did forward Thompson’s letter to Lange, we have learned indirectly from an interview with another photographer (cited in Linda Gordon’s 2009 biography Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits) that Lange felt “shaken — frightened and miserable that her photograph had caused grief.”
We might want to compare Thompson’s statement, which implies a kind of theft of her image, with a statement made by Lange earlier (also cited in Gordon’s biography): when talking about her plunge into documentary street photography of homeless men in San Francisco, she said, “Sometimes you have an inner sense that you have encompassed the thing. […] You know then that you are not taking anything away from anyone, their privacy, their dignity, their wholeness.” This assumption on Lange’s part seems consonant with her account of the encounter in Nipomo. Her notion of “a kind of equality” between herself and Thompson is a way of justifying the practice of photographing poor people with or without their permission.
It’s not as if Lange was insensitive to the awkwardness of her position. A photograph shows her in what for her was one of thousands of such encounters. Here, we see Lange in her working outfit — beret, scarf, pants — looking directly at the person taking the picture. She is smiling confidently, surrounded by three young farm children, one boy gazing stiffly at her Graflex while two other children watch the person taking the picture. One can sense the awkwardness of the encounter and how out of place Lange seems, despite her confident smile. Much later, Lange described her general method to Richard K. Doud, who was interviewing her for a Smithsonian oral history project:
“You know, so often it’s just sticking around and being there, remaining there, not swooping in and swooping out in a cloud of dust; sitting down on the ground with people, letting the children look at your camera with their dirty, grimy little hands, and putting their fingers on the lens, and you let them. […] I have told everything about myself long before I asked a question. “What are you doing here?” they’d say. […] I’ve taken a long time, patiently, to explain, and as truthfully as I could. […] They know that you are telling the truth. Not that you could ever promise them anything, but at that time it very often meant a lot that the government in Washington was aware enough even to send you out […] so that you could truthfully say that there were some channels whereby it could be told. Not about them, but about people like them.”
In short, by the time Lange encountered Thompson, she had developed a technique for winning over her subjects. In Nipomo, however, she clearly did not take the time to have that conversation, except briefly. She did “swoop in and swoop out in a cloud of dust,” although she clearly said that her photographs would “help.” She also indicated that the “Migrant Mother” photograph wasn’t about Thompson but about her situation — it was thus not “personal” but documentary in nature. Such assertions had, no doubt, become mantras she used in her trade. Her approach was similar to that of another photographer who worked for the FSA, Russell Lee, who (as cited in Bill Ganzel’s 1984 book Dust Bowl Descent) would tell his subjects, “I want to show the rest of the country how you live.”
Had Thompson not come forward publicly, she would just be what the iconic picture suggests — a poor white American woman thrown into a desperate situation by social, economic, and political turmoil.
But Thompson was not white: she was a member of the Cherokee nation. She was born Florence Leona Christie in 1903 in Indian Territory, four years before the region was obliterated by “consolidation” into the new state of Oklahoma. Her parents were both Cherokee, and her mother’s second husband was as well. Much has been written about this telling detail (see, for example, Sally Stein’s “Passing Likeness: Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ and the Paradox of Iconicity,” in the 2003 anthology Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, edited by Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis). It seems clear that, because Lange asked no questions, she got no answers; she was thus unaware of Thompson’s indigenous heritage.
Roy Stryker, who ran the Farm Security Administration, also seemed ignorant of this fact. Indeed, he probably would have rejected the photograph if he had known Thompson’s origins. In response to a proposal to document Native Americans submitted by another photographer, he wrote (as cited in Stein’s essay): “The Indian pictures are fine, but I doubt if we ought to get too far involved. There are so many other things to be done. You know I just don’t get too excited about the Indians. I know it is their country and we took it away from them — to hell with it!”
Had
Lange taken the time to really talk with Thompson, she would have discovered
that this encounter was not Thompson’s first with the well-to-do middle class.
In fact, after her husband Cleo died of tuberculosis, she had an affair with a
rich Oroville merchant who fathered one of her sons. Thompson was afraid his
wealthy family would try to claim the child, so she took him back to Oklahoma
to be raised by her parents. Looking at the photograph, one does not get the
sense that Thompson could move between classes in this way. Later, when given
the opportunity, she told more about her life:
In
effect, in this instance, the photographic object is talking back, prompting a
complex discussion about the rights of the observed in a situation where
journalists or writers use the images without permission. Art curator and
theorist Ariella Azoulay, in her 2008 book The Civil Contract of Photography,
says that, in these kinds of encounters, there is a “contract” among at least
three stakeholders: the photographer, the person being photographed, and the
observer(s) of the photo. Her point isn’t only that the encounter may have an
exploitative aspect but also that a positive outcome is possible if the
observed have a stake in the dialogue about citizenship that is played out. Had
Florence Owens Thompson actually wanted the photograph to display her deprived
social status, her give and take with Lange — and others who subsequently
appropriated the image — would have taken a much different form.
And, of
course, there is also the very real issue of financial gain. None of the FSA
photographers held copyright over their photographs, although Lange seems to
have been one of the few allowed to develop her own pictures and keep copies of
her work. Nevertheless, she did not directly profit from the “Migrant Mother”
photograph, although she did so indirectly, via the cultural capital that
accrued from its publication and exhibition. Indeed, the image is widely
considered to be one of the top 100 photographs of the 20th century. Sales of
the photo were handled by the Library of Congress, which sold each reprint for
$150. Lange acknowledged her lack of copyright in a 2000 interview (cited in
Azoulay’s book) but then rather disingenuously claimed that Thompson was, in
effect, the true owner: “The negative now belongs to the Library of Congress
which supervises and prints it. […] [U]ntil now it is her [Thompson’s] picture,
not mine.”
With the
deaths of Lange and Thompson, the photograph is now everyone’s and no one’s.
Does it matter really how it was produced? Many famous photographs of the poor
— by the likes of Walker Evans, Gordon Parks, and Vivian Maier — have not
benefited their subjects, financially or otherwise. Yet these traces of their
lives flow through the cultural bloodstream. Do we have an obligation to view
the images in a different way if we know something more about the circumstances
of their creation?
Migrant
Mother: Dorothea Lange and the Truth of Photography. By Lennard Davis. Los Angeles Review of Books, March 4,
2020.
For the
entire second half of Dorothea Lange’s life, a quotation from the English
philosopher Francis Bacon floated in her peripheral vision: “The contemplation
of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or
imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.” She
pinned a printout of these words up on her darkroom door in 1933. It remained
there until she died, at 70, in 1965 — three months before her first
retrospective opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and three decades
after she took the most iconic photograph in the medium’s history.
“Migrant Mother,” Lange’s 1936 portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, whose identity wasn’t known for more than 40 years, shows the rag-shrouded torso and shining face of a handsome young woman. She’s seated at a California campsite for migrant workers during the Great Depression, and yet she looks timeless. Her fingers lightly touch the corner of her mouth as she squints into the distance, two of her children hiding from the camera behind her shoulders. Overwhelming hardship but also resilience are evident in both her facial expression and body language. Taken while Lange was working for the federal government’s Resettlement Administration, a New Deal program that aided the high volume of economically displaced, the picture was in MoMA’s inaugural photography exhibition in 1940, alongside works by Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. Since then, it’s likely been exhibited there more times than any other photograph, and it is on view again at the museum’s second retrospective of Lange, which opened this month. The image, which has appeared on postage stamps, jigsaw puzzles, magazine covers and T-shirts, is familiar even to American schoolchildren. Because it was taken while Lange was a government employee, its rights are in the public domain. It can be — and is — reproduced by anyone, at any time, for any reason.
Unlike a large portion of Lange’s work, the image was never obscure. On the same day that Thompson’s likeness was published in the San Francisco News, it was announced that the federal government was sending 20,000 pounds of food to the California migrant camp where she and her children had been living. “I did not ask her name or her history,” Lange recalled. She learned her age, which was 32, and a few atmospheric details that Thompson would later dispute, but nothing more.
The lack of contextualizing information was atypical for Lange, who believed, uncommonly for a photographer, that “there is no photograph ... that can’t be fortified by words.” If Lange is remembered disproportionately for one photograph out of thousands, she is also remembered disproportionately for pictures in a career that also very much included words. After photographing her subjects, she rushed to take down what they said to use as a caption or a title, and then selected choice quotes, with an ear for the poetry of vernacular language. “An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion,” her book on rural poverty from 1939, includes some of the most bracing examples, and even its endpapers are printed with captions like: “Burned out, blowed out, eat out, tractored out,” “We made a dollar working from dawn until you just can’t see,” “I’ve wrote back that we are well and such as that, but I never have wrote that we live in a tent.”
Looking at Lange’s career today, it’s possible to see that her photographic innovations were less visual and technical than they were interpersonal. She spoke while taking people’s pictures. Before asking them any questions at all, she talked about herself. She explained where she was from and her job as she understood it to be; she spoke of her children and of how much she missed them while on assignment. By revealing herself, subjects showed themselves to her in return. More than perhaps any other photographer’s work, Lange’s was less about bearing witness to history than it was about engaging directly with it, of being part of history itself.
Like the new journalists of the 1960s and 1970s, people like Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, who brought frank personal bias to forms of writing previously heralded as objective, Lange, decades earlier, did something similar in photography. She blurred the line between reportage and fine art and, in so doing, opened the medium for its most celebrated practitioners, the people who would be the inheritors of Lange’s expressiveness and empathy, from Robert Frank to Wolfgang Tillmans. Her contemporary Ansel Adams called her pictures “both records of actuality and exquisitely sensitive emotional documents.” She was an artist under the guise of a journalist and an activist under the guise of a dispassionate civil servant, and it would be impossible to think of any of these roles today without her influence.
Lange was born at the very end of the 19th century to educated and prosperous first-generation German-Americans. She read literature, patronized the arts and contracted polio. She retained the limp for the rest of her life. “... [It] formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me,” she said. She grew up in Hoboken, N.J., but attended high school in Manhattan. For fun, she strolled along the Bowery after class — “a lame little girl walking down that street unprotected,” as she once put it. It was then that she first “learned to be unseen.” This combination of looking and disappearing led her to announce, before she ever owned a camera, that she would become a photographer.
After working in New York for several years post high school — and taking a class at Columbia University with the famed art photographer Clarence H. White — she decided to take off on a trip around the world with a friend; a pickpocket curtailed their ambitions and they never made it farther than California. Lange would live there for the next half century. Despite her brief experience with White, she was mostly self-taught, trained in the commercial demands of commissioned portrait photography, whose wealthy subjects sat for her in a rented San Francisco studio. She grew into her aesthetic style and moral motivations, which came to her, together, at once. She was still married to her first husband at the time, an esteemed landscape and mural painter, and her two sons were young. It was 1933, and the Great Depression had reached its lowest point. Lange looked out the window of her studio, where her wealthy and safely ensconced patrons sat, and saw the ravages of joblessness and hunger on the streets below. It was then that she took her first documentary photograph, “White Angel Breadline,” which today remains a kind of visual shorthand for food scarcity during the Depression.
This single image — of a group of downtrodden men, all with their backs to the camera except one, whose dirty face is looking hopelessly at the ground — would position Lange alongside Woody Guthrie as a primary witness to America’s decline in the 1930s. With her camera she would capture remarkably intimate images that were universal in their communication of shared suffering: an oddly thin baby nursing at his mother’s breast inside a homemade tent in Blythe, Calif. (“Drought Refugees From Oklahoma Camping by the Roadside,” 1936); a man sitting beside an upturned wheelbarrow, his head bowed low in desperation (“Man Beside Wheelbarrow,” 1934); two laborers walking down a long and empty dirt road with perhaps all they own in their hands, as they stride past a mocking billboard advertisement for the Southern Pacific railway that reads “Next Time Try the Train, Relax” (“Toward Los Angeles, California,” 1937).
Not long after abandoning society pictures, Lange was separated from her husband and working alongside Paul Taylor, a Berkeley agricultural economist whom she would soon marry. The California State Emergency Relief Administration hired Taylor in 1934 to study migrant workers, and he convinced them to hire Lange in 1935, sneaking her onto his research trips as a typist, knowing very well that she would, in fact, be photographing everything. They traversed the state and together devised a new kind of multimedia sociology, one that was part oral history and part visual documentation. Sometimes their tactics were wily. In Arizona, Taylor got a running count of migrants by hiring a gas-station attendant to clock them. His figures, alongside Lange’s photographs of extreme destitution and hopelessness, were the first records of what would become known as the Dust Bowl, the name given to the drought-choked Southern Plains. The physical image we retain of this era was almost single-handedly shaped by Lange. Her initial joint report with Taylor was spiral-bound and included over 50 of Lange’s photographs. These were bureaucratic reports conceived like novels, with Lange capturing the sort of detail no pie chart could render — the decaying roll of linoleum, for instance, that a homeless family had been carting around for three years in hopes of once again having a kitchen floor.
“Migrant Mother,” Lange’s 1936 portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, whose identity wasn’t known for more than 40 years, shows the rag-shrouded torso and shining face of a handsome young woman. She’s seated at a California campsite for migrant workers during the Great Depression, and yet she looks timeless. Her fingers lightly touch the corner of her mouth as she squints into the distance, two of her children hiding from the camera behind her shoulders. Overwhelming hardship but also resilience are evident in both her facial expression and body language. Taken while Lange was working for the federal government’s Resettlement Administration, a New Deal program that aided the high volume of economically displaced, the picture was in MoMA’s inaugural photography exhibition in 1940, alongside works by Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand. Since then, it’s likely been exhibited there more times than any other photograph, and it is on view again at the museum’s second retrospective of Lange, which opened this month. The image, which has appeared on postage stamps, jigsaw puzzles, magazine covers and T-shirts, is familiar even to American schoolchildren. Because it was taken while Lange was a government employee, its rights are in the public domain. It can be — and is — reproduced by anyone, at any time, for any reason.
Unlike a large portion of Lange’s work, the image was never obscure. On the same day that Thompson’s likeness was published in the San Francisco News, it was announced that the federal government was sending 20,000 pounds of food to the California migrant camp where she and her children had been living. “I did not ask her name or her history,” Lange recalled. She learned her age, which was 32, and a few atmospheric details that Thompson would later dispute, but nothing more.
The lack of contextualizing information was atypical for Lange, who believed, uncommonly for a photographer, that “there is no photograph ... that can’t be fortified by words.” If Lange is remembered disproportionately for one photograph out of thousands, she is also remembered disproportionately for pictures in a career that also very much included words. After photographing her subjects, she rushed to take down what they said to use as a caption or a title, and then selected choice quotes, with an ear for the poetry of vernacular language. “An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion,” her book on rural poverty from 1939, includes some of the most bracing examples, and even its endpapers are printed with captions like: “Burned out, blowed out, eat out, tractored out,” “We made a dollar working from dawn until you just can’t see,” “I’ve wrote back that we are well and such as that, but I never have wrote that we live in a tent.”
Looking at Lange’s career today, it’s possible to see that her photographic innovations were less visual and technical than they were interpersonal. She spoke while taking people’s pictures. Before asking them any questions at all, she talked about herself. She explained where she was from and her job as she understood it to be; she spoke of her children and of how much she missed them while on assignment. By revealing herself, subjects showed themselves to her in return. More than perhaps any other photographer’s work, Lange’s was less about bearing witness to history than it was about engaging directly with it, of being part of history itself.
Like the new journalists of the 1960s and 1970s, people like Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, who brought frank personal bias to forms of writing previously heralded as objective, Lange, decades earlier, did something similar in photography. She blurred the line between reportage and fine art and, in so doing, opened the medium for its most celebrated practitioners, the people who would be the inheritors of Lange’s expressiveness and empathy, from Robert Frank to Wolfgang Tillmans. Her contemporary Ansel Adams called her pictures “both records of actuality and exquisitely sensitive emotional documents.” She was an artist under the guise of a journalist and an activist under the guise of a dispassionate civil servant, and it would be impossible to think of any of these roles today without her influence.
Lange was born at the very end of the 19th century to educated and prosperous first-generation German-Americans. She read literature, patronized the arts and contracted polio. She retained the limp for the rest of her life. “... [It] formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me,” she said. She grew up in Hoboken, N.J., but attended high school in Manhattan. For fun, she strolled along the Bowery after class — “a lame little girl walking down that street unprotected,” as she once put it. It was then that she first “learned to be unseen.” This combination of looking and disappearing led her to announce, before she ever owned a camera, that she would become a photographer.
After working in New York for several years post high school — and taking a class at Columbia University with the famed art photographer Clarence H. White — she decided to take off on a trip around the world with a friend; a pickpocket curtailed their ambitions and they never made it farther than California. Lange would live there for the next half century. Despite her brief experience with White, she was mostly self-taught, trained in the commercial demands of commissioned portrait photography, whose wealthy subjects sat for her in a rented San Francisco studio. She grew into her aesthetic style and moral motivations, which came to her, together, at once. She was still married to her first husband at the time, an esteemed landscape and mural painter, and her two sons were young. It was 1933, and the Great Depression had reached its lowest point. Lange looked out the window of her studio, where her wealthy and safely ensconced patrons sat, and saw the ravages of joblessness and hunger on the streets below. It was then that she took her first documentary photograph, “White Angel Breadline,” which today remains a kind of visual shorthand for food scarcity during the Depression.
This single image — of a group of downtrodden men, all with their backs to the camera except one, whose dirty face is looking hopelessly at the ground — would position Lange alongside Woody Guthrie as a primary witness to America’s decline in the 1930s. With her camera she would capture remarkably intimate images that were universal in their communication of shared suffering: an oddly thin baby nursing at his mother’s breast inside a homemade tent in Blythe, Calif. (“Drought Refugees From Oklahoma Camping by the Roadside,” 1936); a man sitting beside an upturned wheelbarrow, his head bowed low in desperation (“Man Beside Wheelbarrow,” 1934); two laborers walking down a long and empty dirt road with perhaps all they own in their hands, as they stride past a mocking billboard advertisement for the Southern Pacific railway that reads “Next Time Try the Train, Relax” (“Toward Los Angeles, California,” 1937).
Not long after abandoning society pictures, Lange was separated from her husband and working alongside Paul Taylor, a Berkeley agricultural economist whom she would soon marry. The California State Emergency Relief Administration hired Taylor in 1934 to study migrant workers, and he convinced them to hire Lange in 1935, sneaking her onto his research trips as a typist, knowing very well that she would, in fact, be photographing everything. They traversed the state and together devised a new kind of multimedia sociology, one that was part oral history and part visual documentation. Sometimes their tactics were wily. In Arizona, Taylor got a running count of migrants by hiring a gas-station attendant to clock them. His figures, alongside Lange’s photographs of extreme destitution and hopelessness, were the first records of what would become known as the Dust Bowl, the name given to the drought-choked Southern Plains. The physical image we retain of this era was almost single-handedly shaped by Lange. Her initial joint report with Taylor was spiral-bound and included over 50 of Lange’s photographs. These were bureaucratic reports conceived like novels, with Lange capturing the sort of detail no pie chart could render — the decaying roll of linoleum, for instance, that a homeless family had been carting around for three years in hopes of once again having a kitchen floor.
For the next four years, Lange was employed by the federal government’s Resettlement Administration, renamed the Farm Security Administration in 1937, and developed a compassionate but matter-of-fact style that focused merely on the subjects of the day, ones that have once again become familiar: environmental degradation, rural poverty, mass migration. Her depictions of these topics would define the rest of her career and help create a topical lexicon of American concerns, and her mythic compositions made from ordinary lives appear neither intentionally newsworthy nor artificially arranged. Lange’s attention to texture and detail make individual human subjects look like evidence of a national crime. Indeed, her 1942 photographs of Manzanar, the concentration camp in eastern California where Japanese-Americans were held during World War II, were impounded and then censored by the military. Among the ones found most dangerous to the national image showed workers picking crops in a greenhouse, whose intricate frame cast striped shadows that resembled prison bars. In their depictions of inhospitably barren landscapes, institutional living facilities and tiny children with numbered tags hung around their necks, they look eerily similar to photographs being taken today at the Mexican border. These images, alongside her portraits of the Dust Bowl, did nothing less than heighten the stakes of what we expect from a photograph, expectations that persist: These days, the camera, whether a Leica or an iPhone, is not so much a documentary tool as a politicking one — an incitement to outrage, a method through which to seek dramatic transformations of the status quo.
It wasn’t until a 1963 trip around the world with Taylor, Lange said, that she truly considered herself to be an artist. For a few years before the journey, she had been a freelance photographer at Life magazine and thought of her work as something closer to straightforward journalism. But it was in places where she knew no one, didn’t speak the language and traveled by rickshaw and motorbike that the sensitivity of her own vision became clear even to herself. By this time, she was suffering from esophageal cancer and so thin that her clothes had to be held up with safety pins. When she returned, she began assembling decades’ worth of work for her MoMA retrospective — she thought of it as making sentences out of pictures, paragraphs if she was lucky. Lange was only eating soft foods by this point and rarely ventured outside. She kept a camera around her neck, though, “for health,” and continued to take photographs — of her house, of her family. Her son wrote to the curator saying that he thought she was staying alive almost entirely for his visits. He estimated her chances of living to see the show open as 50-50.
MoMA, which hadn’t devoted a major show to Lange since, reopened last fall after months of renovation with a fortified list of existential priorities, one of which is to approach its permanent collection with the enthusiasm and scholarship that in the past was typically spent on loaned works. It’s in this spirit that the curator Sarah Meister organized “Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures.” The exhibition spans approximately a hundred photographs. It unfolds more or less chronologically, but in keeping with Lange’s belief that a photograph’s effect can be fortified with text, the gallery layout includes reading areas so visitors can experience the text as they would in a book, instead of uncomfortably on the wall.
What does Lange’s career look like in 2020? It’s clear she was an anomaly from the start, an evident female star in a field dominated by men, a photographer whose work was both funded by the federal government and embraced by the contemporary art world of her day. She produced evidence of the worst moments in this country’s history: the migration of the sick and starved across the country during the Depression, the cruel folly of Japanese internment and the moral disaster of segregation. (In 1941, her photographs of black farmers in the South would accompany Richard Wright’s prose in the book “12 Million Black Voices.”) But it was in looking at these grim, often ignored corners of life that Lange found figures of resilience, dignity and unlikely survival. Her legacy combines two fields — art and journalism — whose entirely separate constraints and ethics can still, at their best, change the world.
For a woman whose images seemed to reveal so much about others, there is only a small amount of material that reveals Lange herself, just a handful of blurry images from her travels through the ruins of the American West during the Depression, her small frame almost eclipsed by her hulking camera. Perhaps the greatest portrait that exists of her is an excerpt from crackly, black-and-white film footage from 1964, where she’s seen discussing the negative of a picture she shot of some elegantly proportioned pueblo steps in New Mexico, beside which lies a bit of rubbish. “The man with a certain kind of training will never remove those two cans and the other man must,” she says. She pauses, mutters the words “these wretched little cans down here,” and then she sighs. “Well,” she concludes, “you accept it.” Lange didn’t necessarily accept the flaws in the world around her, but she didn’t look away, either.
How Dorothea Lange Defined the Role of the Modern Photojournalist. By Alice Gregory. The New York Times , February 10, 2020.
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