Dorothea Lange: Aperture Masters of Photography (The Aperture Masters of Photography Series)
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
Dorothea Lange: Aperture Masters of Photography (The Aperture Masters of Photography Series) Details
About the Author Dorothea Lange is best-known for the photographs she made in the 1930s when she began her pioneering work for the Farm Security Administration. From her documentation of California’s migratory workers who fled dust and drought on the Great Plains and in the Southwest to seek a new life in the West, to her telling images of the desperate conditions of the sharecroppers of the South, she sought to portray the social turmoil and injustice caused by the economic upheaval of the time. During World War II, Lange photographed Japanese Americans in internment camps, documented the struggles of women and minority workers in wartime industries at California shipyards, and captured the founding of the United Nations. She later traveled and photographed throughout Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. In 1941, she received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.Linda Gordon is a professor of humanities and history at New York University. For the first part of her career, she wrote about the historical roots of social policy debates in the U.S., publishing several prize-winning books, including Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: The History of Birth Control in America (1976). She has written at length on Dorothea Lange, including Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (with Gary Okihoro, 2006), based on a group of never-published photographs of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II that Gordon discovered, as well as the Bancroft Prize-winning book Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits (2009). Read more
Reviews
I was first impressed by the photographs of Dorothea Lange, way back in my youth, because a few of her most famous ones were included in The Family Of Man, a selection of photographs I have always been enthralled with. Indeed, their inclusion may have been the impetus to their fame. These photographs include “Migrant Woman” and “White Angel Bread Line,” the latter taken in San Francisco, in 1933, with the haunting image of the man with his back to the crowd, overcoat, hat, with a tin cup on a fence, between his arms.To me, she has always been in that pantheon of great photographers who worked for the Farm Security Administration during the Great Depression, effectively “selling” greater relief allocations to Congressman. She was in good company with Walker Evans who also worked for the FSA. Regrettably, I had never own a book exclusively devoted to her photographs, which I realized when I recently reviewed a book on the works of W. Eugene Smith. This work proves to be an excellent remedy to that deficiency.Linda Gordon is a Professor at NYU. She selected these 41 black and white photographs as a representative sample of Lange’s lifework. She included the above “famous” ones, but the vast majority were ones I had never seen before. Gordon provides a thoughtful five page introduction to Lange’s life, including her childhood polio which reduced her mobility for life (though she was much better travelled than the vast majority of us), as well as a father who abandoned the family at 13. She married, not the best initial selection, would divorce and marry Paul Taylor, who seems to have been a true “soulmate.” She started her career in San Francisco, in 1918, with a bit of a grubstake, and set up a studio to photograph persons of means, eschewed the “say cheese” route, got them talking about themselves, thereby capturing their true essence.One photo per page on the right side of the book, on the left side is Gordon’s comments. The comments are very much worthy of Lange’s work, helping the reader “see” aspects of the photograph that might have been overlooked. Observations included: “Lange rarely made ‘victim’ portraits and preferred to avoid tearjerkers, because they evoked pity rather than respect.” Gordon demonstrates the concept of synecdoche in photography, where Lange might photograph only the worker’s hands and hoe, and not the face, which may not have been as expressive as she would have wanted. The first photograph is that of a pouting teen-ager, of one of her rich clients. Lange captures the angst and ennui of that teen-ager, instead of trying to correct it.Speaking of “overlooked,” I am embarrassed to say that Gordon enlightened me on the subject, yet again, of “the invisible man” (and woman). Why were all the photographs taken by the FSA of whites? It was not a selection made by the photographers! A carefully review of the archives reveals that 31% of the photographs taken by Lange were of black subjects. NONE were published however, for fear of “offending” southern Congressman, whose hands were on the purse strings. These photographs are in the selection, including the one on the back cover, of a black mother, in sunglasses, holding her child, in front of their sharecropper’s cabin.Others including an excellent composition whereby the farmer’s mortgage is being denied by the bankers, a touch of Henri-Cartier Bresson’s “decisive moment.” Another shows the almost crazed intensity of desperation in the eyes of a migrant farmworker. A couple of others have been dubbed “pandonas,” father and child, which was more unusual for the time. She was selected to photograph the process whereby people of Japanese descent were interned in concentration camps during the Second War World. Since she was one of the few whites who saw something the matter with this process, and her photographs demonstrated this, they were all impounded, and never published in her lifetime. The book Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment was published only in 2006, and I note that a fellow New Mexican reviewer has the lead review on this work. The last three photographs were taken overseas, when she accompanied her husband, Paul Taylor, in Indonesia, Vietnam and Egypt. In the latter country, the photo was of a funeral procession, a topic that may have been selected since she knew she was dying of esophageal cancer.Overall, an important addition to my library: great photographs, and great commentary. I only wish the format had been larger, like the standard 8 ½ by 11. 5-stars, plus.
