An Open Book: Dorothea Lange - Politics of Seeing
[TIL #27] "The discrepancy between what i was working on in the studio … and what was going on up the street was more than i could assimilate."
At home, i use small easels to keep a couple of photo books open for a few days or weeks, as a manner to engage in a longer dialogue with some of the images. In this section of the Tales, An Open Book, i share glimpses into a book from my small personal collection in the hope of sharing a touch of beauty, inspiration or knowledge.
I recently wrote about the person known as the ‘migrant mother’ in Dorothea Lange’s famous picture. In the case of this photograph, which quickly escaped from her control to rise to iconic fame, Lange was apparently less diligent than usual in keeping detailed notes of her encounters with the persons she photographed. There were errors in the caption that accompanied the publication of the image. Years later, it came to the public knowledge that the woman in the picture, Florence Owens Thompson, felt very bitter about having been mis-represented so broadly as the face of poverty. Inspired by reading the book Collaboration1, the article meant to look at how the perspective of the photographed person is integrated (or not!) in the making and circulation of an image.
In the course of drafting this text, i browsed the catalogue of the exhibition ‘Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing’2 and decided to leave the book open for a while. As part of my Open Book series, here are a few of Dorothea Lange’s photographs that have stayed with me since visiting the exhibition.
‘The discrepancy between what i was working on in the studio … and what was going on up the street was more than i could assimilate.’
‘I never steal a photograph. Never. All photographs are made in collaboration, as part of their thinking as well as mine.’
(Dorothea Lange, quoted in Politics of Seeing).
Dorothea Lange’s work was driven by her solid social consciousness. Her photographs are strong, an effective documentation of the events of these times of economic crisis and poverty. Beyond their value as historical testimony, i thought that the composition would work perfectly to cover comparable situations today. The attitude of the policeman watching over a protest, for instance, is the sort of composition that i would look for when i’m at a demonstration. The picture of the sheriff on a chair could also inspire a photograph that would seek to question the balance of established powers (in connection with my article about the 50th anniversary of the Portuguese revolution3, it also reminded me that the dictator Salazar died after falling from his chair).
About this photograph of a man and a wheelbarrow, Geoff Dyer wrote:
Lange noted that five years earlier she ‘would have thought it enough to take a picture of a man’. Now she wanted to take a picture of a man ‘as he stood in his world’. The first symbolic prop is provided by the wall: he is a man with his back to the wall. She also deliberately showed ‘his livelihood, like the wheelbarrow, overturned’. The wheelbarrow is a scavenged carcass of itself. It’s particularly poignant in Lange because of the enormous symbolic hope associated with the wheel. If you have wheels you can keep going. Thus in some of her most heroic pictures people are clutching the steering wheel of clapped-out cars, still clinging to the motor of self-determination.4
And i am so impressed by the presence and expressiveness of the hands in these two images.
Thank you for reading the Tales of Ink and Light. It’s good to have you on board.
Collaboration - a potential history of photography, A. Azoulay, W. Ewald, S. Meiselas, L. Raiford, L. Wexler, Thames and Hudson, 2023
Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing, Prestel, 2018.
Dyer, Geoff. The Ongoing Moment: A Book About Photographs, Canongate Books.
When I first began to dive into Lange's work, two things stuck out. That as much as I admire her, I do think she is not fully truthful in saying she never "stole" a picture. I mean, with her large tripod and camera, it was hard to shoot candidly, but I think Migrant Woman and others were not the collaborations she made them out to be. But that is understandable, IMO. Being a lone woman in the field, I have so much respect for what she accomplished alone in that historical context.
The second thing was the hands, and precisely the images you chose. I find them more powerful than Migrant Woman and more truthful, if i am allowed to say that. Great choices to convey the power of Lange's work!
What an excellent view on Lange's work. Those last two photos with the hands, as you say express a lot more than we see on a first view.