[Shameless self-promotion: Beyond That, the Sea has been nominated for the Goodreads Choice Awards in two categories: Debut Novel and Historical Fiction. The initial round of voting ends on Saturday, November 26; if you’re so inclined, please do vote!]
I recently saw the Dorothea Lange exhibition entitled Seeing People at the National Gallery of Art in DC. I think we’re probably all familiar with her Depression-era work, particularly the image titled Migrant Mother. I knew, as well, about how her work in the South and in Japanese internment camps had been somewhat controversial, with the government occasionally stepping in to censor her work, feeling that her underlying beliefs in social justice were too often at the fore. But her body of work is broader than I had realized—in her final decade, she traveled to Ireland, Vietnam, Egypt, and Venezuela. The photo I’ve highlighted here is entitled Irish Child, County Clare, Ireland.
I was fascinated by two elements of this exhibition: first, the way in which she used titles to describe a photo, and second, how she cropped and edited the photos. Both are ways in which she creates meaning in her work and asks the viewer to see it in a certain light.
Often, her titles are generic: Irish Child, Migrant Mother, Man with Sledgehammer. The subject is, in some way, standing in for all others. In the exhibition notes, there is certainly discussion about the lack of names, and how that can be demeaning to the subject, stripping them of their identity. (Certainly that was the case with Migrant Mother.) And while I see that, it also reminds me of the effect in fiction when characters are not named. The way in which fairy tales and folk tales draw the reader in by virtue of the absence of the name. By virtue of the fact that “the girl” is all girls; that the “the mother” is all mothers. In Lange’s work, it is the specificity of the subject that is often so compelling, and here, there is a parallel with writing: the more clearly we can delineate character, the more relatable and universal that character becomes.
But Lange also believed in titles that gave more context to the photographs. She wrote that titles and captions could include information about “attitudes, relationships and meanings.” She saw these words as “connective tissue.” So therefore titles are occasionally longer, with more descriptive information. It is often factual, drawn from interviews she conducted with her subjects. But she uses that to guide the viewer to see what she wants us to see; this, of course, reminds me of what poets do so well, the so-called “heavy lifting” of their titles. Some examples of Lange titles: Ditched, Stalled and Stranded, San Joaquin Valley, California; On the Plains a Hat is More Than a Covering; Ex-Slave with a Long Memory. Often the titles ground us in place, even as the people are not specifically identified: Boy against a Peat Wall, Ireland; Grandfather and Grandson of Japanese Ancestry at a War Relocation Authority Center, Manzanar, California; Shipyard Worker and Family in Trailer Camp, Richmond, California. Midway through her career, she wrote, “ Five years earlier I would have thought it enough to take a picture of a man, no more. But now, I wanted to take a picture of a man as he stood in his world.” Here, too, I am reminded of how important it is to ground our characters in place, of seeing them in their worlds.
A good deal of attention in this exhibit is paid to the way in which Lange cropped and edited her photographs to make meaning. For one photo, the exhibit shows a contact sheet from Vietnam with multiple photos of children, showing how she moved through the space as she was taking the photos, gradually lowering herself to look at the children at their level. It shows how she finally selected one image, which she cropped to highlight a small boy’s face, his eyes closed. In her later years, these cropped photos of the face seemed to became more prominent and often her portraits were of people with their eyes shut to the world. There’s a nice mirroring there: the photographer, seeing the subject, the subject refusing to look back. As with the generic yet specific titles, there’s a way in which the closed eyes allow us greater access, through our imagination, to the interiority of the subject.
With the small Vietnamese boy, the exhibit showcases several versions of the final shot, and there is something marvelous about seeing the process, from contact sheet to photo to final image. How different versions of the final image urge us to focus on different aspects of the photo. Lange was always open about her use of cropping and editing her photos to uncover and unpack different meanings, and to help guide the viewer. The parallels with writing are clear, I think, particularly in the editing process. A good deal of this we all do somewhat intuitively. Do I need this entire scene? Or is it best to zero in on that one small detail that can express much of what all these words are trying to say? I tend in that direction, myself, often thinking that a single image can be as effective as pages and pages of dialogue or interiority or narrative description.
If you want to learn more about Lange, there’s a wonderful American Masters episode on PBS; a great online archive at the Oakland Museum; and an online repository at MOMA. The exhibit at the National Gallery is open through March 31.
See you in two weeks!
Dorothea Lange, Irish child, County Clare, Ireland, 1954, National Gallery of Art
How fabulous! Thank you for sharing. Have you read Mary Coin by Marisa Silver? It was inspired by Migrant Mother, and I really enjoyed it. Thanks again
Thank you for this post on Dorothea Lange. I was at the Tate Modern recently, to see the Capturing the Moment photography/painting exhibition, on how images from photographs influenced paintings. Migrant Mother, Nipimo, California had this description on a panel: "Like most photographs produced for the RA, the title of this work does not give the name of its principal sitter, but instead makes reference to a general category or type – ‘migrant mother’. The historian James C. Curtis has argued that this was a practice employed by the RA to ensure that the figures depicted would be seen as representative of the ‘common men and women whose plight the Roosevelt administration was working to improve’ (Curtis 1986, p.4).
In 1978 a reporter named Emmett Corrigan identified the woman in this photograph as Florence Owens Thompson. In the same year, in an interview with Corrigan for a local newspaper called The Modesto Bee, Thompson stated: ‘I wish she hadn’t taken my picture … I can’t get a penny out of it. [Lange] didn’t ask my name. She said she wouldn’t sell the pictures. She said she’d send me a copy. She never did’ (quoted in Don Nardo, Migrant Mother: How a Photograph Defined the Great Depression, Oakland 2011, p.46). The historian of photography Sally Stein has argued that the identification of the woman in the photograph as Thompson changed its significance as a social and historical document: prior to this it had been assumed that the subject was an American of European descent, whereas she was actually a Native American, and according to Stein the plight of this group during the Depression is often excluded from historical accounts of this period (Stein in International Centre of Photography 2004, pp.352–3)." For the full summary and image, here's the link - https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/lange-migrant-mother-nipomo-california-p13115
I have friends who are working at re-titling and re-storying Indigenous collections made by white settlers in the Canadian Rockies in Canada. This reconnection to communities by museums and others matters to First Nations and marginalized people, whose stories are often edited out, and to everyone whose life might be benefited by learning other ways of creating story, including decolonized versions.