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Life And Land: The Farm Security Administration Photographers in Utah, 1936-1941
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64 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
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About the author
Dorothea Lange
60 books57 followersDorothea Lange was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography.
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March 14, 2022DOROTHEA LANGE: A LIFE BEYOND LIMITS
Quotes Pt 3
“Lange herself wondered why this photo in particular became so much used; she knew it to be a fine photograph, but she had made many others of equal strength. Why a specific image is unusually gripping remains mysterious, but, as Stein argues, Migrant Mother’s inner tension, precisely its lack of resolution, contributes to its power. Lange made flattering photographs, but her tastes did not run to conventional pettiness. She was exquisitely sensitive to embodied emotion, but she also probably felt the complexity of Thompson’s anxiety because it was hers, as well. Nothing in Lange’s personal life was as fraught as her own motherhood and she lived with contradictory impulses every day.”
“Family troubles overwhelmed her, not because she collapsed from worry but because she didn’t.”
“Lange’s sensitivity to dejected men reemerged. Her pictures testify to the idleness, humiliation, and domination that corroded masculine self-esteem. Almost every aspect of the experience undercut customary manly identity: Men were no longer breadwinners; they could no longer be strivers to better their families. Men lost authority; the whole interned population, men, women, and children, were leveled in their subordination to the army. Everyone had to ask permission to do almost anything; no one had to ask a father’s or husband’s permission anymore. Men were as domestic as their wives and mothers; there was no way to go into the outside world. Although many of the men sought energetically to reproduce their work lives in the camps, in agriculture, art, carpentry, or medicine, they could extract only limited benefits from their labor. Other men, whether as a result of temperament or of their skill set, responded with idleness, low energy, and depression.”
“She wanted to be at the heart of world events. In another life, she would have been attracted by photojournalism, even battle photography? Probably not, because that would have required giving up some of her core technique and turning to faster cameras, faster film, and fleeting glimpses. For Fortune, Adams and Lange proposed to document twenty-four hours of life of shipyard workers (although their photography was actually a composite of many days’ work), and she soon realized that this was at the heart of world events.”
“The photographs signal her mixed feelings. She worried about leisure time spent shopping rather than conversing, singing, or building things. ‘Can life be ‘abundant’ without being good?’ She asked.”
“She captured several photos of workers leaving a plant. ’Notice how these people are entirely unrelated to each other. This is the story of these times and the shipyard.’ But this is an overreaction. To me, the people in this photo look tired and eager to get home but not particularly alienated from one another. As in the 1920s she had absorbed Maynard’s mourning for the loss of wilderness, as in the 1930s she had absorbed Paul’s mourning for the lost family farming, now in the 1940s she mourned the loss of the more intimate, homogenous Bay Area she loved so much. She may have projected these concerns onto the defense workers.”
“Returning to the city streets, a subject she had not touched for almost a decade, Lange developed a new photographic exercise, a method that practically invited projecting her feelings onto subjects: She stood on the street without a camera, watched passerby, and speculated about their relationship and feelings. ‘A young couple having a quarrel, a grudge kind of a quarrel. He’s ready to talk it over but she won’t.’ ‘I think her hands are in fists in those pockets.’ ‘Hostile reaction to hatred. The good thing about it is that she stands up to it, which I like about it.’ These projections could be far-fetched, and faintly similar to Bourke-White’s captions, in which she expressed what she thought her subjects meant. But Lange never published her projections; for her they were rehearsals for deepening the photographs themselves.”
“Moreover, she intended her photographs to raise questions, not provide answers.”
“He and his assistants did darkroom work for her. Despite railing against social-justice advocacy, he registered Lange’s total commitment to exploring the possibilities of visual communication.”
“Let’s talk about families and the untellable. I read a sentence of yours that people don’t photograph families.
Dorothea: Yes. That’s kind of a sore place, a hurt place because I, who recognize the great potential that there is in photographing your family. I haven’t done it either. I have had a lot of photographs of family groups on Christmas cards, an emptier form of telling you about the family I don’t know. Communication, zero. The little things that are very near to you are very difficult. To photograph your family is a very unfamiliar road, there is no road.”
“Reorganizing her files constituted a review of her oeuvre and it produced, oddly, a rebirth of ambition despite her invalidism. A desire that she had been suppressing for many years began to break through an internal prohibition—to recognize herself as an artist. It was a dream she had repeatedly expelled fro consciousness but never squelched. It heightened her anxiety, of course, but it also probably contributed to her return to active photography of the end of the decade.”
“Magnum was never able to get assignments for her—her work no longer had a commercial market. But several Magnum people remember her as the only outsider who put energy into the project, stopping by the Magnum office whenever she was in New York. In her no-small-talk way, Lange always managed to initiate conversations they enjoyed, conversations that were ‘philosophic,’ not technical, ‘about how societies work, how cultures change.’”
“She asked of photography that it set up communication or at least conversation, not only between photographer and viewer but also between viewer and photographic subject. Photography thereby becomes a medium which the viewer is an active participant.”
“And yet what she wanted her students to do was by no means impersonal. She began the course by interviewing each one of the students—twenty in one class—individually. She titled the course, ‘Where Do I Live?’ She then organized it around that question, requiring students to bring in photographs that answered it. She assigned the observational exercise she had developed for herself, which she called “finger-exercises” in seeing.’ They were to take notes on the street, guessing the stories of the passerby. Another assignment required using nonhuman objects to reveal the human, a form of Lange’s much-used visual synecdoche. ‘We ought to know beyond a doubt that to some people…this desk or this garden, this bottle of pills, this racing form or this box of candy is home…’ In finding “the location of the heart,” she pointed out, searching the face alone can be misleading.
As she had done in Aspen, she was asking students to find a way to express their own vision and the reality of the outside world simultaneously. The challenge was sterner yet because of her insistence that they ‘not make the kind of picture that bulwarks a popular conception…True exploration into the possibilities of the photographic medium raises questions that are not answered.”
“The challenge represented Lange’s own photographic development and the theoretical discussions about photography that she had participated in, from f/64’s emphasis on the ‘straight,’ to the FSA project’s fusion of authenticity and propaganda, to her wartime efforts to represent and promote national unity against fascism without sacrificing her dissenting eye and visual questioning. She was trying to make important to her students a way of doing photography that could be simultaneously subjective and objective. It was in one of these classes that students challenged her to reveal where she lived, and she produced the portrait of her twisted foot—an act of self-revelation unique for Lange and one that must have affected the students deeply.”
“It was a gift that mother and daughter, long separated by a continent, were now together through some of the dying. Dorothea left no record of her emotions at the time and she rarely spoke about her mother at all. Silence was her response to the greatest emotional events of her life.”
“This photography was not only shaped by Life but also by Lange’s own stage of life—older and fragile—and by history. Far removed from the New Deal’s orientation toward building a better future, the dominant strands of American political culture were now defensive, seeking safely in the status quo and protection against threats to it. Nostalgia pervaded all four of Lange’s projects, and that spirit made her think she could produce material Life would want. It was nostalgia for an imaginary past, of course. It was a nostalgia that had already underlain the last years of FSA work, when Stryker was calling for cheerful photographs, and now Taylor’s family-farm romance and Lange’s unease with the anomie of cities strengthened it.”
“Dorothea had underestimated Paul’s desire to return there—his battle service, injury, self-sacrifice and patriotism wrapped into one very large emotion. He found the battle site just as he remembered it, even a wine cellar that had served his unit as a first-aid station. This threw Dorothea into a self-pitying irritability—for which she promptly criticized herself: ‘You imagine yourself persecuted, you attack in. A rain of petty criticism, spoken and unspoken…You set yourself up as a Paris-sort-of-a-person. This is not true, but it is revenge.’ She never got to Paris, never saw its treasure of photography and modern art.”
“Couldn’t there be a place in the world where [the pressure of] making money would be lifted?”
“Toward the end of the first Asia trip, Dorothea reviewed what she had accomplished, commenting, ‘…that very excellent photographer was not present…There was a half-sick, cold and world-weary old woman, with eyes not so dull as most… She could have met the possibilities she carries within her. But she did not make that moment.’ In Asia, Lange had often felt visually empty. ‘The secret treasury of my heart’ is dried up,’ she wrote. One morning back in Berkeley, she destroyed ten days’ worth of her Asia photography.”
“Driving herself as hard as they did may have shortened her life, but she chose the path and she did not regret it. This meant that in some ways she also chose how to die.”
“You can photograph a tree, certainly it isn’t human, but you who are doing it are human, and your understanding and the reason for doing that tree are strictly human motives.’ Thus her photographic categories were becoming more symbolic than representational.”
“Lange knew that her photography had been labeled ‘sentimental.’ Conrad asked her about this boldly: ‘Some people tend to think that poverty is inherently sentimental, that there is a kind of pathos in the filming of people in disadvantaged conditions. How can this ever be avoided?’ Sentimentality is shallow emotionalism, she replied; images deepen when they force a recognition of something new. When photographs made her think ‘oh god, how many times have you seen this…He’s doing a rehash of a rehash of a rehash of something that wasn’t very deeply grounded at the beginning,’ then, she said, ‘that’s sentimental: a superficial thing, a too readily accessible thing, an over-familiar thing.’ Lange wanted to seduce viewers into seeing something for the first time.”
“Dorothea spoke freely of dying, often in metaphorical language but without self-dramatization or apparent despair.”
“The moral function of art is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to want and custom, perfect the power to perceive.”
-John Dewey
“A portrait is a lesson on how one human being should approach another.”
-Dorothea Lange, 1965
Quotes Pt 3
“Lange herself wondered why this photo in particular became so much used; she knew it to be a fine photograph, but she had made many others of equal strength. Why a specific image is unusually gripping remains mysterious, but, as Stein argues, Migrant Mother’s inner tension, precisely its lack of resolution, contributes to its power. Lange made flattering photographs, but her tastes did not run to conventional pettiness. She was exquisitely sensitive to embodied emotion, but she also probably felt the complexity of Thompson’s anxiety because it was hers, as well. Nothing in Lange’s personal life was as fraught as her own motherhood and she lived with contradictory impulses every day.”
“Family troubles overwhelmed her, not because she collapsed from worry but because she didn’t.”
“Lange’s sensitivity to dejected men reemerged. Her pictures testify to the idleness, humiliation, and domination that corroded masculine self-esteem. Almost every aspect of the experience undercut customary manly identity: Men were no longer breadwinners; they could no longer be strivers to better their families. Men lost authority; the whole interned population, men, women, and children, were leveled in their subordination to the army. Everyone had to ask permission to do almost anything; no one had to ask a father’s or husband’s permission anymore. Men were as domestic as their wives and mothers; there was no way to go into the outside world. Although many of the men sought energetically to reproduce their work lives in the camps, in agriculture, art, carpentry, or medicine, they could extract only limited benefits from their labor. Other men, whether as a result of temperament or of their skill set, responded with idleness, low energy, and depression.”
“She wanted to be at the heart of world events. In another life, she would have been attracted by photojournalism, even battle photography? Probably not, because that would have required giving up some of her core technique and turning to faster cameras, faster film, and fleeting glimpses. For Fortune, Adams and Lange proposed to document twenty-four hours of life of shipyard workers (although their photography was actually a composite of many days’ work), and she soon realized that this was at the heart of world events.”
“The photographs signal her mixed feelings. She worried about leisure time spent shopping rather than conversing, singing, or building things. ‘Can life be ‘abundant’ without being good?’ She asked.”
“She captured several photos of workers leaving a plant. ’Notice how these people are entirely unrelated to each other. This is the story of these times and the shipyard.’ But this is an overreaction. To me, the people in this photo look tired and eager to get home but not particularly alienated from one another. As in the 1920s she had absorbed Maynard’s mourning for the loss of wilderness, as in the 1930s she had absorbed Paul’s mourning for the lost family farming, now in the 1940s she mourned the loss of the more intimate, homogenous Bay Area she loved so much. She may have projected these concerns onto the defense workers.”
“Returning to the city streets, a subject she had not touched for almost a decade, Lange developed a new photographic exercise, a method that practically invited projecting her feelings onto subjects: She stood on the street without a camera, watched passerby, and speculated about their relationship and feelings. ‘A young couple having a quarrel, a grudge kind of a quarrel. He’s ready to talk it over but she won’t.’ ‘I think her hands are in fists in those pockets.’ ‘Hostile reaction to hatred. The good thing about it is that she stands up to it, which I like about it.’ These projections could be far-fetched, and faintly similar to Bourke-White’s captions, in which she expressed what she thought her subjects meant. But Lange never published her projections; for her they were rehearsals for deepening the photographs themselves.”
“Moreover, she intended her photographs to raise questions, not provide answers.”
“He and his assistants did darkroom work for her. Despite railing against social-justice advocacy, he registered Lange’s total commitment to exploring the possibilities of visual communication.”
“Let’s talk about families and the untellable. I read a sentence of yours that people don’t photograph families.
Dorothea: Yes. That’s kind of a sore place, a hurt place because I, who recognize the great potential that there is in photographing your family. I haven’t done it either. I have had a lot of photographs of family groups on Christmas cards, an emptier form of telling you about the family I don’t know. Communication, zero. The little things that are very near to you are very difficult. To photograph your family is a very unfamiliar road, there is no road.”
“Reorganizing her files constituted a review of her oeuvre and it produced, oddly, a rebirth of ambition despite her invalidism. A desire that she had been suppressing for many years began to break through an internal prohibition—to recognize herself as an artist. It was a dream she had repeatedly expelled fro consciousness but never squelched. It heightened her anxiety, of course, but it also probably contributed to her return to active photography of the end of the decade.”
“Magnum was never able to get assignments for her—her work no longer had a commercial market. But several Magnum people remember her as the only outsider who put energy into the project, stopping by the Magnum office whenever she was in New York. In her no-small-talk way, Lange always managed to initiate conversations they enjoyed, conversations that were ‘philosophic,’ not technical, ‘about how societies work, how cultures change.’”
“She asked of photography that it set up communication or at least conversation, not only between photographer and viewer but also between viewer and photographic subject. Photography thereby becomes a medium which the viewer is an active participant.”
“And yet what she wanted her students to do was by no means impersonal. She began the course by interviewing each one of the students—twenty in one class—individually. She titled the course, ‘Where Do I Live?’ She then organized it around that question, requiring students to bring in photographs that answered it. She assigned the observational exercise she had developed for herself, which she called “finger-exercises” in seeing.’ They were to take notes on the street, guessing the stories of the passerby. Another assignment required using nonhuman objects to reveal the human, a form of Lange’s much-used visual synecdoche. ‘We ought to know beyond a doubt that to some people…this desk or this garden, this bottle of pills, this racing form or this box of candy is home…’ In finding “the location of the heart,” she pointed out, searching the face alone can be misleading.
As she had done in Aspen, she was asking students to find a way to express their own vision and the reality of the outside world simultaneously. The challenge was sterner yet because of her insistence that they ‘not make the kind of picture that bulwarks a popular conception…True exploration into the possibilities of the photographic medium raises questions that are not answered.”
“The challenge represented Lange’s own photographic development and the theoretical discussions about photography that she had participated in, from f/64’s emphasis on the ‘straight,’ to the FSA project’s fusion of authenticity and propaganda, to her wartime efforts to represent and promote national unity against fascism without sacrificing her dissenting eye and visual questioning. She was trying to make important to her students a way of doing photography that could be simultaneously subjective and objective. It was in one of these classes that students challenged her to reveal where she lived, and she produced the portrait of her twisted foot—an act of self-revelation unique for Lange and one that must have affected the students deeply.”
“It was a gift that mother and daughter, long separated by a continent, were now together through some of the dying. Dorothea left no record of her emotions at the time and she rarely spoke about her mother at all. Silence was her response to the greatest emotional events of her life.”
“This photography was not only shaped by Life but also by Lange’s own stage of life—older and fragile—and by history. Far removed from the New Deal’s orientation toward building a better future, the dominant strands of American political culture were now defensive, seeking safely in the status quo and protection against threats to it. Nostalgia pervaded all four of Lange’s projects, and that spirit made her think she could produce material Life would want. It was nostalgia for an imaginary past, of course. It was a nostalgia that had already underlain the last years of FSA work, when Stryker was calling for cheerful photographs, and now Taylor’s family-farm romance and Lange’s unease with the anomie of cities strengthened it.”
“Dorothea had underestimated Paul’s desire to return there—his battle service, injury, self-sacrifice and patriotism wrapped into one very large emotion. He found the battle site just as he remembered it, even a wine cellar that had served his unit as a first-aid station. This threw Dorothea into a self-pitying irritability—for which she promptly criticized herself: ‘You imagine yourself persecuted, you attack in. A rain of petty criticism, spoken and unspoken…You set yourself up as a Paris-sort-of-a-person. This is not true, but it is revenge.’ She never got to Paris, never saw its treasure of photography and modern art.”
“Couldn’t there be a place in the world where [the pressure of] making money would be lifted?”
“Toward the end of the first Asia trip, Dorothea reviewed what she had accomplished, commenting, ‘…that very excellent photographer was not present…There was a half-sick, cold and world-weary old woman, with eyes not so dull as most… She could have met the possibilities she carries within her. But she did not make that moment.’ In Asia, Lange had often felt visually empty. ‘The secret treasury of my heart’ is dried up,’ she wrote. One morning back in Berkeley, she destroyed ten days’ worth of her Asia photography.”
“Driving herself as hard as they did may have shortened her life, but she chose the path and she did not regret it. This meant that in some ways she also chose how to die.”
“You can photograph a tree, certainly it isn’t human, but you who are doing it are human, and your understanding and the reason for doing that tree are strictly human motives.’ Thus her photographic categories were becoming more symbolic than representational.”
“Lange knew that her photography had been labeled ‘sentimental.’ Conrad asked her about this boldly: ‘Some people tend to think that poverty is inherently sentimental, that there is a kind of pathos in the filming of people in disadvantaged conditions. How can this ever be avoided?’ Sentimentality is shallow emotionalism, she replied; images deepen when they force a recognition of something new. When photographs made her think ‘oh god, how many times have you seen this…He’s doing a rehash of a rehash of a rehash of something that wasn’t very deeply grounded at the beginning,’ then, she said, ‘that’s sentimental: a superficial thing, a too readily accessible thing, an over-familiar thing.’ Lange wanted to seduce viewers into seeing something for the first time.”
“Dorothea spoke freely of dying, often in metaphorical language but without self-dramatization or apparent despair.”
“The moral function of art is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to want and custom, perfect the power to perceive.”
-John Dewey
“A portrait is a lesson on how one human being should approach another.”
-Dorothea Lange, 1965
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