Dorothea Lange: an image activist
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, Circa 1936. by Dorothea Lange © MoMa, New York City
The Witness and The Defendant circa 1955-57. by Dorothea Lange © MoMa, New York City
A few weeks before the Covid-19 crisis fell down on New York’s cultural life, I had the chance to lose myself inside MoMA’s numerous areas. Immediately drawn towards the “Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures” exhibition, presented until May 9th (now for longer we hope), I was marveled at the feeling of genuineness that comes out of the photographs that this woman made all throughout her life. Dorothea Lange is one of the most iconic American photographers. She embodies the birth of documentary photography. Born in New Jersey in 1895, she graduated from a progressive women’s high school in New York with a lifelong sense of social responsibility. Taking notes of talks she had with every subject she captured, Lange accorded to her photographic work a deep social value that is worth exploring.
“How do you tell others about what you think is worth telling”, asked continually Dorothea Lange to herself. With no interest in qualifying her studio photographs made in San Francisco during the 20s as art and with the urgent need to have an active role in social change, Lange decided to apply to the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Earlier in 1935, the FSA had begun a photo-documentary project which goal was to raise awareness on rural precariousness in the United States. Immediately, the young photographer went South, traveling around California in a loud Ford Model C, a large format camera on her shoulder, with the only directive of capturing the human condition in the fields. Lange soon encountered the hardships of migrant farmers compelled by the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl to find work in the West. Driving past a “PEA-PICKERS CAMP” sign in Nipomo California one day, she met a “hungry and desperate mother” as she recalls, who deeply attracted her. The woman named Florence Owens Thompson said “they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding field and birds that the seven children killed”. Lange took seven shots of this woman with her child by her side. With Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, the image quickly became the symbol of the Great Depression’s desperate migrations, of what was the real American exodus. Published in The San Francisco News alongside the editorial “What Does the ‘New Deal’ Mean To This Mother and Her Children?”, Nipomo itinerant fruit pickers were the next day delivered 2,000 food ration by the State Relief Administration.
In 1942 as the United States recently entered into World War II, Lange was assigned to document the internment of Japanese Americans. More than a hundred thousand people of Japanese ancestry, living mostly on the West coast, were relocated and incarcerated by force in internment camps. She was boldly opposed to this policy and decided to change public opinion through the medium she knew best: photography. Focused on a seven-year-old girl here, One Nation Indivisible is taken from the height of a small child which places the soft and afraid facial feature of the little girl at the center of the photograph. Filled with guiltlessness, this picture definitely acted as calling out the government's savagery. The critical photographs she took at that time, were immediately suppressed by the authorities and were only published in 2006 in Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment. “They had wanted a record, but not a public record” explained Dorothea Lange at a later date.
As she captured the 1933’s protest against Nazism in San Francisco, Dorothea Lange went back to one of her favorite photographic fields: the streets. Following every step of a public defender in Alameda County, California, she worked on a photo-essay enlightening the significance of this program which allowed protection for people who could not afford a lawyer. In The Witness (1955-57), a large Black man stretches out his palm in front of what the viewer imagines as being the judge. The man stands alone in a courtroom. In The Defendant, the same man is pictured seated, desperately holding his hand over the top of his bald head. With two pictures only, Lange sealed this man's fate with sadness and absolutism. Never published during her lifetime, these pictures were used in 1969 to illustrate a National Lawyers Guild’s booklet named after Black Panther Party cofounder’s first trial.
Striving throughout her life to defend excluded minorities, Lange traveled to the Irish countryside with her son to capture the rural life of people about to emigrate. Criss-crossing Utah in the 1950s with her friend, photographer Ansel Adams, she photographed Mormon towns on the bridge of modernity. From cities and citizens of New York, San Francisco, Oakland to ones of Egypt, Venezuela or Indonesia, none could escape the graceful look of the activist photographer. Close to her subjects, Lange never stole them away from their portraits. She always took the time to make acquaintance with them and earned the trust of the people she captured. Thus, in her way of portraying people as in the effect generated by her portraits on their viewers, the work of Dorothea Lange incessantly humanizes the Human.
The exhibition is accessible for online viewing through MoMA’s website.