Nineteenth & early twentieth century photographs

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), one of the top ten American photographers, was born in Hoboken, New Jersey and studied photography at Columbia University. She did studio photography for a number of years until the Depression in the 1930s made that line of work untenable, and she soon drifted into taking pictures in the streets of the breadlines and the labor strikes of San Francisco. She worked for the California and Federal Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration, or FSA) to document the plight of the migratory farm workers in California, where the above photograph was taken (in Nipoma, in 1936). More than most people, she meant her work to have a social and political impact.

This portrait of a migrant mother is probably the most famous image to come out of the Depression years. The FSA engaged a number of photographers to document the effects of the depression on American agriculture. Among the photographers who worked for the FSA were Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Russell Lee, Carl Mydans, Gordon Parks, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, Roy Stryker, John Vachon and Marion Post Wolcott. Stryker, who headed the project, clearly knew talent. All of the images taken for the FSA are the in the public domain and can be found in the Library of Congress collections.

     
Portraits

This is an uncomfortable image. It was meant to be discomforting, to engage us not in the aesthetics of the image but in the anxieties of its subjects. Certainly one of the most powerful portraits ever made in this country, it is not so different in composition from the formal studio portraits of the celebrity photographers. And yet it is totally different. Other than the canvas tent which serves as a background, the image is crowded with people, gestures and textures. The concern conveyed by the mother's expression, by her hand to her face, and by the averted faces of her two children is simply impossible to ignore. So much so that we can easily overlook the third child in her lap although it is one of the brightest areas in the print.
     It is relatively easy to take pictures of people in bright shade—no disconcerting shadows to break across an object, no bright areas where all texture is blown out, just those comfortable middle tones where every blemish and wrinkle, in sleeve or brow, is there for scrutiny. Lange made many images in full sunlight, but her most memorable ones, it seems to me, were made in the shade.