America Thru the Lens (122)

I became interested in the work of Dorothea Lange many years ago and remain fascinated with her art, her photographs, to this day.

She had two major formative issues when she was quite young.  First, at age 7, she contracted polio and had a limp from a weak, shortened leg from that time on.  Her comment on how that impacted her life was,  “It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me. I’ve never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it.”^[  The second major personal pain was that her father abandoned the family when she was 12.  At that point, she changed her last name to that of the maiden name of her mother.  She became a very strong, independent woman and studied photography at Columbia University in NYC.

After she moved to San Francisco, she met and married the Western artist, Maynard Dixon in 1920, continuing her work and having two children with him.  They eventually divorced in 1935 and Dorothea married Paul Taylor, a Professor of Economics at the University of California.  He educated Dorothea in social and political matters and they worked together to document the lives of migrant workers and sharecroppers.

During the Great Depression years, from 1935 to 1939, she worked for the RA and FSA and photographed the plight of the people fleeing the Dust Bowl and people suffering from the Depression. Her typical subjects were sharecroppers, displaced farm families and migrant workers. The pictures she took, along with other RA and FSA photographers, brought the story of the poor to magazine and newspaper readers across the country.

You may remember her most well know picture, “Migrant Mother.” In 1960 Dorothea was interviewed about that picture and said, “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”

What struck me most about Dorothea’s photography was that the people seemed not to pose for her or even be aware of her presence. She said that because of her shyness, she always just tried to become an invisible person in the background and not intrude into the personal space of her subjects. I think she was incredibly successful and for that reason we still celebrate her photographs to this day.

I am very happy to say Dorothea Lange’s photography will be on display in St Louis’ Grand Center starting this August. It will be a joy to see her work in person, as I know she would have liked it to be viewed. She was yet another great artist that shared a view of American through a discriminating lens.