Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Lange’s unabashedly enthusiastic photographs emphasized racial integration—at work, in meetings, at leisure. She showed white and black men working together, but, strangely, made no photographs of women. Perhaps they were doing less field work here than in the past—it was the nearly universal aspiration of sharecroppers that wives devote full time to housewifery and motherhood—and Lange continued uncomfortable shooting indoors. But the absence of women in the STFU pictures may also reflect the fact that because Lange was so positive about the project, she accepted photographing what she was shown on an official tour, rather than exploring on her own. Her California-bred respect for the bravery of union people was confirmed here, but typically her view was sentimental rather than strategic. “Union organizer means somebody of importance. These are the beginning seeds, the martyrs of the union movement, martyrs, that’s the word I’m looking for. . . .”54

  She was disappointed. Delta lasted only seven years. Its land was poor, the co-op was never able to become independent of philanthropic gifts, and in 1942 it folded into a larger co-op in Holmes County, Mississippi. The STFU was broken by planters’ and sheriffs’ violence and threats of retaliation that croppers could not survive. Its FSA supporters could not prevent STFU members from being defeated through terror—threats, arrests, floggings, and lynchings. Nevertheless, Taylor contributed financially to the STFU for decades, even when it was only a shadow of its former substance.

  Neither the STFU nor the Delta Cooperative evoked Lange’s best work. Most of the co-op pictures are posed—a black child and a white one jointly holding a large melon, black men and white men gathered around a tractor.55 The rest are unpeopled images of progress—better houses, a co-op store, neatly plowed fields, a sign announcing an educational program. There are a few STFU portraits, but I suspect Lange destroyed negatives that were unsuccessful or dangerous to their subjects. The best, again, are portraits of leaders already publicly known and thus unafraid to be photographed.56 Celebratory photography was never Lange’s forte.

  Lange had seen racism, but nowhere was it as terroristic as here in the Deep South. Seeing southern white brutality up close deepened her respect for those who stood up to it, but also increased her understanding of why so many did not.

  . . . when I look at the Farm Security [photographs] in the south . . . I thought, these are the people who are stirring themselves 20 years later.

  —Dorothea Lange, 1965

  Her transcontinental experience—observing race relations in western, central, and eastern farmlands—provided an unparalleled understanding of how racism and labor exploitation strengthened each other. This was, of course, a partial understanding, one that missed many of the cultural, sexual, and psychological impulses that animate racism. In the late 1930s, however, the Lange-Taylor analysis was far ahead of the understanding of most other progressive white Americans.

  Lange’s ability to communicate that visually was imperfect, she knew—and the more masterful a photographer she became, the more self-critical she grew. Convinced that words needed pictures and that pictures needed words, Lange and Taylor decided to produce a photo-textual book that would summarize in vivid and simple terms their holistic view of American agriculture and the radical historical crisis facing it. It would be a visual history of landowners, field workers, and the earth itself.

  16

  An American Exodus

  Sometime in the late 1930s, Lange and Taylor decided to sum up their work together. They envisioned a collaboration as personal as it was public, as historical as it was a call for reform. Taylor wanted to develop his vernacular, nonacademic voice, his ability to persuade. Lange wanted to move documentary photography toward what she considered its culmination, a narrative that completely integrated images and text. The result was An American Exodus, published in 1939, a high point in photo-textual storytelling, the fullest synthesis of images and words yet achieved, according to some critics.1 The project was also a celebration of their partnership and a chance to produce something tangible that was theirs, jointly and equally.

  Luckily, they enjoyed the process, because the book never got the attention it deserves. Appearing a few months after World War II began in September 1939, the book got lost in the dire headlines. Moreover, it lacked commercial appeal. It told several centuries of history; it was not billed as an exposé; its goal was agrarian reform, not a cause likely to grip the interests of those who bought photographic books. By contrast, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, strongly influenced by Lange’s images, appeared shortly before American Exodus and became a sensation. Twentieth Century–Fox immediately bought the rights and rushed a film, with a major star and director, into production. It would receive seven Oscar nominations and win two.

  An American Exodus deserves a fresh look, not only because it is a very good book but also because it marks Lange’s new photographic ambition, the creation of visual narrative. She had long focused on how grouping and arranging photographs could expand their meaning. Biographer Henry Mayer wrote, “Lange had come to realize that the language of photography might employ a sophisticated grammar of sentences and paragraphs, but the FSA spoke only one word at a time.”2

  Photo-textual books had recently become a new genre. Illustrated books and photography books had long existed, of course; the novelty was in making text and images equal and so meshed that their impact transcended either medium alone.3 The first to attract significant public notice was the product of another photographer-writer couple, Margaret Bourke-White’s and Erskine Caldwell’s 1937 You Have Seen Their Faces, a sensationalist take on southern sharecroppers. The authors were well known—the world’s first famous female photojournalist, whose modernist photograph of a dam on Life magazine’s first cover promised that industrial power could conquer the Depression, working with the author of many novels, notably Tobacco Road. But it was the book’s lurid words and images that created a stir. Lange detested the book. Its subjects are abject, wretched, and degenerate; the South appears a human swamp, its victims “ ‘numbed like their own dumb animals.’ ”4 Bourke-White seemed unable to pass a disfigured person or a sick child without photographing her. Few in the book do any work. Blacks appear only as imprisoned, lazing about, or stupid. In one of the “quotations,” a black woman says, “I got more children now than I know what to do with, but they keep coming along like watermelons in the summertime.”

  To Lange’s and Taylor’s fury, these quotations were fabricated; as Bourke-White and Caldwell forthrightly admitted, the words expressed “the authors’ own conceptions of the sentiments of the individuals portrayed. . . .”5 Although Lange and other photographers edited images and quotations, there was a qualitative difference between them and Bourke-White and Caldwell. Jacob Riis often arranged his dark scenes and sometimes paid his subjects.6 Walker Evans simplified his subjects’ kitchens by removing objects. Jack Delano of the FSA explained to Stryker that he killed photographs of Negroes that could “be interpreted unfairly.”7 Lange and Taylor edited quotes: “If you die, you’re dead, that’s all” was extracted from a much longer caption and the original context gave it different meaning, complaining that the county would not help pay for decent burials for the poor.8 For all these documentary photographers, the editing aimed to produce more beautiful and more respectful images, never to fabricate or sensationalize. Lange and Taylor would make their indignation at the Bourke-White/Caldwell method explicit in their own book: “Quotations which accompany photographs report what the persons photographed said, not what we think might be their unspoken thoughts.”

  After You Have Seen Their Faces, the next photo-textual book to appear was by the patrician Archibald MacLeish, poet, ardent New Dealer, and future Librarian of Congress. His Land of the Free published 62 FSA photographs, 33 of them Lange’s, to critical approval. This book, more than any other single factor, established the FSA as a producer of art, but it rested on a contentless and sentimental patriotism that Lange disliked.9 Its text bore little re
lation to the photographs;10 MacLeish merely juxtaposed photographs on right-hand pages with some banal free verse on facing left-hand pages. He (or someone at the FSA) committed an atrocity on one Lange photograph. MacLeish took her image of a plantation owner and his sharecroppers (see plate 25), shamelessly cropped out almost everything except the white man, and turned him into a salt-of-the-earth American farmer, an icon of grassroots Americanism.11 The transformation of that photograph exemplifies the futility of seeking authenticity or veracity in photographs, and provides evidence for Lange’s conviction that photographs do not “speak for themselves.”12

  The most enduring of these photo-textual books was journalist James Agee and photographer Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Following Lange and Taylor’s volume by two years, it ultimately became acclaimed by a highbrow as well as a middlebrow audience, a rare occurrence. At first, however, it also met a cold reception, appearing at a time as inauspicious as Lange and Taylor’s, September 1941, after the fall of Europe to the Nazis. Agee’s overlong, confessional, self-centered text—in which he agonized over his role as “spy,” thereby foreshadowing postmodernist scholarship—outraged critics. Profiling three white tenant families, it separated photographs and essay entirely. Evans’s photographs of individuals, families, barren kitchens, and wooden shacks are hushed, contained, and simplified, revealing the similar beauty of weathered boards and faces—both appear timeless, unchanging. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is ahistorical, asocial, and apolitical. It ennobles the poor but offers no help in explaining why they are so poor or in changing their destiny. Lange and Taylor sought, in contrast and perhaps in naïveté, to end poverty. While Agee and Evans’s book presented only whites, the first two chapters of An American Exodus focused on African Americans and included Mexicans and Filipinos.13 The book might have won greater popularity had it featured only “Okies.”

  AN AMERICAN EXODUS rested on “a tripod of photographs, captions, and text,” as Lange put it. The book’s design is on the whole conservative, making its substantive innovations more easily legible. A classic font was used for the text, not one of the sporty scripts fashionable in the 1930s and 1940s. The photographs are presented uniformly: bled to the edges, occupying usually the top three-quarters of the page, captions beneath. The paper is thick, semiglossy, and cream-colored. But one innovative aspect of its design signals its democratic politics: Inside the front and back covers quotations from farmworkers are presented in a collage, end to end, like wallpaper, producing an effect like that of a Greek chorus.

  One critic called Lange’s layout a “Cubist approach.”14 This is a stretch, but a fruitful one. Lange’s photography is representational, a classic example of American social realism; nothing could contrast more with the Constructivism, Surrealism, and montage being explored by European photographers of her time.15 An American Exodus is resolutely antiart, expressing both Lange’s self-conception at the time—documentarist, not artist—and its communicative, political purpose.16 Yet by juxtaposing images, quotations, hand-lettered signs, newspaper ads, data, and brief excerpts from authorities, Lange was doing something akin to what Cubists did: breaking up objects, analyzing them, and reassembling them in a form that calls attention to their construction by denaturalizing the whole; presenting objects not from one viewpoint, but from a multitude of viewpoints, so as to say more about the object than you can see at a glance. She used layout to produce a new syntax. After finishing the manuscript, she insisted on overseeing every detail of production.17

  The book did not find a publisher easily. Dorothea asked John Steinbeck to contribute an introduction or preface, but he refused—a rather stingy response, given his indebtedness to her photographs.18 Unstoppable, Dorothea may well have promised publishers a Steinbeck introduction anyway.19 Even so, the book was rejected by Random House and Viking, among other publishers, until Reynal & Hitchcock, a distinguished New York publishing house, took it.

  The story line of An American Exodus reversed Lange’s learning process: as she had traveled west to east, the book travels east to west, from the older to the newer parts of the nation. Images of highways show how “on the road” bears a variety of meanings in American history, implying the expansion of the United States, the movement and mobility so central to American culture, the automobile as a symbol of freedom and as transportation to a better life. The movement at the climax of the narrative is the mass migration of displaced tenant farmers from the drought-ridden southern plains to California—hence the title.20

  16.1. AN AMERICAN EXODUS COVER, 1939

  A story in six chapters, the book’s mainspring is cotton. Its subtitle, A Record of Human Erosion, with its metaphoric use of an environmental term, signaled that the book was not about crops or conservation, but people. The cover photo was a rear view of a wooden auto trailer, with a top made of circularly stretched canvas—what we see is a covered wagon, one of the most sacred images of Americana. The message is that the exodus consists of pioneers, not bums.21

  In all six chapters, photographs, accompanied by captions, precede the text.22 Each chapter begins with an iconic picture of a region: For the Old South, piles of baled cotton; for the “last west,” the endless highway, of course. Some of these introductory pictures aim to undermine clichés—the dust bowl chapter begins not with an image of a dust storm, but with a grain elevator, directing attention to what had created the dust bowl. In a typical Lange democratic gesture, captions mix the authority of experts with that of farmers: “The collapse of the plantation system, rendered inevitable by its exploitation of land and labor, leaves in its wake depleted soil, shoddy livestock, inadequate farm equipment, crude agricultural practices, crippled institutions, a defeated and impoverished people.” “A piece of meat in the house would like to scare these children of mine to death.” “There’s lots of ways to break a man down.” Some captions make theoretical points: “Old forms remain, but they are changed at the core.”

  16.2. AN AMERICAN EXODUS, 1939

  In content as well as design, Lange’s photographs are restrained. There are sad children, dejected men, and long-suffering mothers, but there are more hardworking, attractive, thoughtful, animated people. The message was, in Taylor’s words, “These people are worth helping.”23 Lange selected the photographs with great discipline, to advance the story rather than promote her artistic reputation. Migrant Mother is not included.24

  The narrative explains that rural poverty was a product of history, not nature. Although agricultural prosperity in the Old South came from mechanization—the cotton gin—there was no incentive to mechanize farming, due to the cheap labor provided by slavery and then by sharecropping. Neither was there incentive to preserve the environment, so the soil became exhausted and the monoculture gave birth to invulnerable pests like boll weevils. The reign of cotton produced the worst damage—85 percent of cotton was produced on plantations, including the largest in the world in Mississippi’s Bolivar County. As the dry prairie was plowed up, the tenant system took over there too, but without even minimal paternalist obligations to dependents. As a result, many tenants survived by traveling in search of seasonal work. As cotton prices collapsed in the 1930s, growers began to buy row-crop tractors, evict sharecroppers, and rely on casual wage laborers. Lange treated a grain silo as if it were a church, suggesting that large-scale farming, devouring ever more land and people, had become an object of worship. The plowed prairie was defenseless against dust storms that stripped away the soil. So farmworkers had to leave their homes for good, heading to Arizona and California, where there had never been an economy of family farms, to join the migrants in the fields of the vast agribusinesses, typically owned by absentee capitalists.

  Lange and Taylor were proud of the book and worked to promote it. They celebrated its appearance at dinner with progressive Wisconsin senator Bob La Follette, Jr., Paul’s college friend. Through historian Mary Beard, Dorothea tried to enlist Eleanor Roosevelt’s support, but she only managed to get a o
ne-sentence mention in the First Lady’s weekly column, “My Day.”25 Photographers, however, recognized its importance. Ansel Adams wrote Dorothea with his usual warmth and charm and unusual high praise: “Your book has been looked at, read, studied, observed, pulled apart and put together again, and glanced through, raced through, micromatically poured [sic] over and macroscopically examined . . . it is the most successful of all the documentary projects produced to date . . . its soundness, its fairness, and its integrity. . . . A supurb [sic] job throughout.”26 Edward Weston wrote, “. . . the most important book of its kind that I have seen. In truth it is in a class apart. . . . This sounds like a patent medicine testimonial but it is nonetheless sincere.”27 Unexpectedly, the left-wing Paul Strand was critical. He found the text weighted more heavily than the images, which he thought merely illustrated the text, and he criticized some less than excellent photographs.28 The latter criticism was quite right, for Lange chose photographs because of what they showed. Adams and Weston did not mind, because they did not see the book as art at all, while Strand, committed to the possibility of socially critical fine art, objected. New Dealers and left-wing magazines loved it, but it got few reviews overall. The book sank quickly into oblivion.