JF Ptak Science Books  Post 1878

Dorothea Lange, a standard portrait photographer-turned-superb-documentarian, had a six-year-run of photographic success and inspiration and energy as few people have ever experienced in the history of photography From her 1936 Migrant Mother, which is perhaps the great photograph of the American Great Depression (which I wrote about in The Best Dollar the U.S. Government Ever Spent) to the wicked sharpness of her documenting the terrible business of relocating Japanese American citizens to concentration camps in 1942. Lange traveled the country recording the state of Americans in what may have been one of the great journeys of th 1930’s. 

The period in which this was all happening was one of the most chaotic in modern history–at least in the West.  The Depression was full-bore-on, of course; as Germany strained its way into confrontation with the rest of the world, taking its calculated and inexorable steps towards world hemispheric chaos. The other images of these six years are almost a dada-kaleidoscopic  assembly of the believable and the not believable:  Sudetendland, Kristallnacht, Neville Chamerbalin, Austria, Poland, Nanking, Canton, War of the Worlds, Munich Agreement, WWII in Europe, Spanish Revolution, lynching, Jewish explusion, concentration camps, Pearl Harbor. In the United States, there was a certain right-wing element that ran deep into the national consciousness, the worst embodied in Father Coughlin’s filthy radio diatribes on keeping America out of war wrapped in Jew-hating monologues, the ridiculous semi-levitating philosopher-fake and home-town-boy-gone-bad Charles Pelley and his Silver Shirts being part of his support; Henry Ford and his assault on Judaism and insistence on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Charles Lindbergh and America First, and so on., and for a divisive time until the crystalizing of Pearl Harbor.

The literature of this time, of this 1936-1942 period, expressing the soul of the country seems pretty full, with these few works standing as good examples of the work of the period:   John Steinbeck’s beginning in “the Harvest Gypsies”/Their Blood is Strong, The Grapes of Wrath,  Faulkner’s Absolom! Absolom! (1936), Pare Lorentz The Plow that Broke the Plains, Carey McWIlliams Factories in the Field (1939), Taylor/Lange’s An American Exodus (1939), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), the New Masses,   Abel Meeropol’s anti-lynching poem “Strange Fruit”, and so on, deeply on.

But perhaps in all of it, perhaps nothing else quite expresses the emotion of the period than Lange’s Migrant Mother.  It seems to have everything, in one photograph.  In the vast result of Lange’s work during this period it is interesting to have a look at her in Imperial Valley, California, in 1937–it seems less-often mentioned, though the work is very strong.  So I decided to post a few of the images with a link to the rest of the collection (below).

Lange worte:

“I was forced to switch from Nipomo to the Imperial Valley because of the conditions there. They have always been notoriously bad as you know and what goes on in the Imperial is beyond belief. The Imperial Valley has a social structure all its own and partly because of its isolation in the state those in control get away with it. But this year’s freeze practically wiped out the crop and what it didn’t kill is delayed–in the meanwhile, because of the warm, no rain climate and possibilities for work the region is swamped with homeless moving families. The relief association offices are open day and night 24 hours. The people continue to pour in and there is no way to stop them and no work when they get there.”

Former tenant farmers on relief. LC-USF34T01

Other samples below but a fuller listing of images is available here.

Imperial Valley, California, February and March 1937
Resettlement Administration

Notes:

1. Lange was still very new to the FSA project when she made this photograph in the spring of 1936.  On the tail end of a month-long road trip she was nearing the end of her day when she spotted a hand-lettered sign “Pea-Pickers Camp” by the side of the road.  Lange briefly considered stopping but went ahead, questioning her judgment continuously for the next 20 miles, when she finally turned around to find the turn-off for the camp.  She drove down the dirt road and found a ramshackle assembly of tents, one of which contained “an exhausted mother sitting forlornly with her children”.  Lange spent only 10 minutes with the woman, making five exposures.  She learned that “the crops had frozen, and the woman and children were living on vegetables scavenged from the fields, and the few birds that the children managed to catch.  The mother could not leave; she had sold the tires from her car”.

The images were made using a Graflex camera. The original negatives are 4×5″ film.