Asked in 1964 about the most significant thing she had learned about Americans while photographing those fleeing the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, Dorothea Lange answered: "I many times encountered courage, real courage. Undeniable courage." She saw it often, she said, "in unexpected places." She attempted to capture it as well, of course, in her stark black-and-white images of somber migrant farm workers, strong-jawed mothers, fly-dotted toddlers, and gaunt sharecroppers. By showing the stoicism of her subjects, Lange restored dignity to the dispossessed during the Great Depression. (Click here to follow Julia Baird).
As Linda Gordon points out in her excellent new biography, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits, the photographs Lange took of the "handsome homeless" symbolized the way the architects of the New Deal analyzed the Depression, so that widespread poverty was no longer blamed on poor people but on financial mismanagement: "The economy, not the people, needed moral reform." Lange's subjects were poor, but also disciplined, hardworking, and upright. And quite beautiful.
These images, taken as Lange explored rural California and the Midwest in her dusty Ford station wagon on behalf of the New Deal's Farm Security Administration, serve as a striking reminder of how subversive it can be simply to view people with respect. Lange chose attractive subjects, Gordon writes, "but she also found the attractiveness in everyone," through courtesy, not flattery. And, when her subjects were uneducated, exhausted, hungry farm workers, "her respect for them became a political statement."
After The San Francisco News published photographs of starving pea pickers, existing on stolen frozen vegetables because a cold spell had destroyed their crop (the iconic "Migrant Mother" was one of them), there was a deluge of public donations. Shortly afterward, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration provided funding for two emergency migrant-worker camps in California. No wonder FDR's critics slammed these photos as sentimental propaganda.
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