California on the Breadlines by Goggans Jan

Author:Goggans, Jan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2010-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

“Squatter camp. California.” 1936. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, FSA-OWI Collection, LC-USF34-009995-C (LC-DIG fsa 8b29941).

Domestic identity became a theme Lange not only experienced but witnessed in the lives of those whom she photographed, and her sense of homemaking practices and their role in establishing a new social order grew more complicated in the years following her marriage. In a photograph of an anonymous squatter camp, the sense of community inherent to any cluster of homes is both established and interrogated by the groupings of cardboard shacks that may or may not include more beyond the limits of the photograph. Within the details of the photograph exists a distorted mirror of home life: symmetry in the patchwork of shacks, shrubs lining the ditch, a peaceful stretch of shady branches, even a tricycle tilting haphazardly, as if dropped from play. In the photograph’s center, home and community are distilled into a single image of mother and child. The mother’s simple gesture, reaching down to steady her daughter’s steps, is intimate, familiar. It locates the heart of community within the mundane practices of domesticity, and in that gesture the photograph transcends the moment and the time while also, in its specificity and the conditions it decries, insisting on both. It is precisely the familiarity of such a pose that collides with the reality of the physical situation the camera documents. Lange had begun to recognize in the physical circumstances before her a secondary story, something beyond poverty and hunger, something that could not be remedied by government camps, something that went even deeper than tule shacks and cardboard walls. A new narrative had begun to emerge.

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