Dorothea Lange by Linda Gordon

Author:Linda Gordon [Gordon, Linda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393339055
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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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

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