John Edwin Mason: Documentary and Motor Sports Photography

Dorothea Lange: The Art and (Social) Science of Documentary Photography

In January 1935, Dorothea Lange reinvented documentary photography. Best known for the iconic images that she made as a photographer for the federal government’s Farm Security Administration[FSA], Lange made her conceptual breakthrough a little bit earlier, while working for California’s Emergency Relief Administration [SERA].

Paul Taylor, an economist and SERA field director, had hired her to photograph the living conditions of the state’s agricultural laborers. The Depression, Dust Bowl conditions in the midwest, and the decline of tenant farming and sharecropping in the South had left millions of American families both jobless and homeless. Without resources, they had become wanderers, living in hovels and searching for work. Many had come to California.

Dorothea Lange:  A mother in California who with her husband and her two children will be returned to Oklahoma by the Relief Administration.  This family had lost a two-year-old baby during the winter as a result of exposure.  Imperial County, California, 1937.  (All photos are courtesy of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information collection at the Library of Congress.)

As Anne Whiston Spirn shows, in Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field, Taylor hired Lange because he believed that "words alone could not convey" the stark reality of farm workers lives, and he wanted his department’s reports to have the maximum possible impact.

In Lange, Taylor had found the perfect partner. (They would soon fall in love and marry.) She quickly came to agree with Taylor that words and images could, in her words, "enhance and fortify" each other, creating a whole that was stronger than either part alone. While photos are very good at describing things, at showing what they look like--for instance, the circumstances in which people live and work--they are very bad at explaining how things got to be that way. Lange wanted her documentary work to be part of the solution to the crisis that the nation faced. In order to do that, she understood that it would have to describe and to explain, to show and to tell.

Dorothea Lange:  Daughter of migrant Tennessee coal miner. Living in American River camp near Sacramento, California, 1936.  (Click directly on any of these photos to see larger versions.)

Spirn argues that "Lange’s photographs and her field notes provided the raw material for a new sort of government report: essays comprising photographs with handwritten captions, many with quotations from the people she photographed." The reports had a powerful effect within SERA and eventually at the national level, as well.

Rexford Tugwell, director of the federal government’s Resettlement Administration [RA], which had been created to assist displaced farmers and sharecroppers, was "extremely impressed" by Lange’s work in California. When he asked Roy Stryker to set up a photography unit for the RA, Lange’s work was the model that he had in mind. (This unit, the Historical Section, became the home of the FSA documentary project after its transfer to that agency.) Ben Shahn, another RA/FSA photographer, remembered seeing Lange’s reports for the first time. "It was a revelation," he said, "what this woman was doing." Stryker was impressed, too.  After seeing the reports, he changed the Historical Section's "whole direction," and very much for the better, Shahn believed.

Dorothea Lange:  Washington, Yakima Valley, near Wapato.  One of Chris Adolf's younger children. Farm Security Administration Rehabilitation clients.  August 1939.

The beauty and complexity of Lange’s photos are undeniable, and they’ve long been recognized as art. The best of her photos seem to make emotion tangible. She convinces us that we feel what her subjects feel and experience what they experience--that we know them in some very personal way. No one has ever used small gestures more effectively to reveal character and emotion--the tilt of the head, the angle of the body, the position of the hands--they all tell a story. Yes, she sometimes posed her subjects (as in the photo of Chris Adolf, below). But she rarely, if ever, simply imposed herself on her subjects. She spent time with them, talked with them, and got to know them.  She created relationships with them. Her images were, in fact, collaborations between the photographer and the subject. It’s precisely this which accounts for the unselfconscious way in which so many of her subjects present themselves to her camera.

Dorothea Lange:  Washington, Yakima Valley, near Wapato. Rural rehabilitation client (Farm Security Administration).  Portrait of Chris Adolf [father of the little girl in the photo above].  "My father made me work.  That was his mistake, he made me work too hard.  I learned about farming but nothing out of the books."  August 1939.

Spirn again: "To divide the visual from the verbal [however]... is to miss the whole that it represents." Lange’s words blended social science with reportage, information drawn from academic studies and government reports with the voices of the people in her photos. "[Her] words and images... are more than documentary records; they are an art form."

The words sometimes change the way that a photo looks. At first glance, this heroic portrait of Chris Adolf strikes us as a something of an FSA cliche. But seen as Lange intended it to be seen--in conjunction with her extended General Caption for the series of photos that she made of the Adolf family--it becomes more interesting and less hackneyed:

General Caption 28:

Date:  August 10, 1939.

Place:  Yakima Valley, near Wapato, Washington

Subject:  Rural rehabilitation, F.S.A.

Name of client, Chris Adolf.  Amount of loan, $2,138.  80 acres of Indian land, on three year lease.

Came to Yakima Valley in 1937 from Bethune, Kit Carson County, Colorado.  He owned his own farm there and he had lived there all his life.  Drought forced him out with his wife and 8 children.  His wife had been a school teacher.  "I'd like to go back.  I was born and raised there and it was hard to leave, but my wife and my children don't want to go back."

"I've broke thousands of acres of sod.  The dust got so bad that we had to sleep with wet clothes over our faces."

All 8 children live at home, all work on the farm, and the family are making a good start.

Dorothea Lange:  Young mother, twenty five, says "Next year we'll be painted and have a lawn and flowers."  Rural shacktown, near Klamath Falls, Oregon.  September 1939.

Another wonderful photo. The mother’s grace within the rough conditions that surround her keeps us from seeing this as a photograph of misery. Her words, even in the short caption, reinforce her body language.

I’ll again quote Lange’s General Caption. It tells us almost as much about her working methods as it does about the family that is her subject:

General Caption 47:

Date:  August 23 and September 29, 1939.

Place:  Near Klamath Falls, Altamont District, Klamath County, Oregon.

Subject:  To show process of resettlement in the West.

Photographs were made in fast growing rural shacktown.  The home was photographed on August 23 and revisited six weeks later.  In that time the family had dismantled the tent and were living in a nearly completed self-built, one room house.

Family consists of husband, wife, two small children, and husband's brother.  They came originally from Oklahoma to Oregon.  Father works on WPA.  Paid $10.00 down for the land.  Pay $5.00 a month out of WPA earnings.

Father:  "We build as we can, to get away from rent and get something for what we pay out."

Mother:  "First we had the tent on the ground.  Then we moved it up on the floor, when we got it down.  We didn't take the tent down 'til we had a roof over it."

Mother:  "Next year we'll be painted and have a lawn and flowers.  We'll put our driveway over there where those beans are.  We've got rabbits now and we'll get some chickens as soon as we can.  We think we're doing swell."

Just as Lange knew that words and images can powerfully strengthen each other, she also understood that there is no dichotomy between art and documentary.  The fact that her photos are art enriches our experience of seeing them.  We know more about her subjects because of--not despite of--their beauty.

* * *

This is the third in my series of posts about Lange's FSA photographs.  You can read about her iconic Madonna photos, here, and her less well known, but no less glorious migrant father photos, here.

Dorothea Lange's Migrant Fathers

Dorothea Lange made far more photos of parents and their children than any of the other Farm Security Administration [FSA] photographers, and her's were easily the most beautiful and most compelling.  One, "Migrant Mother," is an icon of America during the Depression.

It's not surprising that Lange returned often to the theme of mother and child.  These images appeal to the emotions and resonate with the Madonna figure of Christian iconography.  Her job, after all, was to create photos that would build support for the Roosevelt administration's New Deal programs, especially the  FSA.

But Lange also made many photos of migrant fathers, almost always contrasting the size and strength of the men with the vulnerability of their children.  None became iconic, or even particularly well known, but that doesn't diminish their beauty.

 

Lange:  Drought refugee from Polk, Missouri.  Awaiting the opening of orange picking season at Porterville, California, 1936.  (These photos are available online, from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information collection, at the Library of Congress.)

In her wonderful new biography, Dorothea Lange:  A Life Beyond Limits, Linda Gordon suggests that there were other, deeper reasons for the attention that Lange lavished on parents and children.  "Nothing in Lange's personal life," she writes, "was as fraught as her own motherhood and she lived with contradictory impulses every day."  The difficulty was in reconciling her responsibility to her children with her dedication to her work.  Her photography, which she saw as an extension of her commitment to social justice, demanded that she spend long weeks and months away from her children.  The price that she paid was a heavy burden of guilt.  She was drawn to the families that she encountered on the road because she couldn't be with her's.

***

Lange:  Young sharecropper and his first child. Hillside Farm.  Person County, North Carolina, 1939.  (Click directly on any of these photos to see larger versions.)

Lange provided detailed "General Captions" for many of her photos.  This portrait of the sharecropper and his child is part of a series the she did on this family and the land that they worked.  The General Caption for the series reads, in part:

"...young Negro couple and baby.  ...The man was shy of having his photograph made but finally held the baby in front of the house for one picture.  They have just moved here this year--'They treat us better here than where we did live....'  The woman had been through seventh grade, the husband not much education.  She would not let us take pictures of the interior--'Ain't cleaned up in ever so long....'  ...[the family] had to get water from 'the spring' so far away that the man was gone about 20 minutes to get a bucket of water."  (From Anne Whiston Spirn's fascinating book about Lange's field work, Daring to Look.)

***

 

Lange:  The Fairbanks family has moved to three different places on the [federal government's irrigation] project in one year.  Willow Creek area, Malheur County, Oregon, 1939.

There's no doubt that Lange understood how to use archetypes in her photography.  The cowboy, a symbol of rugged independence, has, in this photo, willingly given up some of that freedom.  He's accepted his duty to provide for his child and his wife.  Or die trying.

***

 

Lange:  George Cleaver, new farmer, has five boys. The three older boys, ages twelve, sixteen, and eighteen, are needed at home to develop the farm and do not go to school. Malheur County, Oregon, 1939.

It's worth noting that even in the midst of the Depression, in the midst of poverty and hunger, Lange's subjects are never mere victims.  This photo of George Cleaver and his son is as much about strength and humor as it is about the challenges the family faces.

Yes, the lives of the people in Lange's have been disrupted by economic forces that are far more powerful than they are.  But she wants us to remember that these folks are just complex and just as full of life as we are.  Her people are people that we'd want to know.

Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mothers

When Dorothea Lange made this portrait of Florence Thompson, in February or March 1936, neither one of them could have known that it would become one of the most recognized and reproduced photos in history.  Universally known as "Migrant Mother," it's an icon of America during the Great Depression.

 

    Dorothea Lange:  Destitute pea pickers in California.  Mother of seven children.  Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California.  February or March, 1936.  [Florence Thompson and three of her children.]

Lange's caption from another photo of Florence Thompson:  "Nipomo, Calif. Mar. 1936. Migrant agricultural worker's family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged 32, the father is a native Californian. Destitute in a pea pickers camp, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Most of the 2,500 people in this camp were destitute."

At the time that the two women encountered each other, on the side of US 101, just outside Nipomo, California, Lange was working as a documentary photographer for the Farm Security Administration, one of the federal government's New Deal agencies.  Within the photographic community, she was becoming a big name; outside of it, few had heard of her.  By the time she died, in 1965, she left behind a body of work that's unsurpassed in its power and beauty.  She was famous, and deservedly so.

Thompson was a migrant farm worker.  She and her husband followed the crops, trying desperately to keep body and soul together.  She was also a Native American, born on a Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma.  (This was something that Lange and people who saw the photo in the 1930s never knew.  America assumed that she was white.)  She never became wealthy.  In fact, when she was dying of cancer, in the early 1980s, her family struggled to pay her medical bills.  Understandably, she was sometimes angry that her face--though not her name or her story--had become famous, without her permission and without any benefit to her and her family.  You can hear her tell her side of the story, here.

Reading Linda Gordon's terrific new biography of Lange--Dorothea Lange:  A Life Beyond Limits--sent me back to "Migrant Mother."  Not to revisit the controversy that sometimes swirls around the photograph, but to think about why some images become iconic and some don't.  As Gordon points out, Lange made many photos of migrant mothers and their children, and some of them are just as beautiful and just as haunting as her portrait of Thompson.

That line of thought sent me back to the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information online archive, at the Library of Congress, to look at some of Lange's other photos.  I don't have any large conclusions to offer about what makes a photo iconic, just a few observations.  This is more of an opportunity to look again at this amazing (and important) work.

Dorothea Lange:  Drought refugees from Oklahoma camping by the roadside. (Blythe, California.)  They hope to work in the cotton fields.  The official at the border (California-Arizona) inspection service said that on this day, August 17, 1936, twenty-three car loads and truck loads of migrant families out of the drought counties of Oklahoma and Arkansas had passed through that station entering California up to 3 o'clock in the afternoon.  August, 1936.  (Click directly on this photo or any of the others to see larger versions.)

Ok.  No photo of a nursing mother stood a chance of being widely published, let alone becoming iconic, in the '30s.  I also suspect that the mother looks a little too hard and that the father (over on the right) is a little too present.

Lange's detailed caption is worth noting.  In Daring to Look:  Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field, Anne Whiston Spirn shows how hard Lange worked on her captions, adding information that was not present in her photos.  She saw words and images as complementary to each other and necessary to each other.  It annoyed her that the newspapers and magazines that published her photos usually ignored her captions.  (Even worse, modern books that are dedicated to her photography still tend to ignore her captions.)

 

Dorothea Lange: Unemployed family from the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, camped on a river bottom near Holtville, California.  March, 1937.

There's nothing saccharine about most of Lange's photos.  Her images of the poor almost always capture their dignity and humanity, but she never slips into easy sentimentality.  It seems to me that Gordon is right when she says that, most importantly, Lange's people are interesting.

Dorothea Lange:  Wife and child of tractor driver.  Aldridge Plantation, Mississippi.  June, 1937.

A gorgeous photo, but, in the '30s, most white Americans would not have been able to imagine an African-American icon.

Gordon and many others have pointed out that Lange's documentary photography was, to a large extent, portrait photography.  She treated the poor with as much respect as she had her rich clients, during her years as a successful portrait photographer in San Francisco.  And she found the beauty in them, just as she had with the rich.

Dorothea Lange:  Japanese mother and daughter, agricultural workers near Guadalupe, California.  March, 1937.

When I looked through Lange's photos in the FSA-OWI archive, I was surprised to find not only so many Madonna figures, but Madonna figures of such ethnic diversity.

Afterthought, 4 November 2009:  Perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised.  In her earlier book, Impounded:  Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (co-edited with Gary Okihiro), Gordon points out that Lange had "an exceptional antiracist consciousness."  At a time when "demeaning racial stereotypes of peoples of color saturated white culture," Lange's photos treated Asian-Americans, African-Americans, and Latinos with respect and "actively challenged" this "enduring stream of racism."

 

Dorothea Lange:  Mexican mother in California.  "Sometimes I tell my children that I would like to go to Mexico, but they tell me 'We don't want to go, we belong here.'"  June, 1935.

Lange often spoke at length with her subjects and wrote down what they said to her in notebooks.  She often included bits of conversation in her captions.  As can be seen in the mother's words above, they can enrich the photos tremendously.

Dorothea Lange:  Colored family from near Houston, Texas.  Been in California for two years.  Husband came first, later sent for wife and two children, who traveled by bus (on licensed car, fare six dollars, traveling night and day).  Husband now on Works Progress Administration (WPA).  February, 1939.

I hasten to point out that in 1939, "colored" was not an insult.  African-Americans, at the time, preferred "Negro," but "colored" was not a curse word.

 

Dorothea Lange:  Calipatria, Imperial Valley, California.  In Farm Security Administration (FSA) emergency migratory labor camp.  Daughter of ex-tenant farmers on thirds and fourths in cotton.  Had fifty dollars when set out. Went to Phoenix, picked cotton, pulled bolls made eighty cents a day with two people pulling bolls. Stayed until school closed.  Went to Idaho, picked peas until August.  Left McCall with forty dollars "in hand."  Went to Cedar City and Parowan, Utah, a distance of 700 miles.  Picked peas through September. Went to Hollister, California.  Picked peas through October.  Left Hollister for Calipatria for early peas which froze.  Now receiving Farm Security Administration food grant and waiting for work to begin. "Back in Oklahoma, we are sinking.  You work your head off for a crop and then see it burn up. You live in debts that you can never get out of.  This isn't a good life, but I say that it's a better life than it was."  February, 1939.

Lange was deeply commited to social justice and the full realization of American democracy.  But Gordon points out that she was also commited to beauty.  Lange understood, in Gordon's words, that "[t]here will always be a need to be reminded that beauty can be found in unlikely places...."  In the photo above, she found it in a migrant workers' camp.

 

Dorothea Lange:  Mother and baby of family on the road.  Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California.  September, 1939.

Lange sometimes wrote extended "General Captions" to accompany a series of photos.  General Caption Number 65 belongs to the photos directly above and directly below.

General Caption Number 65:  The car is parked outside the Employment Office.  The family have arrived, before opening of the potato season.  They have been on the road for one month--have sick baby.

The father worked on W.P.A. in South Dakota, “till that played out.”  Three children, oldest about five.  About to camp on a site without water or sanitation.  They have no tent.  “Been trying to get one some way.”

Mother says, of father, “What he really likes to do is milk cows.  He can do a little of everything, but that’s what he likes.”

Father washed the baby’s face with edge of blanket dampened from canteen, for the photographs.

Dorothea Lange:  Mother and baby of family on the road.  Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California.  September, 1939.

This photo forces us to remember that people retain their full humanity, even in the midst of misery.  We need to see both of these photos (and to remember the father's tender gesture of washing his child's face) before we can even begin to understand this young mother and her children.

Lange understood.

Update, 25 October 2009:  The New York Times has just published a review of Dorothea Lange:  A Life Beyond Limits, Linda Gordon's new biography (mentioned several times in this post).  David Oshinsky agrees with my very positive remarks, calling the book "elegant."  You can read the review, here.

Winston "Mankunku" Ngozi, 1943-2009

"I loved jazz before I knew what jazz was."

--Winston "Mankunku" Ngozi, 2006

Winston "Mankunku" Ngozi, one of South Africa's finest musicians, died last Monday, in Cape Town.  As a composer and as a saxophonist, he forever changed the shape of South African jazz. "Yakhal' Inkomo," his best known composition, has become a South African standard.  Every serious musician knows it; you'll hear it everywhere the music is played.  The song is deeply embedded in at least two musical traditions: the progressive African-American jazz of John Coltrane that Mankunku loved so much, and the music of his own Xhosa people.

Winston "Mankunku" Ngozi, "Yakhal' Inkomo," recorded in 1968.  Performed by Mankunku, tenor sax; Lionel Pillay, piano; Agrippa Mogwaza, bass; and Early Mabuza, drums.

When he created "Yakal' Inkomo," Mankunku reached back into the South African past, beyond the marabi and mbaqanga [types of South African jazz] that he played as a young man, into the music and spirituality of the pre-colonial era.  The very words "Yakal' Inkomo" refer to the bellow of a bull, when it's sacrificed in honor of the ancestors.

Winston "Mankunku" Ngozi, "Dedication (To Daddy Trane and Brother Silver)."  Also performed by Mankunku, tenor sax; Lionel Pillay, piano; Agrippa Mogwaza, bass; and Early Mabuza, drums.

It's no surprise, really, that Mankunku wrote "Dedication" for Coltrane and Horace Silver.  Even though he was an ocean away from them (and never met either), they inspired him to push his music far beyond the conventional and to blaze his own musical path.  (It's no accident that Coltrane, a deeply spiritual musician, affected Mankunku, another spiritual soul, so greatly.

I got to know Mankunku only in the latter stages of his life.  He was already weakened by the heart condition that eventually killed him, when my friend Temba Nolutshungu introduced us several years ago.  Temba knew that I was working on a book about jazz in Cape Town and was eager to speak with him.

A formal interview never really happened, in part, because of Mankunku's humility--his inability to see himself as the giant that he truly was--and, in part, because of his health.  Instead, we had a series of informal conversations, usually in his home in Gugulethu, an African "township" within the Cape Town municipality, a relic of apartheid, the old system of racial segregation.

It was during one of those chats that he told me that he "loved jazz before he knew what jazz was."  He was thinking back to his youth, when an uncle started him in music.  This uncle played marabi and mbaqanga on the piano, and the young Mankunku, singing, would improvise along with him.

All of his life, Mankunku communicated more easily--and more profoundly--in music than with words.  I remember once driving him, his brother, and my friend, Temba, to visit Gus Ntlokwana, who runs Duma’s Falling Leaves Jazz Rendezvous, Gugulethu's hippest shebeen.  Mankunku was sitting in the back and had been very quiet all day.  Out of nowhere, he started playing his sax--a soft, haunting tune--a lament, perhaps--that seemed to have no beginning and no end.  Suddenly, we were no longer in my hired Toyota and far away from the dust and heat of Gugulethu.  He had taken all of us to a place where, for a moment, only music mattered.

I have many other memories of Mankunku.  This one is by far my favorite.

You can read more tributes to Mankunku here, here, and here.

SBRA Bracket Finals, Eastside Speedway: Three Days at the Races

Hundreds of drag racers (and their families and friends) turned out for the Southern Bracket Racing Association's championship finals at Eastside Speedway,in Waynesboro, Virginia, on 2 to 4 October.  This annual event draws the best racers from six small, grassroots dragstrips in Virginia and Maryland.  Tracks like these, and the people who race on them, are the foundation--the bedrock--of drag racing.

I was there to continue working on my book about the people and culture of drag racing, Democracy of Speed.  (Click directly on any of these photos to see larger versions.)

I made these photos with two medium format cameras, a fifty-year-old Rolleiflex and a twenty-year-old Mamiya 6.  They're great fun to use and produce the naturally square images that you see here.

I was worried about the turnout for the race.  Drag racing is an expensive hobby (none of the racers in these photos are pros), and many of the racers that I know well have been hurt by the recession.  Hours have been cut; clients have disappeared.

As it happened, the number of cars at the race was off only slightly from last year.  These racers have a real passion for the sport.  Where I saw the difference was in the number of spectators.  The grandstands were significantly less full than last year.

Here some of the faster cars line up for their turn to race, in the staging lanes.

This car is performing a burnout to clean and heat the rear tires.  The cleaner and hotter the tire, the better it grips the track and the quicker the car runs.

Friends and family members are always on hand.  Nobody races alone.

There are lots of cameras at any racetrack.

I'm not kidding when I say that drag racing is a family affair.  This girl's father is one of the best racers at Eastside.  Her grandfather, who's also a fine driver, has been racing at the track since the mid-'60s.

Race control.  No, the boy's not working.  But his mother (not seen) works the timing system, when she's not racing her motorcycle.

The rocks and dirt clods would come from the action on the "circle track" (a dirt oval, for stock car racing), not the dragstrip.  The oval is right next to the dragstrip.  I've never seen anyone hurt at the track, but remaining alert is good advice.

As I was saying, the grandstands weren't particularly full.

The racing went on well into the night.  The fans stayed.  Night racing is terrific.

Nights were chilly.  Ice cream was much more popular during the day.