26 May

Born: iconographer of the Great Depression

1895 When Dorothea Lange abandoned studio photography for documentary work, she became the most literary of photographers – in both her method and her influence. In 1935 she teamed up with – then married – the Berkeley agricultural economist Paul Schuster Taylor. Their reports on the miserable living conditions of farm migrants in California during the Depression would prompt the government to provide ‘sanitary camps’ for the Okies, give Pare Lorentz the idea for The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), involve John Steinbeck in their campaign (see 5 October), and inspire The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

For Lange, the caption was almost as important as the photo. Once asked whether a picture should be left to speak for itself, she denied wanting to tell the viewer what to look for, but saw no reason not to offer relevant background. The caption ‘Winter in New England’ would be redundant to a winter scene in New England, ‘but you could say, “this part of the country is … losing its population”, or “People are leaving this part of the United States which was really the cradle of democratic principles”’. In other words ‘background’ was alright so long as it supplied a pessimistic historical generalisation.

Lange’s photo captions in her and Taylor’s field reports were highly evocative, almost poetic at times. In fact the narrow margins of her notebook break the lines up so that they look like an early poem by William Carlos Williams. To her question, ‘Are you making a living?’, one migrant in a Marysville, California, shanty town answered:

Oh, we’re getting along

As good as us draggin’

Around people can expect

If you call it a livin’—

And following her inset description, ‘Rag houses / Split open garbage cans’, another added:

‘ex service man raised decent like I was

raised by my father, No rag

houses then. I can’t make it’—

This was powerful stuff, even without the pictures, but it had the force of portraying her subjects as victims of natural forces. This bias was strongest in her photograph of a Madonna-like woman cradling three children in a makeshift tent – the so-called ‘Migrant Mother’ – since reproduced over 10,000 times, and now an icon of the Depression as a whole.

This time she didn’t wait for a quote, but used a succession of captions to sketch in her own ‘background’. This was a mother of ‘seven hungry children’, she wrote, ‘destitute in a pea pickers camp’ after the crop failed in Nipomo, California. One caption affirmed that ‘These people had just sold their tent to buy food’, another that they had sold the tyres from their car.

None of this was true. Recent research has uncovered that, far from being a passive victim, the mother was a local organiser for the radical Cannery and Agricultural Industrial Workers’ Union. On the day the picture was taken, her husband and two older boys had taken the radiator off their Hudson car to get it repaired at a local garage. So they hadn’t had to sell the car tyres, and they hadn’t sold their tent, and they weren’t stuck in Nipomo. The next morning the family took off for Watsonville, 140 miles to the north along Highway 101, to work in the lettuce fields.