In March 1936, Dorothea Lange was driving through Nipomo, California on her way home
after a long day of work for the Resettlement Administration,
a New Deal agency created by FDR
to relocate struggling families onto land developed by the government.
Lange was a photographer
For the last fifteen years or so, she'd made her living taking portraits of the San Fransisco elite.
But after the Great Depression hit, she left her studio and began to document the effects of the crisis
on residents of the city.
On seeing those photographs, Roy Stryker immediately hired her to work for the government
on a project that would involve
documenting poor rural workers
in a propaganda effort to elicit political support
for government aid.
Lange was riding home having finished her work,
film ready to be sent back to Washington,
when she passed a pea-picker's camp.
"Pea-picker" was a name given to poor migrants from Eastern cities and towns
who moved west, often to California, looking for farm work during the Depression.
At this camp, an early-morning frost had killed the
crops so some 3,000 people were left in their makeshift homes with no work, some
starving, but Lange passed them by, exhausted from the day's work. It was 20
more miles before she turned around. She didn't stay at the camp long - in about
10 minutes she would be back on the road again - but not before taking one of
the most iconic pictures in the history of photography. Here's how it happened.
On arriving at the camp, Lange is immediately drawn, "as if by a magnet," she
said, to a family huddled under a tent. This is likely a test shot. There are a
lot of things that make this composition unpersuasive. Only the child in the
middle, for example, is offering her face to the camera. The oldest daughter on the
chair doesn't seem to notice the camera at all, and the mother turns away, clearly
defensive, not wanting her picture taken. So Lange talks to them as she's learned
to do after working this beat for a long time, and she helps the family arrange
themselves. This composition is definitely more pleasing than the last,
but something's still not quite right, and it has to do with the eldest
daughter, here. Remember, these photos have a
purpose: to evoke sympathy from voters that would translate into political
support. As James Curtis points out, having an older daughter, as well as
three younger ones, could suggest to some that this woman wasn't taking the right
precautions and family planning, and was less deserving of support - or, in other
words, less like them. So Lange cuts her out. She captures - or stages - a breast
feeding scene, playing on the religious symbolism of the nursing Madonna, but the
picture may have been too extreme for viewers of that time. What's more, it was
clearly making the mother uncomfortable, and Lange is starting to realize that she
is the key to the scene. Specifically, her face. So she alters the angle, asks one of
the children to come back in, and you can see the woman easing up, but the older
child looks a bit awkward and the post is blocking part of the baby's head, so
Lange tries again, this time having the great idea to include the trunk at an
angle in the foreground with the empty pie tin, compelling imagery of the
family's struggle and nomadic lifestyle. The child looks wistful, the baby is
sleeping, and the mother has the right expression, too. This is an extraordinary
photograph. You can see Lange coming to it through a series of adjustments. It
achieves the objectives of her project while being aesthetically powerful.
It's exactly what Ron Stryker would have loved to see, but Lange thought she could do one better.
This is the photograph you probably know. I don't think you can
really appreciate it until you understand the 10 minutes that came
before. A lesser photographer would have milked the children's faces for their
sympathetic potential. Lange even tried to do that herself, but by the time she
arrives here she knows exactly what the focus needs to be. The daughters' faces
turned behind their mother's shoulders communicates that message of family -
a family of the right size, mind you. Without taking away from the central
face, or the eyes, which seem at last to let down their guard as they search the
distance in worry. The face is so important that Lange has the woman put
her hand on her chin so that her arm points to it. It's a technique that she's
used before. Anything that took attention away from the face would hurt the
power of the image, which also explains why Lange had a darkroom assistant
remove the woman's other thumb, here, where she was holding the post so that
she could keep her other hand to her chin. All this manipulation, of course,
speaks to the fact that there is very little spontaneous in this iconic image
of so-called "documentary photography." It's supposed to communicate a candid
truth about the moment, but this is anything but candid. Whether that
diminishes its power is up to you. For me, being able to actually see the steps of
Lange's craft enhances her work, it gives the photograph a third dimension. Almost
as soon as it was developed, this photo took on a life of its own. After it was
published in a San Francisco newspaper, the government sent 20,000 pounds of
food to the migrant camp at Nipomo. Stryker
fell in love with it and sent it all across the country, after which it came
to define the Depression in the American consciousness, and on a deeper level
it became the archetypal image of struggling families in any era. A second
thought, a skilled photographer, a mother, her kids, and 10 minutes in 1936 that
will live forever. Next time you have an instinct to turn around, listen to it.
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