Dorothea Lange Used Photography to Make an Ugly World Beautiful by Washington Post, Adapted by Newsela Staff on 04.15.20 Word Count 1,065 Level 1030L

Dorothea Lange used photography to make an ugly world beautiful By Washington Post, adapted by Newsela staff on 04.15.20 Word Count 1,065 Level 1030L

Image 1. "Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona" (November 1940) by Dorothea Lange. Photo: The Museum of Modern Art, New York

Dorothea Lange was an American photographer and photojournalist, best known for her work during the Great Depression.

On October 29, 1929, the American stock market crashed, causing the worst economic collapse in the history of the modern world, called the Great Depression. It lasted until the early 1940s. Banks and businesses closed and more than 15 million Americans became unemployed. To make things worse, in the 1930s, the region known as the Great Plains in the United States, where much of the country's wheat was growing, experienced a drought. Thousands of people were forced to leave in search of work. The government agency, the Farm Security Administration, hired Lange in 1935 to document this region of the country at this time.

The woman in Dorothea Lange's most famous photograph, often called simply "Migrant Mother," is, among other things, rather beautiful. She is tired but handsome. Lange's 1940 photograph, titled "Migratory Cotton Picker," opens the exhibition "Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures" at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. Bound Up With Words

The beauty of the subjects in her photographs is not often remarked on. Rather, these photographs are bound up with words, with their captions and with a larger cultural conversation about poverty and despair in America during the Depression and after. "Migrant Mother" was made in 1936 but was not known by that title until 1952. The woman in the image, Florence Owens Thompson, remained unnamed to the public until 1978. She is an icon of American suffering and perseverance, and she is also Cherokee, another word not added to the image until decades after it was taken.

It may seem obvious, even uninteresting, to have an exhibition about how words are attached to photographs. Words are tied to photographs all the time. Photography has been around for nearly 200 years. Yet, we have never been more suspicious and verbal in our relationship to pictures. What does this image show? Where was it made? Can I trust it?

That has not always been the case. Throughout the history of photography, there has been a contrary argument about words and images. A good photograph should not need explaining. If photography is art, and art is self-sufficient, then photographs should stand alone and communicate their meaning through the image, not its description.

Compelling Images

Lange made some of the most compelling images of the past 100 years. However, she had no problem with words. She would have been impatient with any discussion that considered photography as separate from the larger world.

"All photographs — not only those that are so called 'documentary' ... can be fortified by words," she said. Lange's images were often confrontational, part of a lifelong interest in social justice, fairness and decency. They needed to be defended against a lack of interest or disbelief.

Many of her photographs also appeared surrounded by words in such popular magazines as Life and Look. They also appeared in books known as phototexts, accompanied by poems or statements from the people in them. Lange also took extensive field notes while photographing. Working in the 1930s with her husband, the economist Paul Schuster Taylor, she contributed images to government reports documenting social conditions during the Depression.

Her images also inspired words from others, including John Steinbeck. In 1938, poet Archibald MacLeish used "Migrant Mother" in a phototext called "Land of the Free." It appears opposite a line from a poem he wrote to "illustrate" images made by photographers working for the Farm Security Administration and other government agencies.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. "Now we don't know," says the line, suggesting a creeping anxiety that had infected the American Dream.

Racial Erasure

Limiting oneself to the content of the image alone does not explain its truth any more than a good or bad caption. When "Migrant Mother" was reproduced in a bulletin for MoMA's first photography exhibition in 1940, it was printed much lighter than other versions so the woman appears not just white but pale. The printing feels like a racial erasure, with any hope of seeing her as Native American effectively whitewashed.

Thinking about photographs without words is essentially impossible. Ignoring the larger, word- based context of their appearance limits their richness.

The beauty of many of Lange's subjects, including Florence Owens Thompson, is not accidental. Lange began her career as a portrait photographer. She had an intuitive sense of what makes a face compelling. But the beauty also creates a spark, a desire to know more and ask questions of the image. The man in the 1940 "Cotton Picker," has a face that seems young and old at the same time, a contradiction that engages the mind.

Beauty, for Lange, was fundamental to photography. She was compulsive about finding images that spoke sharply, clearly and with purely visual power.

In one of the exhibition's most haunting photographs, "Tractored Out, Childress County, Texas," a lone house sits forlorn and abandoned in a field. The picture serves as a devastating image of the Dust Bowl, but it is also a beautifully made image.

A documentary film included in the MoMA exhibition shows Lange late in life as she prepared for a major compilation of her work. In the film, Lange says about photography, "I'm just really beginning to sense what's in this medium." The lack of confidence and modesty in that statement, made by one of the great photographers of that time, is touching. It also suggests her honest uncertainty about the tension between beauty and the purpose her photography was serving in documenting devastation.

Image Always Signified More

Lange once said, "The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera." The statement shows how she understood the dynamic between art and documentary value in her work. She could make images that are perfect and independent, but the image always signified more. The camera could help one see both beauty and ugliness in the world, refining our social and artistic vision.

There were plenty of photographers who feared that words might take you outside of the image. Lange understood that was exactly the point. A good photograph must deposit you in the world.

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com. Quiz

1 Which section from the article BEST explains why Dorothea Lange practiced documentary photography?

(A) Introduction [paragraphs 1-3]

(B) "Bound Up With Words"

(D) "Image Always Signified More"

2 The following sentence from the section "Compelling Images" helps to prove the claim that Dorothea Lange saw photography as a tool for social commentary.

She would have been impatient with any discussion that considered photography as separate from the larger world.

Which sentence from the section provides further support for the claim?

(A) "All photographs — not only those that are so called 'documentary' ... can be fortified by words," she said.

(B) Lange's images were often confrontational, part of a lifelong interest in social justice, fairness and decency.

(D) In 1938, poet Archibald MacLeish used "Migrant Mother" in a phototext called "Land of the Free."

3 How did Dorothea Lange's work affect other artists and writers during the Great Depression?

(A) Her photographs inspired others to create works about the fragility of the American Dream.

(B) Her images of the Depression contrasted strongly with many others' positive depictions of 1930s life.

(D) Her images convinced most other photographers to include captions along with their work.

4 According to the article, WHY did the Museum of Modern Art have an exhibition examining the role of words in Dorothea Lange's photography?

(A) because many artists today agree that the meaning of Lange's photographs has not been clearly explained

(B) because Lange's photography takes a clear position on the historic debate about how words are attached to images

(D) because the museum was contrasting Lange's Depresssion-era photographs with present-day documentary images

This article is available at 5 reading levels at https://newsela.com.