Since I was ill for much of the summer months I decided to spend my spare time reading about photography if I couldn’t actually go out and shoot. Fortunately there are a number of new and excellent books on photography out this year, and Daring to Look [1] is one of them (I’ll write about others in future posts).<\/p>\n
In Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn presents and analyzes Dorothea Lange’s 1939 work for Roy Stryker and the US Farm Security Administration (FSA). Unlike other retrospectives I’ve seen of Lange’s work, Spirn includes not only the portraits Lange is known for but the landscape images and field notes that she took as well. The result is a much more in-depth look at a body of work tremendous in scope, taken by a photographer of not only significant talent but also one with a tremendous social conscience and awareness. <\/p>\n
In this volume, Spirn documents Lange’s attempts to explain in words the context behind the photographs and how the two are arguably more powerful than the images or text alone. Here’s an excerpt from page 36:<\/p>\n
\nAlmost three decades after 1939, Beaumon Newhall, in a foreword to Lange’s American Country Woman<\/strong>, praised An American Exodus<\/strong> as “a bold experiment, pointing the way to a new medium, where words and pictures do not merely explain and illustrate: they reinforce one another to produce…the third effect. To read the photographs is to hear a consistent voice and point of view, but to read the words is to become attuned to diverse voices and points of view, both converging and conflicting, and hence to encounter awful conundrums. To read photographs and words together is to understand how the images’ narrative line connects the disparate texts and propels the reader, and to grasp how words complicate photographs by exposing multiple underlying meanings. To read those visual and verbal images together is to experience the passion in the photographs that counters, even subverts, the dispassionate moderating tone of the brief essay concluding each chapter. The impact is cumulative; if a single pair of image and caption or a set of facing pages seems to make a simple statement, all the words and photographs, taken together, pose a complex dilemma. As the reader progresses back and forth across the pages and chapters, the memory of images and words produces afterimages and echoes.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
In addition to her coupling of images and text (termed “general captions”), Lange also became known for her pairing and sequencing of images – there are a wealth of examples in this book.<\/p>\n
One item that struck me – in General Caption 70, on page 256, Lange writes about the migrant workers who have come to Nyssa, Oregon to work for the Amalgamated Sugar Company that processes beet sugar:<\/p>\n
\n35 per cent of the new people have come from the Dust Bowl. 27 families came from in and around Calloway, Nebraska, alone.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Interestingly, this is the same Calloway, Nebraska from which Charles W. Guildner made the images of cowboys and the cowboy life in his Lives of Tradition<\/em> portfolio, which was featured in issue 89<\/a> of Lenswork<\/a> magazine this past summer.<\/p>\n
[1] Anne Whiston Spirn (2008). Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s photographs and reports from the field. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, Illinois. ISBN 978-0-226-76985 (pbk). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Since I was ill for much of the summer months I decided to spend my spare time reading about photography if I couldn’t actually go out and shoot. Fortunately there are a number of new and excellent books on photography out this year, and Daring to Look [1] is one of them (I’ll write about others in future posts). In Daring to Look, Anne Whiston Spirn presents and analyzes Dorothea Lange’s 1939 work for Roy Stryker and the US Farm Security Administration (FSA). Unlike other retrospectives I’ve seen of Lange’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[56,55],"class_list":["post-167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","tag-anne-whiston-spirn","tag-dorothea-lange"],"yoast_head":"\n
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