Dorothea Lange and the Rise of Documentary Photography

Introduction to Documentary Photography

Life is documented daily, whether in newspaper photographs of world events, in feature magazines of faraway places, or in photo albums of family snapshots. Essentially, all photography is a documentary of whatever is being photographed, for whatever reason. Traditionally, however, the mention of documentary photography calls up familiar images from a few twentieth-century photographers — such as Ansel Adams, Walker Evans, Roy Stryker, Arthur Rothstein, and Dorothea Lange — whose photographs have not only documented culture but have become a part of the culture itself.

Photographs are often regarded by historians as a critical form of documentary evidence that enables past events to come to life, as if looking in a mirror. "Public and scholarly faith in the realism of the photographic image is grounded in a belief that a photograph is a mechanical reproduction of reality." Susan Sontag once said, "Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it."

Early History: From Daguerreotypes to Social Reform

Photographs first appeared in the United States in 1839 and quickly became popular in the country's growing metropolitan areas. America's first photographic image was the silver-plated, mirror-like object called a daguerreotype, named after its inventor Louis Daguerre. This process was complicated and time-consuming; a single daguerreotype plate might take as long as thirty minutes to expose. Moreover, exposure of the plate in the camera required subjects to remain motionless for several additional minutes to avoid a final image blurred beyond recognition. Due to these technological demands, early photographers rarely strayed far from their urban studios, where daguerreotypes were exposed, developed, and exhibited. Because early photographs were unique images, the only way to make and distribute inexpensive copies was through print processes such as lithography and engraving, in which the photographic image was redrawn by an artist.

Photography's popularity fostered numerous experiments, all aimed at making the entire photographic process cheaper, faster, and more portable. The introduction of ambrotypes and tintypes made possible the reproduction of paper prints from the photographic negative and, consequently, a wider circulation of images. By the Civil War, the daguerreotype and its descendants had become part of middle-class consumer culture. Documentary photography developed during this period and was often consigned by art critics to the realm of journalism — an association that persists to this day. This consignment implied that documentary photographers were mere recorders: skilled technicians, to be sure, but passive observers of the social scene and definitely not artists. Many documentary photographers accepted this characterization in order to burnish the perceived realism of their imagery, posing instead as fact-gatherers and denying any aesthetic or political agenda.

Early practitioners of documentary photography, such as Matthew Brady, nevertheless had no choice but to order the subject matter that fell within their photographic frame. Due to long exposure times, Brady and other photographers could not capture soldiers in action during the Civil War and had to be content photographing the remains left on battlefields. In the aftermath of the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg, photographer Alexander Gardner ordered that one of the fallen bodies be dragged forty yards and propped in a rocky corner, resulting in the image Rebel Sharpshooter in Devil's Den — a photograph that still commands attention despite the subsequent discovery of the photographer's manipulation.

By the end of the Civil War, photography had reached the West, where government and corporate sponsorship helped William Henry Jackson become one of the country's most prolific and adventurous photographers. Jackson's images were of monumental proportions, such as his famous photograph of Colorado's Mount of the Holy Cross. Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine, two urban photographers, then began to explore the inner city and thereby established documentary photography as a tool of social reform. Riis, a Danish immigrant and police reporter for the New York Tribune, is still revered for his late-nineteenth-century exposé of tenement conditions on New York City's Lower East Side, just as Lewis Hine is remembered for his pictorials of working men and women and his crusade against child labor during the Progressive Era. Both men shocked their contemporaries with dramatic images showing the human consequences of unchecked urban growth and industrial excess.

The Farm Security Administration Photography Project

By the last decade of the nineteenth century, new processes allowed photographs to be inexpensively reproduced in newspapers, magazines, and books, thus increasing the dissemination of documentary images. Prior to the turn of the twentieth century, pictures of the working poor were limited to portraits taken in studios, so the sensational impact of Riis's and Hine's work was no accidental by-product but rather the very essence of their photographic fieldwork.

Heir to the work of Riis and Hine, the Farm Security Administration Photographic Project (1935–1942) quickly surpassed the combined output of these two pioneers and is now recognized as the most famous of America's documentary projects. Beginning under the Resettlement Administration in 1935 and the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937, a group of about twenty men and women worked under the supervision of Roy E. Stryker to create a pictorial record of the impact of the Great Depression on the nation, primarily on rural Americans. Photography historian Alan Trachtenberg has noted that this project "was perhaps the greatest collective effort … in the history of photography to mobilize resources to create a cumulative picture of a place and time." Many of the thousands of photographs taken by FSA photographers were distributed by the agency to newspapers and magazines to build support for the rural programs of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. FSA photographer Arthur Rothstein once said, "It was our job to document the problems of the Depression so that we could justify the New Deal legislation that was designed to alleviate them."

FSA photographers crisscrossed the country to document the plight of Dust Bowl refugees, southern sharecroppers, migrant agricultural workers, and Japanese-Americans bound for internment camps in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. According to Stryker, the FSA's vast pictorial undertaking endeavored to introduce "Americans to America" — namely, the middle-class Americans who lived in cities far from the locales depicted in the images and who comprised the majority of readers of the newspapers and magazines in which the FSA pictures were reproduced. Under Stryker's directorship, the FSA photography unit employed a number of the finest photographers in America, including Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, and Dorothea Lange. The work of these photographers embodied a tension between the desire to document what was taking place and the desire to influence what was being done. The photographers had to walk a fine line between objective neutrality and subjective engagement, framing, lighting, and cropping images to achieve a desired effect. Some critics believed the FSA photographers went too far — "What you've got are not photographers … they're a bunch of sociologists with cameras" — while others defended the work as "pure record, not propaganda."

Dorothea Lange and 'Migrant Mother'

Of all the images taken during the FSA era, Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother is perhaps the most famous photograph taken during the Depression. This photograph, taken in California of a migrant woman and her children, was the defining picture of Lange's career. It illustrates the suffering, poverty, and misery — but also the strength and determination — of people during one of the worst eras in American history. Taken in 1936, Migrant Mother is one of the most reproduced images in American history.

In the February 1960 issue of Popular Photography, Lange recalled how she saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet:

"I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it."