(light music)
- Americans tend to associate democracy
with free elections but
in the two centuries
since the American and the French
and the Haitian revolutions first tried
to institutionalize the proposition
that the people could govern themselves,
since then I think we've
learned that elections
are vital and irreplaceable but not enough
to guarantee democracy.
We've learned that the legal right to vote
isn't worth much if those eligible
are not in fact able to vote.
We've learned that
elections and legislation
can be bought,
that power located in wealth, inheritance,
racial advantage,
education and social status
can create policies
which affect us directly
but are not accountable to the electorate.
A friend of mine insists
that everyone in the world
should be able to vote
in the U.S. elections
since what the U.S. does
affects everyone in the world.
With that kind of challenge, there's been
a couple of centuries of attempts
both in thought and in practice
to try and expand the notion of democracy
and understand what could make it real.
Probably the best known
expansion of that sort
involved what Europeans
call social democracy
which is a politics of
regulating capitalism
so as to protect workers and consumers
and to guarantee to all a living standard
that permits participation
in democratic politics.
European Democrats often call this goal
social citizenship and think of the poor
or otherwise disadvantaged
as the excluded,
a label which reminds us I think
that political citizenship depends
on at least a minimum level
of socio-economic well-being.
But less well known have been
the theoretical and practical
development of what I am
calling cultural democracy.
I'm thinking when I say
this not only of fine art,
but also of the vernacular representation
of what we might call the demos,
as part of democracy.
And also, culture in the
anthropological sense,
of social assumptions and practices.
A democratic culture
would reflect the idea
that citizens have the self-respect
and the confidence to
trust their own ability
to make sound political judgments
and equally important,
to respect that ability in others.
The aspect of cultural
democracy I focus on here
is its egalitarian side,
its rejection of hierarchy.
This kind of democracy
requires that citizenship
has to be more than legal.
Like democracy,
citizenship is one of those
powerful historical words that rose
from the overthrow of
monarchy and aristocracy.
It designates self-government
rather than subjection
and it opens the way
to a republican polity
in which everyone is capable
of political decision-making.
To the extent that citizenship
in Franklin Roosevelt's
New Deal has been examined,
the emphasis has usually
been on the establishment
of social entitlements,
government economic help
to those who need it,
government responsibility for
protecting the environment,
workers and consumers' rights,
and a sturdy set of public institutions
ranging from schools to post
offices to electric power.
But the period is not often recognized
as contributing markedly
to cultural or political citizenship.
Especially in post-World War II America,
when critiques of inequality have so often
focused on race and sex discrimination,
New Deal treatment of people
of color and White women
seems poor at best.
In the 20th Century, two
major social movements
extended the suffrage for the first time,
the Women's Rights Movement,
culminating in the Women's
Suffrage Amendment,
and the Civil Rights Movement,
which created the Voting Rights Act.
Neither of those movements advanced much
during the New Deal.
Consider that in the 1930s,
somewhere around at least
75% of African-Americans
were legally disfranchised
and effectively deprived
of even minimal due process rights.
Consider that Japanese, Chinese,
Indian and Filipino Americans
were not even eligible for naturalization.
That Mexican-Americans were
being treated as aliens
even when they were legally citizens.
White women could legally
be excluded from juries
and had to seek husbands'
permission to get credit.
The fact that FDR appointed
the first woman to the cabinet
did not produce much in
the way of gains for women.
Employment policy, emergency relief
and public works projects
explicitly discriminated against women.
Nevertheless, I wanna
expand this appraisal
of the New Deal today by
considering its contribution
to cultural democracy,
especially in the arts.
I'm not so much referring
to government employment
of artists, although that
was extremely important.
Rather, I want to ask you
to think about a qualitative change
in artistic form and content,
in literature, theater,
music and the visual arts.
New Deal arts reinvigorated
an older, romantic, inclusive
populist nationalism
and attached it as never before
to a democratic politics,
and by that I mean both small D democratic
and large D Democratic.
Photographer Dorothea
Lange, I would argue,
was not only a superb practitioner
of this cultural democracy,
but in many ways its
most perfect exemplar,
demonstrating in her medium
its most heroic achievements
while confronting directly
some of its limitations.
Now one could connect Lange
with many earlier American artists
but I wanna be content here
to mention just one, Walt Whitman.
And I quote,
"Did you too old friend,
"suppose democracy was only for elections,
"for politics, and for a party name?
"I say democracy is only
of use that it may pass on
"and come to its flower
and fruit in manners,
"in the highest forms of
interaction between people
"and their beliefs.
"I say that democracy can never
prove itself beyond cavil,
"until it founds and luxuriantly grows
"its own forms of art,
poems, schools, theology,
"displacing all that exists,
"or that has been produced anywhere
"in the past, under opposite influences."
Whitman actually called his ideas
spiritual democracy and I actually think
this is an expression
with which Dorothea Lange
would have been entirely comfortable.
The essence, I think,
of the Whitman-Lange vision of democracy
was one of insisting on the citizenship
of the common man.
Let me quote from Whitman
just a tiny bit more.
"Through the many long dumb voices,
"voices of the interminable
generations of slaves,
"voices of prostitutes
and of deformed persons,
"voices of thieves and dwarfs,
"and of the rights of them
that others are down upon."
Just as Whitman used a high art form
to sing the common man,
so did Lange take her elite
portrait photography practice
into the fields of Mississippi
and the San Joaquin Valley.
She was radically more democratic
than her artistic predecessors.
She escaped the racism of her age
to a remarkable degree.
She was no feminist.
But her freedom from gender constraints
was equally remarkable.
I will not claim that
her vision was adequate
to what we need today
but it marks a fruitful
point of departure.
To a startling degree,
popular understanding of the Depression,
I have learned, derives
from visual images,
and among them Dorothea Lange's
were the most influential.
I have now had the
experience several times
of asking my students, young students,
what are their visual
images of the Depression.
Many of them spontaneously come up
with a description of that picture.
Although many do not know her name,
her pictures live on in the subconscious
of virtually anyone in the United States
who has any concept of
that economic disaster.
They not only formed our
collective historical understanding
and abide in our collective memory,
but they also exerted great
force in their own time.
Unlike Whitman, Lange
was happily harnessed
to a political party
and pleased that her
pictures could rally support
for New Deal programs.
But in so doing, I think
they also helped to create
an expansion of American Democracy.
Now photography critics have
sometime criticized Lange
as the most emotional of photographers,
the most attuned to personal stories.
A characterization quite loaded
with gendered assumptions
and meanings, and often
quite accurately so.
Her vision has been treated
explicitly or implicitly
as natural or instinctive,
but I want to argue rather
that the evidence marks her
as an artistic and political intellectual
working systematically toward refining
the emotional and political
communicative power
of her photography.
Her best known work was done
for the Farm Security Administration,
one of those charmed
initiatives of the New Deal
that blossomed into something far more
than its originators intended.
Rexford Tugwell, as
Undersecretary of Agriculture,
had the idea
to document rural conditions
through photography
and hired photography
enthusiast, Roy Stryker,
to create such a project
within the Resettlement Administration
which was later renamed the
Farm Security Administration.
Starting in 1935, Stryker assembled
a group of photographers,
numbering about a dozen at any one moment,
who collectively combined
excellent photography
with passionate Democratic sympathies.
Expanding their mission
until it became a visual encyclopedia
of rural work and life,
they produced by one
estimate 272,000 pictures
by the time the project
was abolished in 1942.
Lange, however, found her way
to documentary photography
quite independently.
Between 1919 and 1935, she
was an extremely successful
portrait photographer in San Francisco.
Her clientele numbering
the among the artistic
and cultural and philanthropic
elite of the city.
She was married to a
leading West Coast artist,
and she socialized in
Bohemian artistic circles.
Her crowd was what we would
today call socially liberal,
but not particularly
political in orientation.
As the Depression deepened
the social movements
among the poor, her own
activist personality
and to say that Lange
was not a passive person
would be an extraordinary understatement,
her own personality I think
made her portrait studio
work seem confining.
She ventured out into the
streets of San Francisco
to photograph homeless men
sleeping on park benches,
crowds lining up at relief stations,
demonstrations in pitched
battles with police.
Paul Taylor, a progressive
agricultural economist,
on the faculty here at
UC-Berkeley hired her
for the California Emergency
Relief Administration in 1935
and then recommended her to the FSA.
Roy Stryker immediately recognized
the power of her pictures
and hired her instantaneously.
Lange married Paul Taylor in 1935
and in all her work from then on,
her strategy, her
sensibility, were indebted
to his political intellectual approach
so his perspective becomes
a part of this story.
Taylor was quintessentially a progressive,
one of the most progressive
of the progressives.
An economist trained by John R. Commons
and his followers at the
University of Wisconsin,
Taylor's analyses were
structural and institutional.
He rejected the emphasis on moral fault
and the need for moral
rehabilitation among the poor
and saw them as primarily
hard-working honorable victims
of their economic environment.
He saw through the myth
that employers and workers
could bargain individually in equality.
He supported unions.
He believed that the state
should regulate the labor market.
Like other progressive reformers,
he did not believe that
objectivity required
that social scientists
should remain neutral
with respect to policy matters.
On the contrary.
Precisely because he believed that
policy should flow directly
from reliable data,
it was important, he thought, for scholars
to follow the logic of their findings,
to actually make policy recommendations
and then to advocate actively
for those recommendations.
He also cared to present
research, excessively,
so that it could reach a broad public.
He wrote for Paul
Kellogg's Survey Graphic,
a magazine of and by social reformers
with a format something like
that of The Nation today,
except with pictures.
This is a picture of Paul Taylor
interviewing Mexican migrant workers
in a labor camp in the Coachella Valley.
That magazine convinced
Taylor that photographs
could send strong messages
long before he met Dorothea Lange.
In fact, he had been carrying a camera
and making pictures since 1919.
In 1927, when he
undertook a massive survey
of Mexican immigration into the U.S.,
he made photographs part of his data.
So he was thrilled when
he saw Lange's work.
The FSA Rural Documentation Project
put its photographers on the road,
sometimes for months at a time.
Taylor sometimes traveled with Lange
and sometimes she worked
with other assistants.
Rarely alone, since she
was not only a small woman,
but also slightly disabled
from childhood polio,
and because the equipment
she carried usually weighed
well over 50 pounds.
The excursions were grueling.
She traveled repeatedly
through the Imperial
and San Joaquin Valleys,
photographing migrant farmworkers
and Dust Bowl refugees in
the scorching heat of summers
before air conditioning.
She moved throughout the Deep South,
braving Mississippi and
Alabama White hostility
as she photographed
sharecroppers and wage laborers
growing cotton and tobacco
and distilling turpentine.
In the summer of 1936,
she logged 17,000 miles.
She climbed on top of
her old station wagon
to photograph when necessary.
She slept in cheap motels,
developed film in motel
bathrooms with no ventilation,
worried, constantly, that the
heat would damage her film.
Arduous work, yes, but
thankless sacrifice, no.
On the contrary, the FSA
photographers would remember
this period as the best of their lives.
After marrying in the morning,
Taylor and Lange went
out to work in the field
in the afternoon.
This was not unromantic.
But for those people
in that place and time,
it was a part of their romance.
They felt themselves to be
a part of a social movement.
Hundreds, probably thousands
of artists, photographers,
prominent among them,
tried to fuse their work,
with progressive political
activism in the 1930s.
Within this movement,
the FSA was a family,
intensifying the feelings of
the longing and brotherhood.
Roy Stryker was a good father,
praising and admonishing
his children, fighting for their wages,
and the ever newer equipment they demanded
while protecting their freedom of artistic
and political expression when he could,
reining them in when he
thought it was necessary
to keep the FSA afloat.
The optimism and passion
supported by the FSA
strengthened an orientation
that Lange already showed.
She turned her camera
outward, never inward.
I have not found that she
ever made a self-portrait,
which is quite unusual
among photographers.
She had no doubts about the
reality and the stability
of the world outside herself.
She had no discomfort in
considering her FSA work
propaganda, I'm quoting from Lange now:
"Everything is propaganda
for what you believe in,
"actually, isn't it?
"I don't see that it could be otherwise.
"The harder and the more
deeply you believe in anything
"the more in a sense
you're a propagandist.
"Conviction, propaganda, faith.
"I don't know but I have never been able
"to come to the conclusion
those are bad words."
Yet her work wasn't
self-abnegation either,
at a time when photographers
found it difficult
to earn a living, even
without a depression,
these fortunate ones working for the FSA
got a living wage and free
film, developing and printing.
Then the FSA distributed these
photographs free of charge
to magazines, organizations,
government agencies
and even individuals, and
Lange's were the most popular.
The photographer's assignment
was to document the need
for Farm Security Administration programs
and Lange at first photographed
migrant workers camps,
alternatively mired in
mud or layered with dust,
she pictured filthy water supplies
and children covered with flies.
But soon she fell back on her strengths.
Always a portrait photographer,
she turned toward the poor the same eye
she had previously
directed toward the rich.
On the left is one of her FSA photographs.
On the right is one of her
early studio photographs.
She made portraits of farmworkers
within the same visual
conventions used in studios,
but the change in subject matter
made them at that time
unconventional, startling, gripping.
Other FSA photographers were influenced
and a new style was being pioneered
by the most unexpected of style makers,
the federal government.
Lange's forte was documenting
poverty and injustice
in pictures that were at
the same time beautiful.
They gave the viewer pleasure,
along with education.
Her designs and images were not radical
but comfortably inside the vernacular,
even commercial and Protestant
religious visual culture.
Her aesthetic so grounded
in the traditional
that the pictures could
be easy, satisfying,
even as they showed suffering.
Here we have a portrait of,
taken later actually,
of a grandfather and his son
in one of the Japanese internment camps,
and one of the studio portraits she did,
this is the composer, Ernest Bloch
Her subjects are never ugly,
never repellent, never wretched.
In this respect, her work,
like that of the FSA as a whole,
was Whitman-esque.
When Whitman wrote of the common man,
he frequently began
what I call cataloging,
listing each member of
the common (mumbles),
honorifically, let me
read just another section
from Whitman I'm sure you all know.
"I hear America singing.
"The varied carols I hear.
"Those of mechanics, each one singing his
"as it should be blithe and strong,
"The carpenter singing his as
he measures his plank or beam,
"The mason singing his as
he makes ready for work,
"The delicious singing of the mother,
"or the young wife at work,
"or the girl sewing and washing,
"Each singing what belongs
to her and to none else."
The new Dell poet Carl
Sandburg used the same device,
"hog butcher for the world,
"tool maker, stacker of
wheat, player with railroads
"the nation's freight handler."
Cataloging in fact was a virtual trope
of the 1930s Popular Front style.
When Mike Gold, editor of The New Masses,
was calling for work from worker writers,
this is a quote from his call
describing what he wanted.
"Letters from hobos,
peddlers, small town atheists,
"school teachers, revelations
by rebel chamber maids
"and night club waiters.
"The sobs of driven stenographers,
"the wrath of miners."
Lange's FSA work was exactly
this kind of catalog.
In her pictures we meet the sharecropper,
the unemployed at the relief office,
the men sleeping in the parks,
the children picking cotton,
the children minding babies,
the nursing mother,
families walking the highways,
the young men putting up lean-tos
from the backs of their old jalopies.
A catalog of honor.
One reason that her
subjects are so often lovely
is that Lange believed in
making flattering portraits.
She practiced a photography
of collaboration
with her subjects.
She was quite slow to ever
adopt the 35 millimeter camera
and she preferred view
cameras with large plate film
which were much slower.
She often used a tripod.
So when she left the studio,
it took her a long time to set up.
She avoided flash bulbs
because of their impact on subjects.
She particularly rejected
the snapshot style
not to mention a device
beloved by Ben Shahn
who also worked for the FSA,
which is what's called a
right angle lens finder.
This is a device in which it may appear
that I'm taking a picture of someone here
but I'm actually taking
a picture of Harry.
She conversed with her
subjects when she could.
She told them about herself
and asked about them
because, she said, she
needed them to relax
into their natural body language
or they wouldn't be able to hold the pose
and without it she couldn't
make a revealing picture.
Because her portraits were collaborative,
Lange believed that her
subjects had a right
to expect flattering results.
Now associating the poor with beauty
was a democratic assertion.
These handsome paupers
could be said to argue
a New Deal analysis of the Depression.
Relief boss Harry Hopkins' approach,
refusing to search for
the causes of poverty
and individual character
rested on the premise
that the crisis was structural,
economic and social.
The occupants of the nation
needed structural repair,
not temporary shelter or
plaster patches or a paint job.
Even the dwellings that looked
well-tended were fragile.
Conversely, even the
disheveled and worn-down
might have strong
foundations and resilience.
To subvert centuries of blaming the poor
and to identify them as deserving
required showing that they worked hard,
that they maintained good morals,
that they behaved with restraint.
One of Lange's visual metaphors
for this discipline was order.
A composition both aesthetically
and morally reassuring.
Here we have a photograph on the bottom
of a sharecropper's house,
a photograph on the top of a sharecropper
who is cleaning his shoes as he prepares
to go into town on a Sunday.
Her pictures are often
classically framed like these,
often centered, carefully composed,
their backgrounds even restful.
Her many maternalist shots
of mothers and children represent perhaps
the ultimate symbol of the human order,
here maintained despite economic disorder.
Lange's women have kept order,
you see in the pictures,
even in their families'
camps by the sides of roads.
Her sharecroppers are
usually well turned out.
Victims needed to be attractive
if they were to evoke sympathy,
not to mention, generosity.
There was censorship here.
Lange's self-censorship.
She simply would not make pictures
of unappealing people,
unless she intended them as what I call
her bad guy pictures,
which I'll show you a few of later.
But she also made people appealing.
Her subjects almost
always seem respectable,
self-confident.
Their good looks derive from
the way she framed them,
giving them the dignity of centrality
with a beautiful frame
and the way she drew from them
a strong gaze and composure.
She typically shot from below,
partly because when
she didn't use a tripod
she held a camera at her waist
and she was short
but also she did so deliberately
in order to enhance her subject's stature.
Some of her portraits
are almost statuesque.
But Lange faced a visual double blind.
If the people looked too good,
if they didn't look like victims,
then how could we justify this enormous
amount of spending on New Deal programs?
Alternatively, if the
people were represented
as totally worn out,
physically and spiritually,
like the land, and the economic order,
then what good could the
government possibly do?
Part of Lange's solution
was making portraits
without abstracting people
from their environment.
She retained a tremendous amount
of social information in
many of her portraits.
She showed them as
trapped but not defective.
Her subjects were exhausted but resilient,
oppressed but not fragile.
She provided context
without erasing her
subject's individuality
and reducing them to types.
Since poverty is rarely beautiful,
were these attractive
portraits of the poor
therefore inauthentic or
at least unrepresentative?
Lange was making images I think
not only of injustice
but also of potential.
The potential of these marginalized people
is basic to the possibility of democracy.
Lange's approach in this respect
is not completely dissimilar
to Soviet Socialist realism.
In that ideology, the romanticizing
of Socialist man and woman was justified
by the premise that the art was true
to the Socialist future
and would help build the Socialist future.
But fundamental to Lange's vision,
both sensory and imaginative,
was something entirely missing
in Socialist realist art.
Her vision of people as multi-faceted,
troubled, conflicted, even enigmatic.
It is this attraction to complexity
that allowed her to
achieve emotional power
while stopping short, I
think, of sentimentality.
To evoke empathy while abjuring
or at least modifying pity.
Another New Deal artist,
playwright Arthur Miller,
could have been speaking
for Lange in his 1949 essay,
"Tragedy and the Common Man."
And let me quote just a
tiny bit from Arthur Miller.
"The common man is as apt
the subject for tragedy
"as kings were.
"The discovery of the
moral law, which is what
"the enlightenment of tragedy consists of,
"is not the discovery of
some abstract or metaphysical
"quantity but it is a condition of life,
"a condition in which
the human personality
"is able to flower and realize itself.
"It is time, I think, that
we who are without kings,
"took up this bright thread of our history
"and followed it to the only place
"it can possibly lead,
"the heart and spirit of the average man."
Sometimes Lange made her
subject stand for every man
through her attention to the body.
As the critic Sally Stein has showed,
some of her most revealing
portraits show no faces,
only backs.
This kinetic awareness
contributed to a muscularity
in the pictures which
makes her subjects stolid.
They were citizens, reliable, durable.
Their material substantialness
was the visual embodiment
of the New Deal version
of populist nationalism.
The cherished belief,
or was it really a hope,
that the common man not only worked hard,
not only deserved respect
but also possessed
the ability to function as
a citizen in a democracy.
Even a sharecropper could govern.
Lange's body sensitivity may have derived
from her own body.
Her lower right leg shortened by polio,
somewhat wizened her foot inflexible,
for she made many pictures of feet.
But she was actually less
interested in disability
than in ability.
Less in weakness than in strengths.
In this respect, her
pictures occasionally partook
of the international Popular Front style
of monumental robust, rugged
salt of the Earth peasants and workers
which we find displayed not only in Soviet
but ironically also in Nazi iconography.
In Lange's magisterial
vision, though I think,
the bodies were not only
strong, but eloquent.
Elegant in gesture, and in posture.
The men were as graceful as the women.
Her male portraits are less brawny
than the Socialist Realist norm
or the man in the WPA murals.
She remarkably often shows
men with small children
yet the men are often also sexy.
The men's bodies showing
the lean self-confidence
she found so enduring
in her first husband.
Her female subjects were often fetching,
the destitute women walking
the highway often well-dressed.
Her subjects smiled, they even laugh.
They had vitality, another
quality of citizenship.
Their vitality was also represented
in their industriousness.
Lange mainly showed people at work,
some of her greatest portraits
show people planting,
weeding, hoeing, picking, weighing cotton,
distilling turpentine,
digging furrows, et cetera.
And of course caring for children.
I recently had the opportunity
to discuss the work
of Diane Arbus, also a
portrait photographer,
in comparison to Lange's.
Arbus' sardonic, ironic,
often disdainful portraits
always show people at
home, in leisure moments,
often in bedrooms, never at work,
where presumably it
might've been more difficult
for Arbus to maintain her critique
of the vacuous and the ridiculous.
Lange by contrast did not
often enter peoples' homes.
Unlike, say, her colleague Walker Evans.
And certainly she would
not enter their bedrooms.
Constrained of course by her
distaste for flash bulbs,
but also I am certain by reticence.
Her interest was in a
sense primarily public,
especially in this New Deal period.
Now honoring work brought with it
the imagery of the good rural life.
And the idealized economic organization
was that of family farm,
absorbed no doubt from Taylor.
Later in her FSA work
when Stryker offered up
more positive pictures
in his efforts to defend the FSA,
against charges of anti-Americanism,
she served up contented farm
mothers and grandmothers,
proudly displaying their
produce and their pies.
Taylor's anger at California
growers' exploitation
of a farm proletariat
and of their robbery of taxpayers
through immense publicly
funded irrigation projects.
These angers made it
impossible for him to accept
that small farms could not be the future
out here in the dry West.
If Lange doubted his family farm utopia,
her work did not reflect those doubts.
Even in the 1940s,
when she was photographing
defense industry
and the multi-racial urban
California it created,
she continued to make small farm images,
unrealistic as they were.
Her downtrodden subjects
are also citizen-like
in that they are deliberative, thinking.
In her portraits,
whether of San Francisco's
eminent philanthropists
in the 1920s
or of sharecroppers and migrant
farmworkers in the '30s,
the subjects are somewhat reserved
and almost always
thoughtful, even meditative.
They don't expose themselves.
They're not simple.
They seem to be pondering something,
possibly in a conversation
with the photographer or someone else.
They're organic intellectuals.
She worked particularly expertly
at showing people in
connection with each other.
These insights too often
arose from using bodies
to show relationships.
Noticing the ways that people touched,
or held their bodies,
in possibly unconscious
connection with each other.
She particularly liked conversations,
whether idle, engaged, or tense.
Clearly Lange was attracted
to an active republican
rather than a passive
liberal version of democracy.
Now the imagery that
I've identified thus far,
attractiveness, respectability,
solidity, vitality,
composure, reserved,
thoughtfulness, deliberativeness.
These qualities work to
characterize citizenship
at a time of a new political opening
to consider what the individual's relation
to the state might be.
What rights the least
advantaged might claim
and thus what citizenship could become.
Lange's citizens epitomized
a political sensibility
that I labeled populist nationalism.
I'm aware that nationalism is not a label
often attached to the U.S., an
absence that remains for some
one of the lingering blind spots
of American exceptionalism
and more recently
of America great power myopia.
Even critics of U.S.
expansionism and foreign policy
I have noticed, are more
likely to speak of imperialism
than of nationalism.
This omission I think keeps some aspects
of American political culture hidden,
particularly the way in which even
democratizing impulses and struggles
have been rooted in assumptions about
and loyalties to the imagined
community called American.
Like many democratic reform
movements and ideologies,
this New Deal version
constructed American history
and American character as
not only politically unique
but politically superior.
The U.S. was founded in democracy
and the population had a
special talent for democracy.
Henry Wallace who was
Secretary of Agriculture
and then Vice President
while Lange did this work,
rooted America's progress
toward ever greater democracy
as foreshadowed in the Old Testament.
Franklin Roosevelt's ability
to speak to the common man,
so as to signal his confidence
in the ordinary citizen
has become legendary.
But he was doing this
even as his administration
relied on expert management
and central control.
Within the New Deal,
Lange's orientation was
clearly toward the former.
Although hired to document
and thereby support
the work done by the FSA,
she was noticeably less
interested in its projects,
than in the people whose
needs justified them.
Lange's populism was also
several degrees less masculinist
than earlier versions.
She shared the idealization
of a sexual division of labor
that located women's primary
destiny with children,
something we find often
in New Deal painting.
But while almost every New Deal policy
rested on family wage assumptions,
and strengthened the
male breadwinner family,
Lange's democratic
ideology visualized women
as self-reliant.
Her resistance to infantilizing
dependent femininity
in women was parallel
by an interest in men
who failed to embody
dominating masculinity.
While populist heroes
were typically independent
and unwavering, she was drawn to men
who had been reduced by the Depression,
who had lost confidence,
men who slumped and brooded.
She photographed men and
women with equal tenderness
but she didn't allow her
audience to forget about women,
there they were, insistently as prominent,
as hard-working, as politically alive
and every bit as beautiful
and dignified as the men.
Never cute, never fey.
A mistiness that had characterized
some of her studio portraiture,
disappeared entirely.
Now America's populist
nationalism also includes
an enduring stream of racism.
This stream is by no means just a flaw
in a package of good intentions.
Often it has been right at the very basis,
the very essence of the American identity.
And nowhere more than in the West,
where the very term
American became a synonym
for White, where U.S. citizens of color
were for long periods of time transformed
into aliens by Whites.
A few anti-racist New Deal administrators,
such as Harry Hopkins, Harold
Ickes, Mary McLeod Bethune,
tried to use federal programs
to erode racial domination
but most New Deal programs
excluded groups characterized
as non-White and failed to challenge
the political power bases
of racial domination.
This suppression is usually characterized
as racism but it needs to be
understood also as nationalism.
The Depression, for example,
gave rise to several programs
of deporting or as they
called it, repatriating
at least two of these alien
groups, Mexicans and Filipinos.
These policies were part
of what is usually
labeled American populism.
Lange's nationalism, by
contrast, was not only inclusive,
but specifically anti-racist.
She took more pictures of people of color
than any other FSA photographer
until Gordon Parks was hired in the 1940s.
She had little control
over which of her pictures
were distributed to the media.
Not only was the FSA's
selection only a fraction
of her work but the fraction it shows
was not representative and
was overwhelmingly White
in contradistinction to the balance
of the pictures she took.
But my argument is not so much
quantitative as qualitative.
Her photographs I think
drew people of color
into citizenship, into Americanness.
And this vision might have had more effect
on the culture had these pictures
been distributed in
proportion to those of Whites.
The project of undermining
the equation of Whiteness
with Americanness reached its
fullest expression I think
in her series of photographs
on the Japanese internment.
Despite the obstacle course
that the Army constructed
in its efforts to keep her
away from the internees
and the camps,
Lange produced a devastating
visual indictment.
A body of work that I plan
to address in another project
and I'm afraid there's
just not time for here.
Unlike most New Deal policies
which were jerry-built
so as not to offend
Southern White racists,
Lange actually tried to expose racism
as a relationship and as a structure.
This particular image
of a Mississippi plantation
owner and his croppers
is one of her most successful,
I think, in exposing power,
because it so precisely
aligns spatial relations
to power relations.
Bodies to economic structures.
Lange's work often found
visual spatial expressions
of social relationships,
both hierarchical and egalitarian.
She actually tried to sell
Roy Stryker on a project
that might have broken through
the limitations she felt with this
and would certainly have pushed
against these limitations.
She proposed a photography
series that would use
pictures and words to show the poll tax
and its disfranchisement
of so many Southerners,
White and Black.
She was deliberately
working, as you can see,
in her book, "American Exodus"
to relate political freedom
to economic freedom.
Stryker would however have
none of this poll tax idea.
He thought, possibly
correctly, that it would make
powerful Southern democratic politicians
determined to crush the FSA.
Yet in other ways
Lange's work was limited,
not only by the political
imperatives of her employers
but also by her craft.
How do you make social and
economic structures visible?
How do you show the enemies of democracy?
Lange did produce these
pictures that I call
pictures of bad guys
in several embodiments.
The crude Southern overseer,
the California sheriff's thug.
In the 1934 Longshore general
strike in San Francisco,
she made distinctly
unflattering pictures of cops
as opposed to demonstrators.
She made some very poignant
pictures of farmers
trying to persuade bankers
and Department of Agriculture
officials to grant loans
or to delay foreclosures.
These bodies and these relationships
are not egalitarian or democratic
but they are also ambiguous.
Without words explaining their context,
they aren't specific enough
to embody a critique.
Moreover, most of her
bad guys were of course
only the managers, the
agents and not the sources
of power and policy.
She could show a racist but she
couldn't easily show racism.
Perhaps portrait photography
simply would not allow
exploration of structures
and large-scale relations of power.
Reaching for deeper critiques
led some politically
committed photographers
in other times and places to try montage,
surrealism, images of
violence and atrocities,
performed and constructed scenes.
Lange by contrast stuck with
the challenge of revealing
what was already visible.
Her favorite saying which
she repeated so often
that at one point I
thought it was something
that she had written but it isn't.
It was, "a camera is a
tool for teaching people
"how to see without a camera."
Perhaps this failure
has to do with the fact
that the most completely
hegemonic relations of power
are simply not visible.
Still her own politics,
which was indistinguishable
from her character,
also kept her from exploring
these fundamental relations of power.
Her ability to visualize
these relationships
was also truncated, I would argue,
by her own reluctance
to identify an enemy.
She did pull her punches.
Other FSA photographers like for example,
Esther Bubley, turned their
cameras critically on the rich,
to great success as Lange did not.
It was if she was emulating the confusion
of one of her White sharecroppers
who said to her in
explaining his helplessness,
"If we fight, who we gonna whoop?"
She actually knew the
answer to that question.
She knew perfectly well who owned the huge
San Joaquin Valley agribusinesses.
Paul Taylor knew more about
them than anyone else.
But she did not try to incorporate them
and their work into her work.
In regard to identifying
and investigating an enemy,
Lange, like many New
Dealers, was a progressive,
both politically and temperamentally.
Like the New Deal as a whole,
like its father, FDR,
like her husband, Paul Taylor,
she preferred a positive
to an adversary spin.
She sought win-win solutions.
To his final days, Paul
Taylor thought injustice arose
as a result of failure to make use
of non-partisan expert solutions.
Despite his sympathy for workers,
he failed to understand how
the very New Deal policies
he most appreciated were dependent
on the grassroots social movements
that the New Deal had somewhat
inadvertently supported,
such as the CIO, or the Townsend Movement.
Lange appears to have been instinctively
on the workers' side in conflicts
like the 1933 Mexican-led
strikes in the field,
or the 1935 Longshoremen's strike,
but she deferred to Paul
Taylor on these matters
and he took up a
perspective similar to that
of John Steinbeck's
novel "In Dubious Battle"
which described both sides in the strike,
both the growers
and the Farmworkers Union as unscrupulous.
Still, her own work, shows
that she did not wish to dwell
on class conflict let alone encourage it.
She was an optimistic not an angry person.
She was disposed toward
unity not division.
Her pictures of conflict are flimsy
compared to her better work.
Her style was about
heroism, rather than rage.
Her pictures did not exhort activism.
They are so calm, her
subjects so contained,
that they seem to advocate patience.
In the New Deal political context,
this meant arguing against federal policy
from the inside, as Taylor did,
not the outside.
In this respect, Lange's sensibility,
did not fit into the political left,
unlike those many of her close friends.
It was precisely her
organizationally non-aligned position
her distance from the Left, I would argue,
that allowed her not only
to perceive but to protest
the gross injustice of
the Japanese internment
while the Communist-oriented Left
was justifying and supporting it.
Lange was one of America's
great democratic artists.
That much of her work was
part of a collective project
made it only bigger.
Just as in her radical
imagining of democracy,
all would gain from being
part of larger communities.
Besides all art arises
from historical social
and political constructions
of what we see.
For many reasons,
possibly her modest background,
her mother's great competence,
her experiences as a
child with a disability,
the anti-authoritarian
artists she socialized with
in the '20s,
the influence of Paul Taylor,
the galvanizing social struggles
and hopefulness of the 1930s.
But above all her own
formidable discipline
and intelligence, for whatever reasons,
she made democracy visible.
Thanks.
(audience applauding)
- [Woman] Yes, would
you be able to connect
the social portraiture
of the Depression era
with later politics of visual culture
as in the Civil Rights Movement,
Vietnam War protests and such?
- Well I guess there are
two ways to answer this.
One is, in terms of personal connections,
Lange died in 1965, which
means that she was alive
long enough to begin to understand
the tremendous significance
of the Civil Rights Movement
and in fact there were
several quite important
photographers around SNCC
anyway who considered
her their mentor and who
actually had advised them
and actually contributed money
to their photography projects.
But at another level, I
think you're also asking
about the nature of the photography
and I think most critics
would make a distinction
between documentary photography
and photojournalism.
Lange was never a
photographer who captured
things in process.
She was not a Cartier-Bresson.
She didn't use,
she obviously experimented some
but by and large her work was always slow.
So that is one aspect of photojournalism.
But I also think that her temperament
would not have taken her there,
because she really was
such a painter-like person
in the way that she wanted
to set up every shot.
- [Man] You used the
term cultural democracy.
It makes me a little nervous
because I always think
that there's always a
tension to some degree
between aesthetics and politics.
At this time, I mean this
is a period where there
was on the one hand, in many art forms,
a radicalism of form that was,
that you don't tend to see
in documentary photography,
but that kind of radicalism
was different from political radicalism,
sometimes in tension with it,
dissolved the kind of socialist content
that you're talking about.
So I'm wondering to what
extent that kind of tension
was in the milieu of Dorothea Lange?
- The photography critic Sally Stein,
who knows more about
Lange than anyone else,
just does brilliant work,
has an absolutely stunning article,
which is just about exactly
what you're talking about,
seen from another way, it's entitled,
"Why was there no photo
montage in the United States?"
'Cause at exactly this time,
that Lange is doing this,
and even in the '20s
when she's doing her portrait photography,
in Europe, and especially
coming from Eastern Europe,
you have people like
Moholy-Nagy and these people
who are breaking up the images
and looking at things in
a way that really question
that which is visible
as a very basic question
which Lange never questioned.
There's absolutely no question in my mind,
and I should say that this article,
which I highly recommend,
and I can tell you where to find it,
argues something that
I think is really right
about something very deep in
American political culture
and in the conservatism of
American political culture
and I would add to
that, in the religiosity
of American political culture,
that meant that you didn't
find this much here.
I think it relates furthermore
to something else which has
yet to be well-explained,
I think, and that is the
uncanny similarity that you see
between American, Soviet
and Nazi production
of various kinds of art in the '30s.
There was about five six
years ago in New York,
there was an exhibit of Soviet and U.S.
documentary photography
of the '30s and it has,
the catalog has been published,
the person who does it,
just does these absolutely
stunning juxtapositions.
I'm not saying that's an across the border
a simple convergence,
but it's certainly interesting
and needs to be examined.
Even in her own time,
Lange was considered
extraordinarily old-fashioned
by the kind of work that was being done
by, not only newer people,
but even some of her contemporaries,
like say Ben Shahn,
whose work looks almost a
little post-modern to date,
his photographic work
in the way that you have
this sort of fleeting slight
motion off in a corner
and you don't know where, what to look at
and what's the center
and it just doesn't cohere.
She just was completely
uninterested in that.
- [Woman] I have a
question about more toward
the politics of reception
I think with Lange's work.
You point out that she
is picturing democracy
and I thought that was
a very interesting point
but the question I have about it was
about the democracy that she pictures
because judging from Lange's portraits,
we would begin to imagine a democracy
that was indeed inclusive
of Blacks, of women,
of the poor, when in fact she's being paid
by a government that is
neither socially progressive
nor, well, with a glimmer,
in the FDR administration,
but moreover, neither socially progressive
nor particularly interested
in redistribution
of the wealth.
So what are we to do
with interpretive values
when we see her work being mobilized
to, for example, advertise a democracy
which doesn't actually exist.
I saw perhaps the most blatant example
of Lange's work being remobilized recently
in the New York Times Sunday paper
when the Madonna was pictured
with a facelift and
what she would look like
had she had laser resurfacing.
So it's sort of an interesting question
about how that work got mobilized
beyond the desires of the artist perhaps
and with her intentions
completely subverted.
- It's a very good question
and you may end up just
disagreeing with me
but what I would argue
is that not only Lange
but a lot of FSA photographers,
in fact a lot of people
in a lot of agencies
in the federal government
were far to the left of their government
and were in fact having
a bit of an influence,
no doubt nowhere near
enough of an influence.
I think that the, I don't know
how you would describe this,
the mainstream of
American political culture
was moved, very
significantly in the 1930s.
That's not an original claim to me,
there's some people right here
who have done much more than me
to establish that.
My argument very simply about that is
that the visual was a very important part
of changing and moving that culture.
That happened despite
the federal government.
Of course it would've happened even more
if she had been able to control
the distribution of her own pictures
but I wanna point out,
if she had done the
photographing individually
none of the pictures would
have been distributed.
It's an incredible gift now
that these 272,000 pictures
are all in the public domain
and anyone can use any one of them
without paying a single thing,
unlike the Bettman archive
which has now been bought
by Bill Gates and costs a fortune
to reproduce a picture from it.
(light music)
