Photography from the Classics -

#3 - 08.02.2009

Try to guess the author's name till next Sunday night, the 15th, (maybe also the decade it was taken), when I'll reveal his/her name .

You may post your guess since now! Suggestion: if you are convinced you really guessed, please let the master's name initials, instead, for others to go on trying! Thanks.

I'll post 3 pics from each photographer to show different views from himself, and to make it easier to guess. After his/her name revelation, I'll post at least three more photos just for your extended pleasure, as well as a new Master work for a new turn in the game ;)

You may choose, also, to make some comments on the pics themselves, both in a "woophyan" way as you do in your comments [don't hesitate to criticize a Master, for bad or good;)], or in a more general point of view, if you like. Thanks and enjoy!

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And the answer is: DOROTHEA LANGE.

There is no real warfare between the artist and the documentary photographer. He has to be both. - Dorothea Lange


The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera. - Dorothea Lange


Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still. - Dorothea Lange


Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion...the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate. - Dorothea Lange


… put your camera around your neck along with putting on your shoes, and there it is, an appendage of the body that shares your life with you. - Dorothea Lange


One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. I have only touched it, just touched it. - Dorothea Lange


The good photograph is not the object, the consequences of the photograph are the objects... - Dorothea Lange


DOROTHEA LANGE
(1895-1965)

Dorothea Lange (American, 1895–1965) was born Dorothea Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey, and is one of the few female photographers whose name is widely known. She is most recognized for her social documentary work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and her photographs humanized its tragic consequences. As is the case with many well-known artists, her talent is often associated with one image. In her case, it is Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California.
When she was 12 years old, her father abandoned her and her mother, leading her to drop her middle and last names in lieu of her mother's maiden name. Lange was educated in photography in New York City. With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA). In December 1935, she divorced M. Dixon, a noted western painter, with whom she had two sons, and married agricultural economist Paul Schuster Taylor, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Taylor educated Lange in social and political matters, and together they documented rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers for the next five years — Taylor interviewing and gathering economic data, Lange taking photos.
From 1935 to 1939, Lange's work for the RA and FSA brought the plight of the poor and forgotten — particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers — to public attention. Distributed free to newspapers across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era.
Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother". The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson. In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience taking the photograph:
I 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.
In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the prestigious award to record the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans to relocation camps, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). Her images were so obviously critical that the Army impounded them.
In 1952, Lange co-founded the photographic magazine Aperture. In the last two decades of her life, Lange's health was poor.
Lange died of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965, aged 70. She was out-lived by her second husband, Paul Taylor, two children, three stepchildren, and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Text edited by me, A.Miguel Oliveira, with extracts from Getty Museum+Wikipedia

About those three photos:

#1_Migrant Mother_1936
"Destitute pea pickers living in tent in migrant camp. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two." Nipomo, California. February 1936. The anonymous subject of this famous Depression-era portrait known as "Migrant Mother" came forward in the late 1970s and was revealed to be Florence Owens Thompson, at the age of 32, with three of her daughters, and who died in 1983.
In 1936, while driving down US Highway 101 in California, F.Thompson's car timing chain snapped and they coasted to a stop just inside a pea-picker's camp on Nipomo Mesa. Florence set up a camp there, and Jim Hill, a man who was living with Florence, went to get help for their car with two of her sons. As Florence waited for Hill and her boys to come back, Dorothea Lange drove up and started taking photos of Florence and her family. Over 10 minutes she took 6 images.
Some of the 1936 photos ran almost immediately in the San Francisco News, with an assertion that 2,500 to 3,500 migrant workers were starving in Nipomo. Within days, the pea-picker camp received 20,000 pounds of food from the federal government. However, Thompson and her family had moved on by the time the food arrived.

#2_No end in sight_1939
Western Pacific tracks through the unclaimed desert of northern Oregon, 10 miles from the railroad station at Irrigon.

#3_On the road_1936
Pittsburg County, Oklahoma. Family walking on highway, five children. Started from Idabel, bound for Krebs. In 1936 the father farmed on thirds and fourths at Eagleton, McCurtain County. Was taken sick with pneumonia and lost farm. Was refused relief in county of 15 years' residence because of temporary residence elsewhere.


Some extra photos:

#4.

Starting Over_1935
"Resettled farm child. From Taos Junction to Bosque Farms project, New Mexico."

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#5

Nutbrowns Groceteria_1939
Calipatria, Imperial Valley, California. "Idle pea pickers discuss prospects for work."

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#6

No money, ten children_1936
Stalled in the Southern California desert. "No money, ten children. From Chickasaw, Oklahoma."

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#7

In from the fields_1936
"Migrant cotton pickers at lunchtime. Near Robstown, Texas."

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#8

Dust Bowl Kids_1936
"Children of Oklahoma drought refugee in migratory camp in California."

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#9

Two forks_1939
"Hay forks. Northern Oregon farm. Morrow County, Oregon."

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#10

Delapidated_1936
Washington, Pennsylvania. "Old age."

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#11

On the road_1939
On the road with her family one month from South Dakota. Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California

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Hope you like them and you can go on leaving here, if you like, any other comments!
Thank you!




Next sunday another Master to be guessed!