Dorothea Lange Doc on PBS

[c_watson1]

<p>This Friday evening:</p>

<p><a href="http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/beyond-the-dustbowl-with-dorothea-lange/">http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/08/25/beyond-the-dustbowl-with-dorothea-lange/</a></p>

[marc_rochkind]

<p>And, if you want to see some of her photos, here are some links to my SmugMug pages (500+ photos in all):</p>

<p>http://basepath.smugmug.com/LangeFSA/Lange-1933-37-large/n-C7tBk/<br>

http://basepath.smugmug.com/LangeFSA/Lange-1938-42-large/n-C3Jhq/</p>

[wogears]

<p>Will watch or record for sure!</p>

[William Kahn]

<p>We'll be on the road, but I'll definitely record it...</p>

[constance_cook]

<p>She was my first awareness of a photographer. <br>

I will watch. Thank you.<br>

Conni</p>

[GerrySiegel]

Interesting that her photojournalism was supported by a federal agency, Farm Security Administration. And later by Henry Luce's Life magazine. Nowadays with tight agency budgets and only tabloid press at large which keeps up with Miley Cyrus and the Kardashians, there are less of such traveling social photojournalist commentators who can earn a living or get the same kind of respect. Same for the plain reporting side of things in essay form. That includes the loss of wide progressive leaning national publications (McClures at one time). There are a few left, but some are just hanging by a thread. PBS specials, e.g. Frontlline, does a fair job within limits. National Geographic which is still solvent has picked up some of the slack too. Show on D.Lange is on my watch list for tonight.

[marc_rochkind]

<p>Calling the FSA photography program under Roy Stryker (later moved to the Office of War Information) "photojournalism" is somewhat of a stretch. Its purpose was propaganda for the New Deal. Of course, the photography was first class.</p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<p><a href="http://video.pbs.org/video/2365316335/"><em><strong>HERE</strong></em></a> is the link directly to the PBS American Masters special on Lange which aired last night.</p>

<p>Yes, the link can also be found by going to the NYTIMES.com blog link above, but this is the most direct.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<blockquote>

<p>Calling the FSA photography program under Roy Stryker (later moved to the Office of War Information) "photojournalism" is somewhat of a stretch.</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>Yes, but Lange managed to make it into photojournalism, for which she was subsequently fired, if I am not mistaken.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[marc_rochkind]

<p>Not sure fired is what happened. My understanding is that Lange started hanging out with some guy in California named Adams, and started taking his advice to think of her photos as works of art, rather than government property. Thus, she and Stryker went their separate ways.</p>

<p>I do agree that the FSA photographers certainly did their work with a level of integrity worthy of any good photojournalist.</p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>I don't really know, Marc, but I did find this:</p>

<blockquote>

<p>"Migrant Mother" anchors a new book about Lange's Depression-era chronicles. <em>Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field</em>, written by MIT professor Anne Whiston Spirn, documents hundreds of Lange's photos and the descriptions she wrote of them.</p>

<p>Lange was part of the legendary stable of photographers at the Farm Security Administration during the New Deal. They were sent out to document conditions nationwide and help build public support for government improvement programs. As the 1930s wore on, Lange documented those programs that succeeded — and those that didn't.</p>

<p>And, as Spirn tells NPR's Andrea Seabrook, "She set the standard."</p>

<p>The book zooms in on a single year, 1939, when Lange was at her most productive — and her most feisty. She took thousands of photos that year and wrote simple but eloquent text blocks she called "field reports." But she was fired after a series of conflicts with the FSA's photo chief, Roy Stryker.</p>

<p> <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92656801">http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92656801</a></p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[DickArnold]

<p>Just finished watching it. It was fascinating. I was born in 1932 on the SF penninsula. I was a mere boy when Lange was photographing the hordes of dust bowl displaced families. Other FSA paid depression photographers were Gordon Parks and Walker Evans. I was in class as a seven year old when a few of my Japanese classmates were pulled out of school and went to Manzanar. I know where Lake Beryessa is. Her husband crusaded for equity and documenting years of battling for fairness in apportioning water rights in the Central and Imperial valleys. The documentary brought back long forgotten memories. </p>

[Norma Desmond]

<blockquote>

<p>Its purpose was propaganda for the New Deal.</p>

</blockquote>

<p> Can you give some examples of photos from the time that were not propaganda or your ideas of how what was going on at the time could have been documented in a non-propagandistic way? What exactly was another essential side of the story you feel was not being shown by Lange and the others?</p>

[DickArnold]

<p>My family were native Californians at least for a generation. In the thirties at least in Redwood City where my father for a time during the depression was unemployed. We ate Macaroni and cheese and sometimes less than that while he looked for work. On top of that there was this huge influx from the dust bowl and parts east. The plight of those folks was god awful to use a thirties expression. Lange, Parks and Evans were propagandists for the cause of feeding starving migrants and produced the subsequent publicity that drew funds to help feed hungry families theit efforts were IMO righteous. Maybe that was publicity but its journalistic nature was for a good cause. They weren't paid a lot and were probably grateful to have work. The country having experience a market crash in '29 and ongoing drought was in dire financial straights. Brokers jumped out of windows if my history is correct. There was certainly truth in Lange's pictures and those of other depression photographers. In those days desperate people did not put a lot of fine points on the quality or intent of the FSA. Remember Maslow. </p>

[GerrySiegel]

Hanging on to the propaganda theme, which is kind of interesting, Dick and Lannie and Fred. If propaganda means spreading lies or biased information or images that are designed to manipulate and subvert something or publicize and make wholesome some cause that is inherently negative, then photojournalism especially during the wars is pure propaganda. If it is to promote a good cause,then it is still a kind of propaganda loosely defined, or even public relations or PAO stuff. I do not see that in the work of most -I say most od- the New Deal photographers or artists, nor even on some of the Federal Arts Program plays like 1/3 of a Nation, Spyrochete, or the work of movies and images of the CCC with Roosevelt in his convertible handshaking the dollar a day workers.

Although it is currently of a fashion ( in revisionist quarters) to denigrate anything paid for by the feds as inherently skewed towards a bigger government intervention. An argument can be made, agreed. This would mean that anything Hearst promoted was free and unbiased and unequivocal and....you call it by what name you choose.

And same today for anything distributed by the Murdoch syndicate paper-TV empire. I guess it is a kind of conundrum, if that is the right word. To me. a photo has to be Orwellian and sinister to be really over the mark in this category.

Now the House Unamerican Activities committee took a different view and also had an agenda so we have a precedent for "stretching." But here of course we wander into the philosophy of the arts and photo arts including journalism and documentary. Is "On the Waterfront" propaganda, or just a powerful sign of the times.. How about "Grapes of Wrath?"..I would hesitate to be sure either way. Meaning I can't get a grip on pure propaganda, benign propaganda and Joseph Goebbels'/ Orwellian described propaganda in his Ministry of Truth. Toughie.

 

PS: I got the show on DVR and just need to set aside two hours, maybe tonight. Admirer of the work for years.

[Brad_]

>>> If propaganda means spreading lies or biased information or images that are designed to manipulate and

subvert something or publicize and make wholesome some cause that is inherently negative, then

photojournalism especially during the wars is pure propaganda.

 

Yep. And speaking of Dorothea Lange... Compare and contrast her approach to covering the uprooting of

Japanese-Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area during the war and her photographs at the Tanforan

assembly center (a horse race track) and at Manzanar where many were more permanently "relocated," with Ansel Adams coverage

of the same prison camp.

 

Lange's photos spoke volumes about the harsh life there, and as a result got her fired and her photographs

impounded by the government. Adams' photographs, made at the request of the prison camp Director and friend,

depicted a much different experience where life didn't seem quite so bad.

[Landrum Kelly]

<p>Thanks, Gerry.</p>

<p>Yes, "propaganda" comes from the same root as "propagate" and should be a neutral word. Unfortunately, it has been trotted out so many times to derogate political opponents that it connotes for many something overwhelmingly negative. I think that a lot of this comes from its overuse in Cold War rhetoric, not to mention in describing the abominations of Riefenstahl, Goebbels, and the like.</p>

<p>Sometimes a new policy has to be "sold" to the public, and, as much as I don't like to talk about the "selling of ideas," we do have to promote good policies in order to propagate them as policy. The fact that our political enemies will be doing the same thing does not change the fact that "propaganda" at its core is not good or bad but simply inevitable.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[Landrum Kelly]

<blockquote>

<p>Lange's photos spoke volumes about the harsh life there, and as a result got her fired and her photographs impounded by the government. Adams' photographs, made at the request of the prison camp Director and friend, depicted a much different experience where life didn't seem quite so bad. --Brad -</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>If we speak the truth as we see it, whether as writers or photographers or dissenters in the street, rest assured that someone more ruthless than ourselves will try to shut us up, perhaps even to crush us so that we do not speak again.</p>

<p>In Pete Seeger's immortal words, "When will they ever learn?" </p>

<p>Yes, we can be shut up for a while, even totally wiped from the earth in the most extreme cases, but the ideas and images can take on a life of their own--and sometimes the ideas so conveyed take on a kind of practical immortality. The more the despots try to stamp them out, the more they spread.</p>

<p>--Lannie</p>

[Norma Desmond]

<p>I think what the Manzanar photos by Lange and Adams show is that only when we see things from different perspectives do we start to put together a more full and well-rounded understanding of various situations, both historical and contemporary. Usually what's required is not a single supposedly unbiased or non-propagandistic view but rather a variety of points of view that let us see what are usually multi-dimensional situations that can be seen and portrayed in many different ways for many different reasons. The understanding of a given situation is rarely simple and rarely can be fully told by one person's camera or one person's word.</p>

<blockquote>

<p><em><strong>Born Free and Equal: The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans</strong></em> is a book by Ansel Adams containing photographs from his 1943–4 visit to the internment camp then named Manzanar War Relocation Center in Owens Valley, Inyo County, California. The book was published in 1944 by U.S. Camera in New York.</p>

<p>In the summer of 1943, Adams was invited by his friend, newly appointed camp director Ralph Merritt, to photograph life at the camp. The project and the accompanying book and exhibition at the MoMA created a significant amount of controversy, partly owing to the subject matter.World War II was still being fought and the animosity against Americans of Japanese descent was high, especially on the West Coast.</p>

<p>Adams was not the only photographer to take pictures in Manzanar. Before him, Dorothea Lange had visited all eleven Japanese-American internment camps while a staff photographer for the War Relocation Authority. During Lange's visit in 1942, the camp was a less organized state and Lange was driven to portray the injustice of the relocation project, leading to a harsher and less optimistic portrayal of camp life than Adams's. The third photographer was internee Toyo Miyatake, previously a studio photographer in Los Angeles. Miyatake initially took photos with an improvised camera fashioned from parts he smuggled into the camp. His activity was discovered after nine months, but Merritt supported the endeavor and allowed him to have his stored studio equipment shipped to the camp and continue the project (initially a camp guard had to release the shutter for him after Miyatake had positioned the camera). Miyatake and Adams met and befriended each other at the camp, while Lange's and Adams's visits did not overlap.</p>

<p>Adams's goal in the project was twofold: to stress the good American citizenship of the internees, as conveyed in the subtitle of the book, "The Story of Loyal Japanese-Americans"; and to show their ability to cope with the situation:</p>

<p><em>"The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and despair by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment…All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use."</em> (Ansel Adams, 1965)</p>

</blockquote>

[Brad_]

>>> The understanding of a given situation is rarely simple and rarely can be fully told by one person's

camera or one person's word.

 

I agree and would also say that if your goal is really about gaining a better understanding, invest some time

and go beyond relying on and then posting a short Wikipedia summary verbatim about Adams' book. Rather, scratch a little deeper by

reading a variety of available source material on the subject, and, maybe even engage in conversation with

people who were affected during that time period, or their children. With respect to gaining insight into

Adams' beliefs and goals, instead of relying on the Wikipedia summary and interpretation, I recommend

reading Adams' book which the summary was about. I think it provides a more accurate view into Adams’

thinking at the time, when he set his words and photos to print back in 1944.

[htarragon]

<p>The link to all of the text and photos of Adams' book is here<br /> <a href="http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=gdc3&fileName=scd0001_20020123001bfpage.db"></a></p><br /> More text than pictures - the pictures are of smiling faces and not so comfortable living conditions. Text tells a starker story.</p>

[htarragon]

<p>The link to all of the text and photos of Adams' book is here, at the Library of Congress site: <a href="http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=gdc3&fileName=scd0001_20020123001bfpage.db">http://lcweb2.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=gdc3&fileName=scd0001_20020123001bfpage.db</a> More text than pictures - the pictures are of smiling faces and not so comfortable living conditions. Text tells a starker story.</p>

[Damon DAmato]

<p>I don't remember her ever referring to herself as a photojournalist. She calls herself a documentary photographer. <br /><br />Documentery is not journalism. Objectivity is an ideal of journalism, not documentary. Documentary is <em>supposed</em> to have a point of view.</p>