4th of July,
1937;Hillhouse,Mississippi
Two
photographs taken in Mississippi in 1937 by one of America's photography masters
lay in the Library of Congress archives for half a century. Today, I am proud to
present these two photographs. I am excited about the remarkable story these two
pictures tell.
Dorothea
Lange, a woman trained as a portrait photographer in New York and who
apprenticedwith prominent society photographers, was the photographer for these
two environmental portraits. Born Dorothea Nutzhorn in 1895, as a child she
changed her name to her mother's maiden name after her father left and her
parents were divorced. Two of her five photos of a Mississippi woman are
overlooked master works.
A Sharecropper's Family that moved to Mississippi,
1937
Dorothea
Lange took the long road to Mississippi. She traveled west to San Francisco in
1918, and opened a successful portrait studio, married a painter and gave birth
to two boys. In 1935, she divorced. She married a economics professor at the
University of California, Berkeley, and as the Great Depression drew near, she
begin to make photographic images that documented the impact of the economy on
daily lives of her subjects. Her photographs of human character find people on
the edge of survival, working in poverty, standing in meal lines, alone, with
their family,or in groups. Their faces are a deep study of the impact of these
conditions.
A
Sharecropper from Issaquena County, MS
In 1936,
Dorothea Lange was hired by the federal government's Farm Security
Administration's Office of War Information to travel across the South
documenting a rural America. When she got to Mississippi, she photographed the
sharecroppers and agriculture of the Delta. Her eye connected the relationships
of work to living through the simple mechanism of image and composition. She
raised these two photographic techniques to an art which at its best, is still
surpassed.
Negro
Children, Mississippi Delta, 1936
As a
photographer, she waited on each story to appearin the faces before her lens.
For Dorothea Lange, sharing was a natural action, and she valued what was
within. She was not interested in matching her images to variations of external
social ideals. She waited untilher subjects'faces got past the apparent doom,
relaxed from the usual cliches ,and finally opened a window to her and her
camera that offered an inner glimpse into the expressions and emotions held
dear in their inner heart. Working with spare back drops of natural settings, a
porch or a field, her photos are careful documents of the hardships and hopes
that lived and collided within her subjects. Her images somehow acquire and
preservean inner strength and vulnerability. Her photos are a window to the
inner grace of her subjects, presenting the dignity of their real selves as they
face the camera for all to see.
I think
two of her best examples of image and composition are of a Mississippi women who
was a field hand, working as a sharecropper in the Delta, that Lange
photographed in 1937. This unnamed women has five images in the Library of
Congress archives of Lange's photographs. I was absolutely astounded when I
found them. Together they tell a story heard but rarely seen. Photos of Negro
sharecroppers , often idyllic and stereotyped, many times expressed the values
of outside views of the people and their work.Lange soughtout the inner
character of the persons photographed. But Lange also took herself out of the
way. She knew how to look for the dignity and real vulnerability within
everyone; she knew each person was a hero with a 1,000 faces, and she went
beyond preconceptions to capture that moment in which the person emerged unique.
She reveled in what she had not seen before. She abandoned formula or
familiarity, sparked by the emerging difference that offered a look unseen
before. She knew when she had this elusive quality: her photos are one with this
transcendent moment.
Traveling Highway 1, 1938
The
Mississippi woman she photographs offers two extraordinary instances of Lange's
gifts.
First is
a picture of the woman sitting alone on her porch in a wooden ladder back chair.
The woman, a farm worker and sharecropper, chops cotton; she uses a long
handled hoe to weed and turn the soil in cotton fields. She is skille in "hoe
culture." She was born, by her own words, two years before the surrender, (the
end of the Civil War in 1865). Photograph in 1937, she is likely 84 years old.
Like other people Lange photographed, she is unnamed and no located is noted.
The
wooden slated or cane-backed ladder chair in which she sits was the most common
piece of furniture on rural porches. In the South, and in many rural locales,
porches served as outdoor living rooms. From the porch, the sun cast its colors
of pink and rose, leaves fell, dust rolled into the wind, wind played across the
skin, and the changing light and its display of textures and signaled the swift,
silent passage of time.
Master Work: A Portrait of an 84 year old
Mississippi Woman
Lange's
photograph elevates the chair. Its straight back rail is at an offset angle to
the vertical boards rising like timbers, towering above the sitting 84 year old
woman. The chair is a throne more than a place of rest. It is a fixture exalted
by its function. Its special role is to be a gathering place. Sitting here, the
elder womanoffers silent, contemplative thanks for the immeasurable gifts of
life given by an immeasurable God whose hand and will wrote the sky and colors
and trees and fields seen by her living eye, restored her peace after troubles
and calmed her fears, and gave her the health and strength she feels within.
Look carefully at her face: her eyes are looking within; this wonder is almost
too much to contemplate. Her hand supports the weight of this glorious
knowledge, this lived experience.
Each day
the woman sitsin this chairknowing that God calls to her. Her face is etched
with a light filled with bright love. She is seeing something that belongs only
to her. Dust, hard work, and weariness can not diminish this place she has
entered. In fact, the journey to this place is a praise song deep in the soul.
This elder woman has worked and earned a living turning the ground with a long
handled hoe. Her real earning shows in the promise of her face, her hand
touching her cheek to affirm that this presence that stirs within her is as real
as the ground she works. Yet Lange's composition makes this photo work: she
photographs the woman from the side, allowing the viewer to look in.
She subtly uses wood, the chair and the
long, vertical house boards (rising out of view of the photo) to call to mind
the altar chair in a church. Her composition frames and presents this woman's
story.
The
second shot is deceptive and its features easy to miss. It looks like the
stereotypes often associated with this era, but close inspection offers a
profound difference. This women, by her own words, born two years before the
surrender, in 1863; in 1937, sheis 84 years old!
At 84,
she poses as a life-long, proud farm worker, a skilled laborer, knowing both how
to tend a crop from planting to harvest, but also knowing, from long experience,
how to preserve her body from the wear of sun and hand labor. Back and neck
muscles and worn-out arthritic bones have often put others out to pasture, but
she proudly is going on. Smiling, looking straight into the camera, her face
expresses her easy confidence, a fierce pride, a lifelong way-making. This
second portrait is taken at work rest.
Master Work: Portrait at Work Rest of an 84
unnamed Mississippi Woman,
A Sharecropper skilled in "hoe culture," "born two
years before the surrender."
The
details of her longsuccess are in the details of her stance. Her thin frame is
at an angle to the hoe. The angle offsets the pulling action of chopping by
torquing the pull. As she chops the ground and pulls the hoe to turn the soil,
her body twists from her lower back, hips, and thighs. In fact, by the portrait,
her action works exactly like a modern rotary tiller, whose curves blades lift
and spin the soilin exactly the same way she does with with the pose of her
body!
Her head
is elevated, raised from the neck. Keeping her neck up and her head raised
staves off the painful onslaught of arthritic that field workers who bent their
necks and dropped their heads suffer from.
But the
signature adaption she has made is easy to miss. Look carefully at her right
hand. Her palm is turned out. Her thumb is below her fingers. Pulling out
prevents the muscles and tendons from becoming sore and uses the shoulder and
back to pull the load as her lower back swings around, using her legs and thighs
to complete the action.
This
portrait is a brilliant photograph. It is an anthropological study of advanced
farm worker's techniques. (I can find no other photograph of workers before or
after the civil war photographed in a similar pose, showing similar techniques.)
I am glad
to share both photographs with you. Enjoy this remarkable story, connecting the
American experience, told by two woman, one whose life touched the 1861 war,
experienced freedom as an infant, and hoed the cotton fields of the rural
Mississippi Delta; the other, a polio survior, a society photographerwho
livedin large cities; both collaborating on a July day in 1937, before and
behind a camera set up in the Delta to make these lasting
images.
Sharecropper's Home, 10 Miles from Jackson,
1937
All photographs
by Dorothea Lange from the Library of Congress (available with no
knownrestrictions).
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