Linda Gordon

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Linda Gordon | Dorothea Lange: The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist | The Journal of American History, 93.3 | The History Cooperative

Dorothea Lange: The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist

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To a startling degree, popular understanding of the Great Depression of the 1930s derives from visual images, and among them, Dorothea Lange's are the most influential. Although many do not know her name, her photographs live in the subconscious of virtually anyone in the United States who has any concept of that economic disaster. Her pictures exerted great force in their own time, helping shape 1930s and 1940s Popular Front representational and artistic sensibility, because the Farm Security Administration (FSA), her employer, distributed the photographs aggressively through the mass media. If you watch the film The Grapes of Wrath with a collection of her photographs next to you, you will see the influence.¹ Lange's commitment to making her photography speak to matters of injustice was hardly unique—thousands of artists, writers, dancers, and actors were trying to connect with the vibrant grass-roots social movements of the time. They formed a cultural wing of the Popular Front, a politics of liberal-Left unity in support of the New Deal.	1
The FSA photography project aimed to examine systematically the social and economic relations of American agricultural labor. Yet none of the scholarship about that unique visual project has made farm workers central to its analysis. One consequence of the omission has been underestimating the policy specificity of the FSA's and Lange's exposé. We understand her work, and that of the whole FSA photography project, differently if we see it as a contested part of New Deal farm policy. Putting Lange's photography back into that context makes the sharpness of its critical edge more apparent. FSA photography was a political campaign. The FSA was at the left edge of the Department of Agriculture, and its photography project was at the left edge of the FSA. The photographers not only challenged an entire agricultural political economy, but tried also to illustrate the racial system in which it operated—a system it also reinforced. Some politicians and scholars had censured southern racism, but no prominent racial liberals addressed the more complex but equally unjust race relations in the West. Since most people of color in the western United States at that time lived in rural areas, the Department of Agriculture's photography project provided a unique opportunity to make them visible to urbanites and non-westerners. Even the gender relations revealed among these photographic subjects were less conventional than mainstream discourse would suggest.	2
Among documentary photographers, Dorothea Lange was exemplary in both meanings of the word: her work exemplified a prevailing style and, as a premier practitioner of that style, influenced it. Her progressive commitment was at once typical for cultural front documentarists and also unusually targeted, because she was promoting specific New Deal policies.² She eventually received great acclaim (most of it, unfortunately, posthumous) as a master art photographer; but the agricultural reform to which she was so passionately committed did not (and perhaps could not) materialize. Her photography thus also exposes the limitations of even a notably progressive part of the New Deal's agricultural policy.	3
That Lange, a city-born (Hoboken) city dweller (San Francisco), became an ace documentary photographer through her work on rural America did not make her unique among FSA photographers. They were mainly of northern urban background, a remarkable proportion of them Jewish (five of the eleven major photographers).³ But their origins may have been a strength as well as a weakness. Because they saw rural society with eyes unhabituated to agricultural vistas, they took nothing for granted, and because they needed to learn, they were better able to teach others. Lange executed the FSA's assignment more thoroughly than any other individual photographer—because she traveled to more regions than did the others, because she was married to and often traveled with Paul Taylor, an agriculture expert and FSA insider, and above all because she was based in California, which represented in many ways the future of American agriculture.	. . .

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