| Book Review | Oregon Historical Quarterly, 110.1

REVIEWS

DARING TO LOOK: DOROTHEA LANGE'S PHOTOGRAPHS AND REPORTS FROM THE FIELD

by Anne Whiston Spirn

University of Chicago Press, Illinois, 2008. Photographs, notes, index. 359 pages. $40.00 cloth.

Imaginative and beautifully produced, Anne Whiston Spirn's book is a delightful hybrid: a newly published primary source, a photography book with a fine introduction by the author, an apologia for Lange against her often snobbish critics. Professor of landscape architecture and planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Spirn developed the ingenious plan to publish a sampling of one year of Lange's work, 1939, including nearly two hundred photographs alongside Lange's original captions. I wish Lange were alive to see this, because she was frustrated by the fact that her work was almost always published without these captions and therefore without the context she wanted to emphasize.

The book will be of particular interest to readers of this journal, because in 1939, Lange made a several-month photographic trip into Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. These photographs have rarely been published, in part because they contain fewer of her masterpieces than those made elsewhere. But what was ordinary in Lange's photography is still often superb. Moreover, Daring to Look emphasizes Lange's environmental consciousness and landscape photography. Unfortunately, this promising line of analysis is not pursued far enough; I hope Spirn will develop it in future publications.

This photography was made for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a New Deal haven of progressives within the conservative Department of Agriculture. Lange had been photographing farmworkers since 1935, a project that marked an ironic turn in the life of this deeply urban portrait photographer. By 1939, she had become not only a master of documentary photography but also an expert on the agricultural depression and the exploitation and miserable poverty of sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and migrant farmworkers.

Scholars of photography or of the Pacific Northwest will find particularly useful Spirn's meticulous correlation of the captions with the photographs they explicate. Lange denied that images "spoke for themselves" and insisted that words could enrich images. She disliked the iconization of her photographs, ripping them out of their context. Central to the visual respect she paid her subjects was her sense that they should not become mere symbols of injustice or suffering, that they should never lose their individuality. Many of her captions provided brief narratives of her subjects' lives and of the economic structures that constrained them. Reading these captions as they sit side by side with the photographs allows a fuller understanding of Lange's project, her expertise, and her politics than has previously been easily available.

Spirn presents two brief sections on Lange's California and North Carolina photography and a longer section on her work in the Pacific Northwest. In each, we see the natural and the built environments as well as their inhabitants. Lange's assignment for the FSA was not only to document agricultural problems — poor land use, erosion, technological backwardness, and poverty — but also to propagandize for the work of the FSA in resettling farmers from poor to better land, loaning money for farm improvement, and providing temporary housing for migrants.

The photography is classic Lange: she talks with her subjects and quotes them — one employer of migrant farmworkers tells her he keeps the deputy sheriff on hand "kind of to keep them scared..." (p. 152). She provides telling details — that one female farmer canned 400 to 800 jars of fruits and vegetables annually, for example. She demands that viewers respect the expertise of these workers so often imagined as unskilled, as when she describes the trickiness of picking from orchards — balanced on a ladder, reaching far in all directions even while carrying a heavy bag and protecting the fruit from bruising. Sometimes, she notes, the grower required pickers to wear a metal ring attached to the middle finger to grade and separate fruit by size, while still on the ladder. She photographs and explains agricultural processes in detail, as in her images of hop growing.

The Pacific Northwest photography is unique, notably because agriculture there was not so dominated by large corporations or plantations. Lange cut her documentary teeth photographing the vast agribusinesses of California's central valley, where wages were beneath subsistence level, living conditions created widespread ill health, and growers hired posses of thugs to terrorize workers who dared to protest or unionize. In the Pacific Northwest she found more family farms. As a result, Lange's photography is more positive here, even sentimental, and lacked the power of her critical documentary. It is as if we are seeing a great writer of tragedy trying her hand at romance.

A more serious loss deriving from Spirn's decision to feature the Pacific Northwest is the relatively small proportion of photographs of people of color. About a third of Lange's FSA photography represented people of color. This is a major part of Lange's contribution, for white people of the 1930s rarely saw respectful images of non-whites. Spirn tries to compensate by including many images of African Americans in the section on North Carolina, but this leaves out all the Mexican and Filipino Americans that Lange photographed in California, not to mention the Japanese Americans and other Asians she photographed in her later years (see Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, Norton, 2006).

I do not know of any other scholar who has studied Lange's photography from an environmental perspective, and Spirn's eye takes in much that others (including me) have missed. She features, for example, Lange's coverage of "stump farms" in the Pacific Northwest, the products of lumbering with no reseeding and of real estate firms that dishonestly sold this land to migrants who had not seen it and did not grasp the huge expense of getting the stumps removed. (Lange, ever the social scientist, even calculated the cost per acre.) But Spirn was caught between contradictory purposes here — examining Lange's take on the environment, providing a representative sample of her work, and presenting just one year's photography. Acknowledging this, the book's title does not mention the environmental theme. Spirn's introduction offers a paragraph on a Lange photoessay ("Death of a Valley") — not from 1939 — concerning the environmental cost of a California dam but, surprisingly, does not discuss the historical and ecological argument of Lange and Taylor's masterful photo-textual book American Exodus, published in 1939.

Still, Daring to Look makes two major contributions — foregrounding Lange's captions and publishing, for the first time, a selection of her photography in the Pacific Northwest. Happily, an exhibit of Lange's Oregon photography will be mounted at Portland State University in the fall of 2009.

LINDA GORDON

New York University

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