From John Edwin Mason's blog:
Think about the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression, and images like the one below will spring into your head -- a photograph of a homeless mother and her children who appear to have nothing to cling to but their clothes, their car, and each other. It seems to sum up the desperate reality of people caught in the worst economic catastrophe of the twentieth century.
Like so many of the images made by photographers working on the federal government's monumental Farm Security Administration/ Office of War Information documentary project, it feels utterly real, perfectly iconic.
Dorothea Lange: Mother and baby of family on the road. Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California. 1939.
It turns out, however, that Dorothea Lange made several photographs of this young mother and her children on that day in 1939.
Here's another one, the last in the series. This photo is not iconic. It never was and probably never will be. In fact, it feels false. The child's face is freshly scrubbed, and both mother and child are smiling. It makes us wonder what's going on.
Dorothea Lange: Mother and baby of family on the road. Tulelake, Siskiyou County, California. 1939.
Lange, brilliant artist and documentarian that she was, fills us in.
The explanation is in the "General Caption" that she wrote to accompany the series of photos:
The car is parked outside the Employment Office. The family have arrived, before opening of the potato season. They have been on the road for one month--have sick baby....Father washed the baby’s face with edge of blanket dampened from canteen, for the photographs.
Well, there it is. The father washed his child's face. He manipulated reality, and Lange let him do it. Together they've created a lie.
I'm not sure Lange really created a lie for two reasons - first, the photos that she puts forward first and the photos that are known from her trips photographing people are the more authentic ones. Second, Lange notes that the father washed the child's face and by noting that points out that the family knew they were being photographed and likely posed. By pointing out the face washing, she asks us not to see this second photo as authentic.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Amanda. She tells us the process of what happened during the photoshoot. She also released the more authentic photos to the public like Amanda mentioned. In that situation, most people would want to clean themselves up for a photoshoot. She probably took those last photos more for the family's sake than for the media.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure one is really more authentic than the other. They both reflect reality, they just reflect it in different ways. I don't the other photograph would have been misleading either, in fact, the juxtaposition of both makes for a more interesting story in my opinion than either by themselves.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Sean, they do both reflect reality. Also, photograph shows a glimpse, a one-second moment you could say, of life. The more iconic photo that we've seen initially has a bigger impact, but that doesn't mean that mother and son are always miserable. That one shot of them looking miserable and hungry doesn't mean they always were that way despite it being the dust bowl.
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