Photo exhibit a reminder that our past is never dead
William Faulkner’s memorable line from “Requiem for a Nun” never seemed more apt than it did Sunday, as I strolled through the powerful Dorothea Lange photography exhibit at the Oakland Museum of California. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Lange, the greatest American documentary photographer of the 20th century, is best known for her iconic images of Dust Bowl survivors, which along with John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath,” came to define this human crucible. But less known than her work in the fields and squatter camps of the Central Valley are the haunting, black-and-white pictures she took of breadlines and street protests in San Francisco during the Great Depression and the families who were rounded up from Japantown and shipped to prison camps in California’s desolate interior during World War II. Stoic and dignified, even in extreme duress, the men, women and children in these Lange photos remain imprinted in your mind’s eye, never less than fully human.
Lange was “a photographer of democracy and for democracy,” wrote her biographer, Linda Gordon. “By showing her subjects as worthier than their conditions, she called attention to the incompleteness of democracy.”
This failure of the American dream is vividly captured in “White Angel Breadline,” the famous photo Lange took in 1933 of a group of hungry men gathered outside a soup kitchen on the Embarcadero, near Filbert Street. The feeding station for the Depression’s poor was created by a widow named Lois Jordan, who called herself White Angel. Most of the men in the picture have their backs to the camera, but the viewer’s eye goes immediately to the grizzled man with a battered hat and old trench coat, who’s turned
the other way. Staring bleakly ahead, oblivious of the camera, he cradles a tin cup of soup and folds his hands over a wooden rail as if in prayer.
Until the 1929 stock market crash, Lange was a successful San Francisco studio photographer. By day, she took pictures of the most illustrious names in San Francisco society, before partying at night with her husband, painter Maynard Dixon, and their artist crowd at bohemian bars like the Black Cat. “I had the cream of the trade. I was the person you went to (for a portrait) if you could afford it,” Lange is quoted on the exhibit wall. “The Depression woke me up.”
With the human misery spreading all around her in San Francisco, Lange decided to take her camera and head for the streets, “to see if I can just grab a hunk of lightning.” She succeeded in capturing the torrent of history as it rushed past, freezing it in unforgettable close-ups. Like the one of a woman’s passionate face as she addresses a rally during the violent 1934 San Francisco waterfront strike; or the stark, still-life of a Kern County gas station, where someone has posted a hand-scrawled sign with a message of run-on urgency: “This is your country don’t let the big men take it away from you.”
Lange’s pictures were worth a thousand words or more. But she also understood that carefully crafted captions were a vital part of the story, and her second husband and collaborator, progressive Berkeley economist Paul Taylor, helped her collect testimony from her subjects. In one of the photos on display at the Oakland Museum, a migrant farmworker in overalls gazes defiantly at the camera. Nearby, Lange’s caption reads: “They holler that we ain’t citizens, but their fruit would rot if we didn’t come.”
Another Lange masterpiece, “Woman of the High Plains,” depicts a lean, anguished survivor of the Texas dust bowl, with her hand pressed to her forehead as if to console herself. “If you die, you’re dead — that’s all,” she tells us in the caption with chilling fatalism.
Lange’s photos of Japanese American families being torn from their homes in San Francisco are equally heartbreaking. Their children stand proudly pledging allegiance to a country that has turned against them. As the families were transported to barbedwire camps in the California wasteland, Lange was racked by what she saw, developing ulcers in the process of recording the national orgy of fear and racial prejudice. “We have a disease,” she’s quoted in the exhibit. “It’s ‘Jap-baiting’ and hatred. … I went through an experience I’ll never forget and learned a lot, even if I accomplished nothing.”
The Oakland exhibit also features the work of a few contemporary photographers who’ve been inspired to follow in Lange’s footsteps, including Ken Light, who took striking color photos of Mexican American farmworkers in the Central Valley. But no artist of Lange’s stature has emerged to capture the current American drama.
These artists are certain to come along, to seize their own “hunk of lightning.”
On our way home to San Francisco, my wife and I drove to West Oakland to pick up a friend of our son. His family was forced to leave San Francisco, despite their deep roots in the city. The streets we drove down, past shuttered warehouses, were deeply gutted and potholed as if they had been strafed by an air attack. There were clusters of tattered tents and fleets of shopping carts stuffed with people’s life belongings. Some blocks looked like scenes from a movie about survivors of the apocalypse. Back in the city, it was nearly as bleak, as we drove through some stretches of the Mission District.
From Dorothea Lange’s squatter camps to today’s. As the man said, the past is never dead.