Electrifying images that ooze human tragedy

Lange/winship Barbican ★★★★★

Dorothea Lange’s images of Thirties’ sharecroppers, fruit pickers and Dust Bowl refugees have come to sum up both the atmosphere of Depression-era America and the notion of socially committed photography: the idea that the photographer can “effect change” through the power of the lens.

Yet Lange’s renown as a great American photographer is based on just one image: Migrant Mother, which was snapped at a camp for displaced farmworkers at Nipomo, California, in 1938.

Now, Lange’s first major British exhibition wants to give us a wider view of this seminal figure, whose career stretched from the Twenties to the Sixties, but who has remained oddly anonymous.

Born in New Jersey in 1895, Lange didn’t start out as a documentary photographer. Early experiments with portraiture in San Francisco, where she moved in 1919, evoke the kind of privileged bohemian world seen in the work of other great modernist photographers, such as her friends Edward Weston and Ansel Adams.

It was when she started looking out of her studio window, watching the hungry, unemployed men milling through the streets, in the wake of the 1929 financial crash that Lange “woke up”, as she later put it.

Early attempts at street photography during the mid-thirties are still playing modernist games: she seems more interested in the patterns formed by the light and lines of queuing men than in their human desperation.

But when, in 1935, she went on the road for the government’s Resettlement Authority – set up to deal with the 300,000 people displaced by drought in the southern states – her work took on a laconic toughness. Images such as Woman of the High Plains, with its emaciated, rather deranged figure framed against an enormous sky, and Returning from California, both 1938, in which a man sits in his car in Oklahoma, apparently reflecting on a wasted journey, are great social documents, imbued with an epic, American sense of scale.

This is the world of John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath. The hunted-looking couple in Family on the Road, 1938, hitchhiking with their two children and a single suitcase, look like characters from some existential road-drama fuelled by starvation, rather than the quest for inner knowledge.

The scarily intense urchin staring out of the still-shocking Damaged Child, 1936 (who damaged her and how?); the wild-eyed man with the broken down car in Ditched, Stalled and Stranded, 1935: these images give a truly electrifying sense of being taken to a moment – one where you can positively smell human catastrophe. It’s a quality that can only be created by the photographer putting themselves, physically as well as emotionally, into the story. In a revealing letter, Lange lambasts fellow reporters who spend the day looking at hungry people, then eat a dinner costing $1.75 – “when you can get a perfectly good meal for $1.00.”

Spreads from magazines such as Life show how Lange’s images were seen as embodying a plucky pioneer spirit, rather than as indictments of the gross inequity of American society, as she intended. Indeed, while the exhibition makes much of Lange’s “unparalleled resilience” and determination to “effect change” (a term that becomes very over-used), it falls into a similar sentimentalising trap, describing Migrant Mother as a “universal icon of human dignity and defiance in the face of adversity”. Actually, it looks like someone who is having a very bad time, and is close to the edge.

If Lange’s later photography is never less than excellent, I think it lacks this sense of complete engagement with its subject; though One Nation Indivisible, 1941, showing Japanese-american children singing patriotic songs as they are about to be shipped to an internment camp, plucks very effectively at the heart strings.

Lange comes across as a determined, but paradoxical individual, a “romantic socialist”, who wanted to change the world, but retained a deep attachment to rural traditions. The two strands come together in Death of a Valley, an elegiac 1956-57 portrait of an idyllic Californian small town that is lent edge by the fact that it is about to be destroyed to make way for a dam. Lange, you feel, was happiest as an artist when tragedy was close at hand.

A comparison between Lange and the award-winning, contemporary British photographer Vanessa Winship, showing concurrently in the Barbican’s upper gallery, is instructive. Winship, born 1960, creates epic photo-essays that aspire to Lange’s level of social commitment, but with the added knowledge that these days we tend to question the authenticity of images, so that nothing can be presented “straight”. Winship shows her images in wall-filling assemblages, eschewing labels in favour of poetic statements printed like headlines. While this approach makes a refreshing change, the images, particularly in her series on the American South, She Dances On Jackson, have an alienated quality that feels rather mannered and second hand. Her work in the Balkans, however, where she lived for several years, has a far more urgent sense of personal exploration. Like Lange before her, Winship proves that the more implicated the artist is in their subject, the more compelling the results.

June 22 until Sept 2; 0845 120 7550; barbican.org.uk