No Flower Bed of Ease

Essay on Dorothea Lange’s Southern Photographs

Lange plunged into a land where life was a prison of no relief, a land whose crumbling structures were built on psychic beliefs of injustice
that most people ignored and were powerless to confront.

I was rummaging in the cloistered basement stacks of a local college library when I first came across Dorothea Lange’s photographs. I had been working as an independent historian and tour guide, acting in the role of the African griot and was using free time to peruse books and articles to see what might open up. Bowing each one gently with my thumb, I turned the heavy glossy pages; my eyes suddenly lingering over portraits from the 1930s, a family album of Southern share croppers, tenant farmers, American migrants, adults and children. I knew many who viewed Southern history had “come to see the elephant,” to engage beliefs that prevailed too much or too little against the facts. Southern history is often considered a carnival of horrors.

So, the honesty of the photographs were startling. I didn’t know the photographer but I knew the message. The photographs told how to live in the midst of arrested decay, under the elephant’s foot. Living goes on and can not be abandoned, despite hardships and changing times. The photographs were stark and unsentimental, reverential; guileless. There were fire and doom in their moments. I immediately believed her work.

The first discovery of Dorothea Lange’s photographs rewarded a faith in freelance knowledge. My private moment of adventure stumbled on a prize so stunning it lay beyond the grasp of immediate understanding. Private voyages often lead to unintended places. To know them deeply, they must be revisited, Mississippi writer Eudora Welty noted, with “grave persistence.”

In time, I came to realize Dorothea Lange’s Southern photographs deserve wider purview. They tell several stories, including the story of another curious, freelancing adventurer, Dorothea Lange. During a 1960-61 interview with Suzanne Reiss, she said of her lifelong penchant for observing and photographing humanity, (“the openings I saw in an expanding world”), “it leads you to odd places but it’s fun (217).”

Southern history is often considered a carnival of horrors.
So, the honesty of the photographs were startling.

On her Southern journey, she discovers the odd, silent moments of a reverie of ideas and beliefs patterned in Southern life.

Dorothea Lange refines these still visions of the state of things into an augury of survival. Her Southern photographs direct attention, as she put it, “to something unique from their own nature (218). ” It recurs in her photographs. Yet it’s something hard to put your finger on.

“It is brave to be Involved”

I saw discomfort and deep satisfaction in the images of her faces. Faces whose discomfort teeters between many sources. But faces which also reach their own destinations of living and find their own rewards of faith—an “authority of freedom” Lange calls it, in the world around them. Freedom gained from finding your own way, a faith possible even in the despair of living.

Dorothea Lange exhibited this authority. It’s her way of seeing. She imbued it in her technique. More often, it shines in her photographs. She learned it early.

She observed the images of life in the tenements surrounding the open windows of the library staff offices where she waited for her mother after school. “I’m aware that I just looked at everything. I can remember the smell of the cooking too, the way they lived. Oh, I had good looks at that, but never set foot myself. Something like a photographic observer. I can see it. (11).”

Looking at her photographs, I began to realize her piercing curiosity, a desire to know, the eyes to see significance around them. Every photographer—and photograph—makes certain assumptions, but Dorothea Lange’s work apprises us of her insights rather than her techniques. Her southern photographs surmise not what people have hung on to (emotionally, materially) but how much they have let go. The vale of misery placed on them redefines freedom and repositions it in unlikely places. Dorothea Lange’s southern photographs, their backdrop the grueling misery of sharecropping during the Depression, exhibit the deep, sentient satisfaction of freedom’s hidden measure.

Time is strong in her pictures, it brings its remarkable powers to their images. In a paradox—photographers are often concerned about light, about illumination—Dorothea Lange places a premium on time, on waiting as she put it, until the photograph “arrived at the right place (55).” She knows the human body and face is its own page that portrays feelings and memories, experiences and ideas, urges and dreams from within.

A main Lange technique waits as they emerge. From her experience, she observed, “No subject can hold on to anything that is false for them for too long (53).” Her photographs gather time inside—and outside—the moment—to arrive at, “recordings of human beings you can look at and into (54).” The moments she captures in her photographs arrive as natural and easy as breathing.

“To be not fearful is to be Unresolved”

Dorothea Lange’s remarkable work of photographing the South’s human terrain began with its own improbable journey. Living in San Francisco and married with two young children, operating her own studio, her 1935 photographic study of early arriving migrants to California caught the attention of a Washington official in a New Deal program assisting relocating farm workers. Roy Stryker, a Columbia University economics professor, came to Washington as chief of the History Section in the Information Division of the Resettlement Administration, later renamed the Farmers Security Administration (FSA). He founded and staffed the FSA photographic division to do field reporting and hired Dorothea Lange on the strength of her California photographs.“I didn’t know a mule from a tractor when I started,”she said.

When interviewed in 1963, Stryker recalled the division’s early mission:

“I don’t know if anybody else will ever know how much [Rexford] Tugwell [Stryker’s boss] really conceived having to sell back to the people the thing he was doing. I think it was only primarily in supplying his field people with tools to make the program clear. Basically, his was an action program.”

If we strayed, he recounts, “circumstances pushed us in this direction.”

In hiring FSA photographers, Stryker tried to assess, “How sharp was his mental vision as well as what he saw with his eyes? Those are the things you look for.” He went on: “Photographers were intelligent people that worked for us. They were trying to tell us, tell the public, make pictures that were genuine, that recognized peculiar situations whether it be a piece of geography or a human being, and recognized the pertinent things in a situation . . . they were reporting what they felt and saw.”

Recording the earliest dust bowl arrivals and the camp conditions in the California’s agricultural valleys, she was the first photographer to focus on the ecological conditions of the Great Depression and its effects on the human ecology of farm workers and farm life. Lange tells of first hearing the phrase, “we’ve been blown out,” and says “I went home that day a discoverer, a real social observer.”

With the FSA, she received a salary (rather than commissions and sales), a per diem (four, then five dollars a day!), and sometimes traveled with an assistant or was helped by state or federal officials in the field. Her assignments included broad themes: “cooking, sleeping, praying and socializing,” but she exercised wide creative range.

Almost always her best works were portraits of the people of the era; workers, friends, wives and mothers, husbands and fathers, children of different ages, across the different states.

She crisscrossed the South during the spring and summers of three years, from 1936 to 1938. Starting in Virginia, she worked her way through North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida; then Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Louisiana, Arkansas, Texas. Journeying along thin ribbons of asphalt laid on top of old wagon paths and pre-European, Indian trails, she turned onto rutted dirt lanes, sending notice of her arrival in passages of dust and grit. People knew she was a stranger because everyone could tell who was coming by the dust and car sounds, and when the dust and mica settled, people gathered on weathered front porches waiting to greet her. The occasion of Dorothea Lange’s arrival called forth voices of quiet welcome standing in time.

She recalls the experiences: “When you were out in the field you were almost always alone, unknown, very often unprepared for, turned loose, really, with a background where something is expected of you. You found your way, . . . We found our way in, slid in on the edges. We used our hunches, we lived, and it was hard, hard living.”

Waiting to see who she was, (that was more important than what she wanted), women, not wanting to be forward, expressed their modesty by standing in the front door as she arrived.

The door marked the passage of what each day brought. She asked about them and asked if she could make photographs of them with their families. And people who knew without thinking the meaning of the odor of rain or how sunlight refracted in the play of dust, agreed to share their image with a stranger, the one crossing the yard with a limp from a childhood bout of polio. Taking a quiet pride in her official role and the politeness and importance of her request, surprised she just showed up to ask their help to show the government the conditions of the Depression by photographing their home and family, they agreed.

Dorothea Lange carried a heavy, bulky Graflex SLR camera with a hooded eyepiece. She let the children touch the camera and its lens. Before long, curiosity ceded to purpose.

“Exhaust the little Moments”

The porch in the South was a social space. Porches arrange function and order by season and need. Its zones and passages vary by family, age and imagination. The porch transformed limits into expectations, but a porch also offered support, rest, a place of freedom, of spartan joy. Even when quiet and bare, a porch was the symbol and center of community. Porches flew invisibly, abruptly off into space filled with danger and dreams. Somewhere along her southern passage, Dorothea Lange began to photograph abridged flights of many of the people she meets against the passages and dreams resting on their porches.

If the porch is a social and cultural space, openly arranging its meaning, the front door is an open space, transparent, fixed, without barriers, or desolation or despair. An open door is a close embrace. (Closed, in the 1939s it tells of rest, not safety). People think of a door as an entrance, but the southern front door is an exit. It’s a dare. A passage of faith. A garland for those going out.

The region’s widespread superstition said visitors who entered through the front door had to leave the same way to keep evil spirits from coming in. Death had to go out a different way, so it wouldn’t return before its time. The front door was a portal between worlds, with grace and sin crowding in, trying to get by each other.

The vying enticements of the doorways lead to humor:

“Mary Jane worked harder than all the women in the fields and hard work seemed to improve her beauty. She fairly glowed coming from the fields. At night, a parade of suitors who wanted to bask in that light knocked lightly at her door, bearing gifts.

First came John. He brought fresh apples, peaches, strawberries, watermelons, honeydews, grapes, and pears. She’d tell him “leave them” on the porch. She was tired; she was going to bed. Next Peter came with field peas, cucumbers, onions, corn, tomatoes, radishes, green beans, peas, okra. She tell him, “put them on the porch; I tired!” Then William knocked. “What you want?” she say. “Mary Jane, I got a mess of loving out here,” he say. “Bring that t’ing on in,” she say. “That t’ing perishable!”

A door was a place of decision.

A photograph was a powerful thing. During the old days, at the river, the faithful were taken by the arm and waded to waist-deep waters, and taking the mystic hand for “drowning comfort,” they were baptized. A voice in the crowd might be heard to cry out, “that chile sure is getting a new soul!”

A photograph was a chance to freshen your soul, to let the world know you were winning against the devils. But Dorothea Lange knew how to get beyond your weariness and struggles, and beyond your hope. She waited on the moment of your truth, and got its image when it presented its gifts. She often photographed Southern women in their provision, standing or seated near their front doors. She caught their central reality. Not their conundrums, but the reversed responses that renew the triumphant self in the midst of cruel and inhuman conditions.

Unlike the growing exodus of tenant farmers out West, from the dust bowls to an unsuspecting California, the Depression didn’t change the lot of sharecroppers and tenants in the South, estimated at 1.83 million farmers. In fact, in the South during the Great Depression, people returned to the farm!

People think of a door as an entrance,
but the southern front door is an exit. It’s a dare.

They supplemented the thin edge of income with fish caught from nearby streams, with game from the hunting woods, deer, squirrels, bobwhites, shrimp, brim, catfish prepared with nonperishable staples of grits or rice.

In Georgia at the time, the annual rural income averaged $200 for whites (South Carolina averaged $151) and was substantially lower for blacks, less than a $100 a year. By 1935, Georgia land ownership for black farmers dropped below 12 percent. In April 1932, Mississippi foreclosed on one fourth of the state’s farmland. One North Carolina county saw 3,500 farms foreclosed. During this period, in Alabama, 207,000 farms were operated with sharecroppers and tenant laborers.

Their jobs, to prepare and work the fields, to harvest the crops, depended on the crop cycle. The South’s crop lands yielded wheat, tobacco, peaches, beans, corn, peanuts, potatoes, turpentine, oranges, sugar cane, rice, and cotton—even as market prices dropped. The workers’ meager wages depended on shares (a percentage of the harvest) and “furnish” credit. When reconciled, they usually reaped a deficit at year’s end. After an entire year’s work, they typically lost ground.

When not put on shares, picking cotton was paid as piece work. In the 1930s it paid a cent and a half a pound. Recently in the grocery store I met a man who worked in the fields as a child picking cotton for two and a half cents a pound. I have childhood friends who picked for three cents a pound. I remember a two cents a pound rate, with a fifty cents bonus if you reached a hundred pounds. Legendary pickers could make five dollars a day.

The depression made “fair to middling” (cotton grades, used by buyers) difference to these families who spent daylight bent from the waist, crab walking cotton fields, feet splayed like new foals, pulling fiber from its seed bowls, stuffing sacks longer than an elephant’s tusks. Gleaning fields where the air was too hot to breathe and the sun’s glare blinded their sight, and turned the skin on their arms and necks raw to the touch. (People wore long, loose sleeves, bandanas, and wide hats to keep the painful heat off their skin.)

No difference, either, the privation and aching fatigue for the ones tying tobacco, stacking wheat, tapping trees, or cutting sugar cane—the families and people in Dorothea Lange’s images. Her caption notes report field workers, for hoeing or “chopping” cotton in Alabama, made seventy-five cents for eleven to thirteen hour days. Off the farms, William Cash, a native son, summed up Southern mill towns before the Depression as “the squalid, the ugly, and the drab.” In his 1929 American Mercury article, Cash asserted the Southerner appeared “totally blind to the realities of his condition, (187)” in a “closed, ordered world (189).”

So how do Dorothea Lange’s three years of photographs get past the fascination and fear of the elephant?

The principle of creating a photograph, Dorothea Lange felt, draws from a special encounter, a special fearlessness: “one of the sharp instants of realization of the moment. It’s like making all parts of the world your natural element, through experience and through no alternatives for you (26).”It brings together in contact life history and the historical moment, the hardship and grace of the journey. Every Southerner knows: the difference between rising and falling tides and the powerful currents that move oceans and streams. While framing the height and depth of the Depression, Dorothea Lange photographs the evidence of the hidden power that moves and sustains and enables the rise of those who have been stagnant, or crushed and fallen.

The spare, minimalist portraits Dorothea Lange sets on the stark geography of fertile fields have a pull beyond their obvious irony and harsh details. In the 1960 interview with Reiss, she explained her working theory of how/why photographs communicate: “A good deal of the attraction between people, I think, is based on the fact that one is able to absorb the creation. The whole point of remembering these people is to try to find out what it is that forms you (68). I really and seriously tried, with every person I photographed, to reveal them as closely as I could (92).”

“Standing Among New Affairs”

Lange’s Graflex SLR Series D camera exposed 4 x 5 negatives and she lumbered with it across the South. Big, boxy, rugged, it was a contraption—but it was also a good icebreaker for children, who were curious about its parts and operation. She always took time to let children touch the camera and lens, an unassuming openness that won over many families with its sincerity. The Graflex, a solidly made American camera has had a long professional life and admiring fans. Lange knew its operation thoroughly.

The main body of Dorothea Lange’s three years of southern works are the 1,179 photographs in the Library of Congress FSA online archives (many prints are washed out, developed out of focus—the FSA lab work often drew Lange’s ire and complaint in the 1930s). Essays, interviews, exhibits, and the bulk of the Library of Congress collection of her photographs feature her California work. Her California work includes the most famous of the Library of Congress’ 12.5 million photographs, Lange’s 1936 photograph of a displaced Native American mother with three of her children, one an infant. A negative for her 1934 San Francisco photograph, “White Angel Bread Line,” at an October 2005 Southeby’s auction, sold for $822,400.

The spare, minimalist portraits Dorothea Lange sets on the stark geography of fertile fields have a pull beyond their obvious irony and harsh details.

Yet a major chapter of this portrait photographer who went from commercial and retail jobs, to society and business portraits, to being credited with creating the genre of documentary photography, to fame and exclusive auction sales, is missing without a careful review of her Southern work, a work that stretches and affirms her techniques with people and places daily unfamiliar, photographed for long periods on the fly, but rendered as if she—and we—knew their private moments all our lives. Lange remembers the context of the work: “That freedom that there was, where you found your own way, without criticism from anyone, was special. That was germane to that project. A person expands when he has an important thing to do.”

Lange was an American daughter of an German immigrant family. Her extended family included a brother, three grand uncles (all lithographers), two grand aunts, a school teacher and a nurse; her mother, a librarian and juvenile probation supervisor; an uncle, and a seamstress grandmother, all settled in New Jersey and lower Manhattan. As a child she roamed New York City alone, from the Bowery to Harlem.

At twenty-three, she and a girl friend (she, a dark room developer; her friend, a Western Union operator) set out for San Francisco. After being robbed by a pick-pocket and losing all of their money, Lange began her independent career by developing photographs in a downtown luggage and stationery store.

“Some Specialness Within”

At age forty, she was again on the road, in the South, to places where time and living had a different feeling than New Jersey, San Francisco or the Southwest. The South was physical, restricted; its grasp of purpose separated from the hands of those who lived and worked its land. Southern society organized contradictory ideals into a life from which there was no exit; sharecroppers and tenant farmers lived in a world where others wielded power and control. Somebody else took privilege over the basic choices of their lives and this power intruded into their living, approving a plight without apparent escape.

Those who challenged the system experienced violence and terror. The South appeared idyllic, but with easy nudges, it erupted into explosions. The Depression was something outside. In far away America. The South’s numbing poverty was always close at hand. Dorothea Lange never compromises or shades with despair the will to record what she sees. The experiences that guided her life furnish the method of her photographs: to observe others closely and be open to their stories. The authority of freedom is the living breath of the land; “It passes,” Emily Dickinson writes, “and we stay.” In the faces Lange photographs, it informs the “vision of their possibility” (157).

Lange plunged into this land where life was a prison of no relief, a land whose crumbling structures were built on psychic beliefs of injustice that most people ignored and were powerless to confront.

Many of her photographs are singular exemplars of hope. She was shooting portraits of people freed from slavery by the civil war, photographing their descendants. She made images of the people, white and black, who lived and worked the land, farming by hand, mired in debt. Mothers with too many children and too little food, with dreams; without means.

They were undefeated in spirit; ironically celebrating what was compliant and defiant. Her work, along with other FSA photographers (less than twenty!), compiled 207,000 images of this history, recorded its people, its conditions, a giant American landscape.

Dorothea Lange’s unerring instincts about people led her path through a seamless, guarded society. Navigating the South in the 1930s as her photographs did, required careful skill.

The paradox of the South, (and perhaps America), is a mask of transparency that opens only at certain times, that rivets our attention yet protests its view as an indiscretion, to hide its veil of misery and scorn. Somehow through the landmarks of veils, where “humanity confronts the fates” (235), Lange found the implicit awareness of the heroic scale of people facing forces beyond their control (235).

For some, her photographs were cause for protest. Her hard edged, pastoral, idyllic photographs “put the boot on the wrong foot.” The work of the FSA was considered dangerously subversive. Its expanding collection of photographs was touted as “an organized conspiracy to undermine the status quo in rural America.” Long after, Beverly Brannan, a curator at the Library of Congress, told Dorothea Lange’s granddaughter, Diana Taylor, in a film interview that in their time, Lange’s photographs were thought to be “purely propaganda for communism. That’s what they thought, propaganda for communism. But you are looking into the eyes of history.”

When a people grasp the force of their history, it endures. No matter how poor or oppressed, Lange finds its passage and authority in Southern faces. Around her is its source: it springs from the dirt, when the shoots of seeds push up to break ground. It springs from the branches as fruit. It pelts the ground as rain. Every Southerner who worked the land knows this once-multiplied, simple assurance. Seed grows with a magnificent, powerful force. No matter their poverty or position, or chances, the veil or footprint of misery, they knew this other; they felt it, observed it, touched it and took it in their hands.

They retold it when “spinning yarns,” an old nautical term for haunted tales. Telling yarns salved laughter on the porch’s splintered, broken edges. The tales’ continuous, creative morals paralleled the journey of finished cotton; the conundrum being the cotton brought more value than the hands that grew it and spun it. They recognized it before the day’s temperature touched their skin. They could see or smell or hear cold or heat in the air.

Dorothea Lange’s photographs present what Library of Congress poet Robert Hayden, in his poem, “Middle Passage,” termed “the timeless will.” The people she illuminates knew its seasons and silence. And by degrees, in places where burials were marked by broken lamps, they leaned on its grave persistence.

“Many times I encountered courage, real courage,” Dorothea Lange recalled. The courage to let go, to wait and seek; in a place where freedom is a surrender that avoids simple measures of gain or loss to advance by its own means.

The South is a vast region of different landscapes. From mountains and sand hills to fertile plains to coastal forests, and oxbow rivers, bayous and swamps: of Native American, English, Scot, and French heritage (along with others!) tied by its long, uneasy relations with Africans whose descendants were a majority of the rural farm population, the South Dorothea Lange photographed was a place of family secrets, whispered scandals, and open scorn. But tangled up underfoot, something else shines through in the time it takes to get straightened out; A bright, quiet judgment, as long and sure as the elephant’s memory. A comforting witness, a familiar companion to low and high. Fleeting and present, it did extraordinary beautiful things; like the moon’s tracing of the indigo night, shining behind the clouds.

For three years, Dorothea Lange found and recorded its fire and truth. Discussing her work, she recalled, it “did happen more than once that we unearthed and discovered what had been either neglected, or not known, in various parts of the country, things that no one else seemed to have observed in particular, yet things that were too important not to make a point of (174).”

Notes

Photographs by Dorothea Lange for the Farmers Security Administration (FSA), from the Library of Congress.

Header: Mississippi field workers. June 1937.
Part of a crew of 200 hoe workers. Leland, MS. June 1937.
Georgia tenant family. June 1936.
Oklahoma mother. March 1937.
Mississippi cotton field worker born four years “before the surrender.” June 1937.

Sharecropper boy. Chesnee, SC. June 1937.
North Carolina woman on her porch. June 1936.

Mississippi children. June 1937.
Arkansas migrant family. June 1937.
Alabama field worker, chopping cotton field. July 1936.
Women (kin) on relief. Memphis, Texas. June 1937.
Farm infant. Hillhouse, Mississippi. June-July 1937

Tennessee woman followed kin to Sacramento. Nov. 1936.
Delta children. Mississippi. June 1936.
Turpentine worker’s family. Wages a dollar a day. Cordele, Alabama. July 1936.
North Carolina Country Store.

Missouri migrant in Porterville, CA. Nov. 1936.
Peach pickers. 75 cents a day. Muscella, Georgia. June 1936.

Sub-heading titles (in order) are phrases from Gwendolyn Brooks poems, “do not be afraid of no” (2), “A Sunset of the City” (2), “Of Robert Frost.”