Teaching the Article

Dorothea Lange was one of the world’s great documentary photographers. Because so much of her work was done on the federal government payroll, her images are in the public domain and have been reprinted thousands of times, even for advertisements. A few photographs have been so widely distributed that they have become icons. I have learned that if I ask my students to describe their visual images of the Great Depression of the 1930s, many will describe Lange photographs.

Most writing about Lange has been produced by photography journalists or scholars who are understandably most interested in her technique, her approach, her composition, and how she managed to bestow such dignity upon her subjects, no matter how plebeian or unassuming. Scholars of visual culture have discussed in scores of books and articles what is meant by documentary photography, a new category in the 1930s, and they often treat Lange as a key exemplar. Historians have used her photographs extensively, but usually as illustrations of textual descriptions.

No scholars, however, have focused on what Lange chose to photograph. In the course of working on a biography of Lange, I came to understand, with some degree of surprise, that she was extremely knowledgeable about American agriculture and farm labor and that she set out to create a systematic appraisal of it. She acquired that knowledge mainly from her husband Paul Schuster Taylor, a leading agricultural economist. It is not so much that he lectured her or provided her with reading material, but that they worked and traveled together for an intensive five years. During that time she listened to his explanations and conversations with interviewees, observed the questions he asked, and discussed his writing and his strategizing to raise the living standards of farm workers. She absorbed from him a skepticism toward corporate power and a capacity for empathy with the poor and an appreciation of their hard work. Taylor was one of the rare whites in the 1920s and 1930s who did not believe that people of color—African Americans, Mexican Americans, Japanese and Chinese Americans—belonged on the bottom of society’s ladder. Lange and Taylor formed a great personal/political/professional partnership, in the mold of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. But if Lange, who had only a high school education, had not been a systematic and rigorous thinker, and if she had not been a passionate democrat with great respect for manual labor, she would not have been able to absorb Taylor’s thinking and deepen it through her visual acumen.

By titling my article “The Photographer as Agricultural Sociologist,” I sought to call attention to the information in her depression-era photographs. Lange was hired by the Farm Security Administration (fsa) in 1935 to document rural aspects of the depression, and, in some cases, she received specific assignments and was dutiful and efficient in executing them: photograph a particular fsa project, picture conditions in cotton harvesting, show the degree of farm mechanization. But she went beyond those assignments, as did other fsa photographers such as Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, Russell Lee, and Gordon Parks, creating photography that was not only informative but also persuasive, dramatic, gripping, and haunting.

Their boss, Roy Stryker, encouraged and guided that development, thereby contributing as much as the photographers to a new understanding of documentary photography—that its function to inform, persuade, and call attention to injustice need not subtract from its artistic value. Stryker created an invaluable (and, unfortunately, never repeated) government project: it showed America a part of itself, not in the bureaucratic language of a typical government report, but in a way that could communicate both widely and intimately. It was as personal as a family album. This national photo album gave millions a sense of the agricultural depression and the need for government action to end it.

The exercises that follow are designed to encourage an examination of fsa photographs in this way. They aim to create some understanding of the fsa and how the photography project fit into its other functions. They aim to explain why Lange cared so much about including textual captions with her photographs. They ask students to consider racism in 1930s America and Lange’s efforts to combat it visually.