Dorothea Lange - "Just to Come in the Room Where She Was"
One rarely sees pictures of the photographer Dorothea Lange. The woman she photographed who became the face of the Depression is the migrant woman, Florence Owens Thompson. But it is the photo taken by Lange's husband, the economist Paul Schuster Taylor, of Lange herself atop the roof and hood of a car that is striking in its own way and a reminder of their own relationship.
An excerpt from "Face to Face with Paul and Dorothea," Professor Emeritus Clark Kerr's memory of the couple, printed in a California Alumni Association, California Monthly:
Although Paul's original interest in Dorothea stemmed from his conception of the camera as a tool of research, their relationship became far more than a professional collaboration. It became a great love affair. Paul later said: "It was always a wonderful thing to see her. Always. Just to come into the room where she was." Years later, I would visit Paul in the old redwood house on Euclid Avenue which Dorothea had chosen for them. As Paul played Beethoven softly on his hi-fi set, we would talk about being on the ground in the Thirties. Dorothea's name would come up and Paul would sit there with tears streaming down his face as I recalled his tender words - "just to come into the room where she was."
But back to Florence Owens Thompson, in Lange's own words:
http://memory.loc.gov/service/pnp/ppmsca/12800/12883r.jpg
"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (Lange, “The Assignment I'll Never Forget: Migrant Mother,” Popular Photography, February 1960)"
"Whatever the woman, Florence Owens Thompson, thought of Lange's actions at the time, she came to regret that Lange ever made the photographs, which she felt permanently colored her with a Grapes of Wrath stereotype. Thompson, a Native American from Oklahoma, had already lived in California for a decade when Lange photographed her. The immediate popularity of the images in the press did nothing to alleviate the financial distress that had spurred the family to seek seasonal agricultural work. Contrary to the despairing immobility the famous image seems to embody, however, Thompson was an active participant in farm labor struggles in the 1930s, occasionally serving as an organizer. Her daughter later commented, 'She was a very strong woman. She was a leader. I think that's one of the reasons she resented the photo — because it didn't show her in that light.' "
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has a series of videos and audios of Ms. Lange that can be viewed at their site.
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