Dorothea Lange's most famous photograph is also, as Linda Gordon notes in this studious biography, one of America's most famous photographs. It is her portrait of Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant worker who, like countless others, had journeyed west from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression. For a long time, it was known simply as Migrant Mother and, like many of Lange's images from the 1930s, it is stark and beautiful. It is also problematic, because of its contested context and the issues it raises about the morality of documentary photography.
Lange was travelling around California in March 1936 documenting the plight of the wandering "Okies" for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), part of Roosevelt's New Deal programme, when she chanced upon Thompson and her children. They were huddled in a makeshift shelter near their car, which had broken down on Highway 101 by the entrance to a pea-pickers' camp. In her notes of the encounter, Lange wrote: "I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was 32. 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."
In 1958, Thompson made herself, and her frustration with Lange, known though a powerfully inarticulate letter to a photography magazine in which she demanded that her portrait no longer be used without her permission. By then, of course, it was too late. The photograph had long since floated free of its subject, and of its creator, becoming a symbol of something greater than either of them could have imagined.
In A Life Beyond Limits, Linda Gordon writes: "Lange was shaken – frightened and miserable that her photograph had caused grief." She was also powerless to do anything about it. Then, in 1978, 13 years after Lange's death, a reporter tracked down the 75-year-old Thompson. She was living in a mobile home in Modesto, California. "I wish she had never taken my picture," she said of Lange. "I can't get a penny out of it. She didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the picture."
Gordon rebuts Thompson's claim that Lange had told her the image would not be published. Her case for the defence is a strong one: FSA photographers knew that their images would be widely disseminated for the common good so it is unlikely that Lange would have said otherwise. Likewise, Thompson's long anonymity was decided not by Lange but by the project's guidelines that instructed photographers contracted to the FSA not to record the names of their subjects.
Nevertheless, one's sympathies lie with Florence Owens Thompson who, it transpires, was not a white American but a Cherokee. She had lived on the margins of American society while Lange's portrait of her was reproduced around the globe, becoming an icon of American suffering and stoicism. "Its reputation grew," writes Gordon, "because it symbolised white motherhood and white dustbowl refugees… Would the photograph have had such popularity if viewers had known its subject was a woman of colour?" The ironies that attend this single image, then, echo the contradictions that attend America's collective – and revisionist – notion of nationhood.
Lange's reputation rests to a great degree on that image and on the body of sociopolitical work that she made in that decade. Unlike Walker Evans, who also created unforgettable images of the Depression for the FSA, she did not go on to reinvent herself as a visionary artist. Operating somewhere between reportage and portraiture, her vision was essentially a romantic one.
For me, Lange's most powerful photographs are the ones that challenge our view of her. The stark landscape that is The Road West (1938) is a case in point. It depicts Highway 54 stretching ahead into the horizon. Devoid of human presence, the sky ahead as grey as the road, it is as desolate a metaphor for the hopelessness of the time as any of her more studied portraits of the poor.
Gordon's biography is meticulously researched and pays particular and illuminating attention to her formative years: the polio that left her lame but made her so strong-willed; the bohemian circles she gravitated to, and thrived in, in New York and then San Francisco; the first husband whose nostalgic vision of a prelapsarian America so influenced her vision. Maynard Dixon was a Californian painter in thrall to the Old West of prairies, deserts and campfires. Looking at Lange's portraits of the Native American Hopi elders, one can sense his presence in her work, and see how artfully she could construct an image that resonated with received meanings – the romance of the primitive, the stoicism of the dispossessed – and how many of those same meanings were embedded in the American consciousness by photography. You sense, too, that, even as the young Lange grew as a photographer when she began turning her camera on the poor who lined up outside the soup kitchens of San Francisco's Mission district in 1932, she never quite jettisoned the belief that photography should be restrained and uplifting even when its subject matter was not.
This approach worked in her favour when she was commissioned to photograph the Japanese-American citizens who were rounded up and placed in internment camps during the Second World War. Ordered by the authorities not to show watchtowers or barbed wire fences, she focused instead on the dignity and humanity of a people caught – and imprisoned – between two cultures. Her great photographs, as Gordon memorably puts it, "wept more than they raged".
Gordon is big on gender politics and makes much of the notion that Lange thrived at a moment when photography was a new form not solely defined by male practitioners. She maps out her troubled childhood and her later struggle to balance the responsibilities of motherhood with the demands of her calling, but the living, breathing woman behind the camera remains frustratingly elusive throughout. Nevertheless, this is a long-overdue study of a great and pioneering photographer – albeit one who never quite escaped the long shadow of the decade that she helped to define and that so defined her.
