Written by Dorothea Lange

How do words and pictures work together? Dorothea Lange took great care in combining photographs with words to communicate the stories of everyday life.

When I began working with curator Sarah Meister on the exhibition Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures, she shared Lange’s reflection that “all photographs—not only those that are so-called “documentary”... can be fortified by words.” With this proposition as our guide, we dove into Lange’s work. We grappled with the many ways that Lange worked with both words and images to shape meaning, but also the ways in which her pictures continue to resonate beyond, and sometimes in spite of, the words that accompanied them. It’s not that Lange’s pictures fall silent in the face of words; it’s rather that Lange thought with great care about how words could support, extend, and “fortify” the reach of her images.

At a moment of contemporary environmental, economic, and political crisis, it feels both timely and urgent to turn to artists like Lange, who documented migration, labor politics, and economic inequities—issues that remain largely unresolved today. Lange was needed in her time, but we may need her even more urgently now.

From 1935 to 1939, Lange worked with government agencies to draw attention to the economic and environmental crisis of the Dust Bowl drought and the Great Depression. In early 1935 Lange was hired by Paul Taylor and the California State Emergency Relief Administration as a typist—a salary for a photographer had not yet been approved. Working together, Lange and Taylor produced reports pairing his typed analysis with her photographs and handwritten captions, taken from interviews with people they encountered. Lange recounts running quickly to write down the precise words people used to describe their circumstances; these fragments of conversation and individual stories often reveal what isn’t immediately visible: locations, forms of labor, routes of travel, racial and ethnic differences. Together, the words and pictures made the case for government intervention on behalf of migrant workers and drought refugees. The caption, “If I could earn $4.00 a week we could get along” sits alongside a portrait of a father, mother, and their three children—presumably Mexican laborers near Thermal, California, just south of Coachella on State Route 111.

Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor's landmark photobook An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion weaves together text drawn from field notes, folk song lyrics, newspaper excerpts, sociological observations, and quotations from the sharecroppers, displaced people, and migrant workers whom Lange photographed. Informed by the methods they used while collaborating on government reports, An American Exodus is a compassionate document of the grim economic and environmental circumstances and personal costs of the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression. Read today, the book appears as a work of love and care for others, but also as a testament to Lange and Taylor’s relationship as partners and lifelong collaborators.

During World War II, Lange turned her camera to the conflict’s impact on Americans. Some of her most affecting images are of the Japanese Americans sent to internment camps in 1941, after Executive Order 9066 and subsequent orders authorized their imprisonment. Lange had been hired by the War Relocation Authority to document the internment, but the photographs were withheld from circulation. “They had wanted a record,” Lange later recalled, “but not a public record.” In One Nation Indivisible, Lange focuses our attention on a seven-year-old girl, Hideno Nakamoto; she stands amid a group of students reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The children gaze upward, presumably at a flag or teacher leading them in the ceremony. Lange positioned her camera low, recording the children at their level; the portrait conveys an earnest innocence that seems to call out the inhumanity of the government action to come.

Other variants of the image, which was taken at Raphael Weill School in San Francisco, also show the girl to Nakamoto’s right: Yoko Itashiki. Subsequently their families were forcibly removed to Tanforan Assembly Center, and then to Topaz Relocation Center in Utah. (In 2007, photographer Paul Kitagaki interviewed and photographed the two Japanese American women. That later portrait stands as evidence of their survival and of this devastating chapter in US history.)

From 1955 to 1957 Lange worked on a photo essay following the day-to-day work of Martin Pulich, a public defender in Alameda County, California. Lange’s research files for the project contain copies of criminal justice reform proceedings of 1955, evidence of her awareness and interest in the public defender’s role and the significance of the federal program. While the public defender program was established in California in 1915, it wasn’t until 1964 that a federal version followed. The photographs never circulated widely during her lifetime, but posthumously, in 1969, the National Lawyers Guild published first a pamphlet and then a handbook titled Minimizing Racism in Jury Trials: The Voir Dire Conducted by Charles R. Garry in People of California v. Huey P. Newton, after the Black Panther Party cofounder’s first trial. Lange’s photograph depicting the battered doors of the police vehicle, which seem to show traces of violent struggle, evoke the racial bias and police harassment described in the text.

In preparation for her 1966 MoMA retrospective, Lange worked with curator John Szarkowski on selecting and sequencing pictures for each section. In a section titled the Last Ditch, Lange choreographed a sequence of photographs alongside a first-person text: “I am trying here to say something about the despised, the defeated, the alienated. About death and disaster. About the wounded, the crippled, the helpless, the rootless, the dislocated. About duress and trouble. About finality. About the last ditch.” We get the sense that Lange is speaking of an effort that extended across her time of making individual pictures; she also began to arrange groups of images in what she called “photographic statements.”

When Lange died just three months before the retrospective opened, I can only guess at the sense of responsibility Szarkowski must have felt in carrying out her vision. In an annotated photograph of the Last Ditch, mocked up in her studio during preparations for the exhibition, Lange’s notes reveal the process of carefully weighing combinations of images, shuffling, editing: below her most iconic image, Migrant Mother, she has drawn a red box and the words “Woman on Great Plains (subst.)”. These words conjure the photograph that was eventually installed on this wall, demonstrating the ways that words and pictures reference, link, and sometimes stand in for one another.

In an interview toward the end of her life, Lange remarked about her work, “You see it’s evidence. It’s not pictorial illustration, it’s evidence. It’s a record of human experience. It’s linked with history. We were after the truth, not just making effective pictures. To tell the truth is in some people’s nature and it can be a habit, but you can also get in the habit of not telling the truth.” Lange’s conviction in photography’s ability to function as a “record of human experience” comes from the position of someone embedded in the experience and the history that she records. Lange remained dedicated to seeing and telling truths over the course of her nearly 40-year career.

Read more in the exhibition's catalogue.