Dorothea Lange's America

R E Y N O L DA H O U S E P R E S E N T S

SEPTEMBER 14 —DECEMBER 30

S E P T. 14 TH RO U G H

DOROTHEA LANGE’S AMERICA

D EC . 30

In the 1930s, the twin cataclysms of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl inspired a group of socially conscious photographers to capture the mass exodus of Americans from their homes and farms. Photographer Dorothea Lange (1885–1965) rose to preeminence with empathetic images of migrant workers, suffering families, and tortured landscapes that seared the effects of the Depression into the conscience of the nation. Her most celebrated photographs of that era—Migrant Mother, White Angel Breadline, and Migratory Cotton Picker—have become icons in American cultural history.

The working method Lange developed was gentle, open, and personal. She engaged her photographic subjects in conversation, winning their confidence and their consent to be photographed.

Her pictures typically focus on a single figure, even amidst a crowd shot. And work—its presence or absence—was a constant theme, connected, perhaps, to a frequent emphasis on people’s hands. The artistic merit of Lange’s work was recognized almost immediately; it led to a long and fruitful collaboration with the New Deal’s Farm Security Administration (FSA). By raising public awareness of the dire need for federal assistance around the country and helping convince Congress to provide it, her work helped alleviate the suffering of the very people she depicted.

Lange’s photographs will be supplemented by photographs by other notable social documentarians of the era, including Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee, and Mike Disfarmer.

All photographs in the exhibition are original lifetime prints, including several oversized exhibition prints.

— All works in the exhibition are from the collection of Michael Mattis and Judith Hochberg. The exhibition was organized by art2art Circulating Exhibitions.

Reynolda House is grateful for the generous support of the exhibition from Lead Sponsors Claire & Hudnall Christopher and Debbie & Mike Rubin; Contributing Sponsor Alex. Brown, a division of Raymond James; and Exhibition Partners Lynn & Barry Eisenberg, Pam & Fred Kahl, and Phoenix Packaging.

P L A N YO U R V I S IT AT R E Y N O LDA H O U S E .O RG/A M E R I CA

R E Y N O LDA H O U S E P R E S E NTS

Dorothea Lange, Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Pinal County, Arizona, 1940. Gelatin silver photograph, 10 x 13 in. Š The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California. Gift of Paul S. Taylor.

Image: Dorothea Lange, Displaced Tenant Farmers, Goodlet, Hardeman Co., Texas, 1938. © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California.

Gift of Paul S. Taylor.

“What am I doing here? What drives me to do this hard thing?”

DOROTHEA LANGE IN CONVERSATION

SUZANNE B. RIESS: After your marriage to Dr.

Taylor [December 1935], did you and he travel together on field and photographing trips?

DOROTHEA LANGE : The first five years, until the

war interrupted, he went on some of the big field trips with me. He had assignments where the regions were parallel so we were together a lot of the time. It wasn’t that he was with me all of the time. He’d be with me maybe a month and then he had to go back to Washington and he would rejoin me in the summers. And a good deal of the discipline that I needed in order to get hold of such an assignment—some of them had a very broad base—he gave me on those trips. So I never quite did what some of the photographers on that job, some of the best ones—I say best because what came out of it at the end was decidedly important —did, the haphazard shooting. I learned a good deal from Paul about being a social observer.

RIESS: I wanted to ask you about haphazard

shooting, and particularly in the situation of the FSA team. Why do photographers take so many pictures of the same subject instead of pinpointing what it is they want to show and tell in a few shots?

Late in her life, legendary photographer Dorothea Lange relutanctly granted an interview to California’s Regional Oral History Office.

Over the course of one year, interviewer Suzanne B. Riess peered into Lange’s interior world while asking about her childhood, documentary photography, her subjects, and her travels. Fearing the resulting interview was too personal, Lange nearly threw the manuscript in the fire. In the end, Lange offered only minor edits in 1964, before dying of cancer in 1965 at age 70.

their letters in triplicate—you can’t do it, but I certainly wouldn’t seriously criticize a photographer who works completely without plan, and photographs that to which he instinctively responds. In fact, that’s a pretty good guide—that to which you respond. I have all my Asian work that I’m going into now, cutting right into the middle of it, and I find that it proves that a very good way to work—I’m careful not to say “the only way to work” because there is none—a very good way to work is open yourself as wide as you can, which in itself is a difficult thing to do, just to be yourself like a piece of unexposed, sensitized material.

To know ahead of time what you’re looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false. It’s a very difficult thing to be exposed to the new and strange worlds that you know nothing about, and find your way. That’s a big job. It’s hard, without relying on past performances and finding your own little rut, which comforts you. It’s a hard thing to be lost.

RIESS: And so you watch and wait...

LANGE: You force yourself to watch and

LANGE: It’s highly desirable to make more

than one shot on the same subject. There isn’t always time. In fact, there is rarely time to work deliberately. When you get going, you have to shoot fast. Like asking a person to write

wait. You accept all the discomfort and the disharmony. Being out of your depth is a very uncomfortable thing. In travel, for instance, you force yourself onto strange streets, among strangers. It may be very hot. It may be

Interview excerpt: Dorothea Lange, “The Making of a Documentary Photographer,” interview by Suzanne B. Reiss, 1968, Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 176-179.

painfully cold. It may be sandy and windy and you say, “What am I doing here? What drives me to do this hard thing?” You ask yourself that question.

You could be so comfortable, doing other things, somewhere else. You know?

RIESS: You didn’t feel out of your element for

long when you were doing the Farm Security Administration photography, did you?

LANGE: Sometimes I did. Oh, the end of the day

was a great relief, always. “That’s behind me.”

But at the moment when you’re thoroughly involved, when you’re doing it, it’s the greatest real satisfaction.

RIESS: At the moment of photographing, not the

moment of developing?

LANGE: Never then. But at the moment when you

say, “I think maybe... I think that was all right... maybe that will be it.” And you know when you’re working fairly well. You have a stretch. But as I say, every day as it passes you say, after it’s done.

It’s over. I did the best I could. I didn’t do very well but I did the best I could... There’s nothing on the film. I’m sure there’s nothing on it, nothing worth recording...” What I’m trying to say is, photography for the people who play around with it is very exhilarating and a lot of fun. If you take it seriously, it’s very difficult. There’s no end to the difficulties.”

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... 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.

D O ROTH E A L A N G E , 1960 Dorothea Lange, Nipomo, Calif. March 1936. Migrant agricultural worker’s family.

Seven hungry children and their mother, aged 32. The father is a native Californian, 1936. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USZ62-58355.

A MOMENTARY ENCOUNTER

Dorothea Lange, Nipomo, Calif. Mar. 1936. Migrant agricultural worker’s family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged 32. Father is a native Californian, 1936. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-9097-C.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant agricultural worker’s family. Seven children without food. Mother aged 32, father is a native Californian, 1936. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/ OWI Collection, LC-USF34-9095.

Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8b29516.

Dorothea Lange’s field notes for this photograph read: “Migrant agricultural worker’s family. Seven hungry children. Mother, age thirty-two. Father is a native Californian. Destitute in pea pickers’ camp, Nipomo California, because of the failure of the early pea crop. These people had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Of the 2,500 people in this camp, most of them were destitute.”

A woman looks with concern into the fields that provide her family’s only source of nourishment and income. Her young brow is furrowed, and three of her children surround her like a halo (or a set of shackles?). Her name is Florence Owens Thompson, and she was born in 1903 in a teepee, a child of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma. In the 1930s, Thompson moved with the crop harvests, picking vegetables or cotton—as much as 500 pounds of cotton a day while carrying “babies in bags” and weighing less than a hundred pounds herself. Lange made six images of the family, while they waited out the cold snap and survived on frozen peas and birds that the children killed. “We just existed,” Florence Thompson told Lange. “We survived. Let’s put it that way.”

Thompson was wary of being represented as a victim, but Lange convinced her that photography could call attention to the desperate plight of the working poor. Migrant Mother directly served the FSA’s mission to relieve the struggles of hardworking Americans, becoming a definitive image of the Great Depression in the national press and on an international tour of FSA photography. Four decades later, a reporter interviewed Florence Thompson, who corrected some inaccuracies in Lange’s account and resented the fact that she had remained poor while her image enjoyed global fame.

Neither Lange nor Thompson could have foreseen the afterlife of Migrant Mother, a momentary encounter that became an immortal emblem of American motherhood.

Phil Archer Deputy Director, Reynolda House

AN IMPORTANT PARTNERSHIP Dorothea Lange’s photography documented the hardship and heartbreak of a generation, producing some of the most arresting images of the 20th century. Dorothea Lange’s America presents myriad pathways for appreciation, including exploring what these works of art from the 1930s can mean to us in 2018.

Throughout history, art has been a medium through which people like Lange have not only documented history, but also helped shape it. Works of art can provide an opening into experiences very different from our own; indeed, the word ‘empathy’ was coined to describe the way we can feel our way into other lives, joys, and struggles. At Reynolda, we embrace the opportunities for such experiences each day. As we bear witness to the poverty of nearly a century ago, we can reflect on the correlations and divergences to contemporary American poverty. Here, we can provide a new lens through which to understand the struggles before us and set the table for the dialogue and action that are necessary to move us toward a hunger-free tomorrow.

Poverty remains persistent and significant in our communities. Contemporary poverty looks different from the poverty of Lange’s time, making it sometimes unrecognizable and hard to see, but its impacts on children, on seniors, on families, and on community health remain the same. Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina is leading the work of building healthy, hunger-free communities. Through collaboration, innovation, advocacy, and leadership, Second Harvest works to address root causes of hunger and poverty to improve the lives of our neighbors and make our communities places where we can all prosper.

We are honored that our organizations have come together this fall to highlight the very best of innovative partnerships: those that elevate both the aesthetic values and the social needs of a thriving community. We look forward to hearing about what pathways open for you during visits to Dorothea Lange’s America.

Allison Perkins Reynolda House Executive Director, Wake Forest Associate Provost for Reynolda House & Reynolda Gardens

Eric Aft CEO, Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina

Art has been a medium through which people like Lange have not only documented history, but also helped shape it.

Dorothea Lange, White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco, 1933. © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California.

Gift of Paul S. Taylor.

STORIES FROM OUR HOME From Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina

There’s no buffer, no breathing room. Anything unexpected and we’re back to scrambling that mountain and back here at this pantry.

A.C., Wilkesboro, NC

The portraits and stories here reflect an all too common reality: household budgets that simply don’t add up. Nearly one in seven Northwest North Carolinians cannot reliably afford enough food to live an active, healthy life. For children, the situation is even worse: one in five is at risk of not getting enough to eat. Through its core food and nutrition programs, Second Harvest Food Bank provides immediate food assistance for neighbors in need through a network of more than 460 local partner programs throughout an 18-county service area.

hungernwnc.org

Older folks have had a whole lot of life doing for themselves. It’s hard for them to ask for help.

D.G., Greensboro, NC

Summertime, especially, can feel so impossible. I can go without, but my kids have to eat.

A Mom, Greensboro, NC

My family hasn’t always been in this position. There was a time we owned a house and we made plenty of money to feed our children, but our circumstances changed.

I could see the familiar pain and worry in their eyes. When I share my story, I know it’s helpful, especially to other young mothers.

S.R., Thomasville, NC

C.B., Burlington, NC

WALKER EVANS IN THE TWIN CITY

Walker Evans, [Untitled photo, possibly related to: WinstonSalem, North Carolina, 1935]. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8a20042.

Above: Walker Evans, Negro houses, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1935. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8a19641.

Left: Walker Evans, [Untitled photo, possibly related to: Negro houses, Winston-Salem, North Carolina, 1935]. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8a19635.

The national movement of social documentary photography reached Winston-Salem in two notable ways.

Photographer Walker Evans shot Negro houses, WinstonSalem, NC, reproduced here, on his visit to the Twin City in 1935. Scholars have commented on Evans’s fascination with the stillness and formality he witnessed in plain, often decaying, “vernacular” architecture. In the simple lines of the homes, Evans saw beauty. At the time, Evans was working for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a New Deal program created to alleviate rural poverty. With these photographs, Evans offered evidence of previously undocumented poverty in one corner of the South.

Local scholars have been unable to place Evans’s Negro houses series, or his compelling Lincoln Market photograph, ostensibly from the same visit to Winston-Salem in 1935.

While there are a few likely suspects for the featured neighborhood, the photographs’ lack of identifiable landmarks and our inability to place them are indicative of Evans’s personal style, the FSA’s focus on representative themes (not specific places), and the overwhelming disparity that existed within the population.

Evans had done. Reynolds’s photographers encountered appalling conditions, primarily in black neighborhoods.

In one instance, up to thirty-two families were witnessed sharing one cold-water spigot and three toilets. Reynolds bypassed the aldermen and shared his evidence with federal officials, who allocated money for the first federal housing project in North Carolina.

Evans’s photographs of Winston-Salem, as well as those in our exhibition, Dorothea Lange’s America, put on display a level of disparity that we often associate with a bygone era.

However, as we’re learning this season with our partners at Second Harvest Food Bank of Northwest North Carolina, we have not come so far.

These photographs can be seen in a complementary exhibition, Walker Evans: Landscapes in Transition, on view at the Charlotte and Philip Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University this Fall.

Chris Jordan Manager of Community and Academic Learning Reynolda House

Five years later, Dick Reynolds (R.J. Reynolds, Jr.) ran for Mayor of Winston-Salem on a platform of improving dire conditions in some neighborhoods. The Board of Aldermen issued a statement that the city had no slums, demonstrating the “out of sight, out of mind” mentality that the FSA was combatting. Reynolds won office and immediately commissioned photographers to document the slums he knew to exist, if less artfully than Walker

Walker Evans, [Untitled photo, possibly related to: WinstonSalem, North Carolina, 1935].

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8a20044.

SEPTEMBER COMPLEMENTARY EXHIBITION

EXHIBITION

After Documentary: Photography, 1980—Present West Bedroom Gallery, Reynolda House What can we know from a photograph? When photography was introduced to the public in 1839, commentators immediately praised its ability to provide an accurate representation of people and events. This belief in the ability of the photograph to show us the world as it is led to the idea of documentary photography and, by the 1930s, artists such as Dorothea Lange used the camera as a tool to explore social situations and create a record of lived experience. Yet, the photograph is always prone to manipulation— the staging of a subject or darkroom techniques—made even easier through use of digital cameras and programs such as Photoshop.

Drawn from the art collection of Wake Forest University and curated by Wake Forest students, the photographs in this exhibition complicate or question the legacy of documentary photography. They examine photography’s relation to reality as well as its ability to create alternate realities. Now through December 30.

PAY-WHAT-YOU-WISH THURSDAY PRESENTED BY MACY’S

Thursday, September 27; Museum open until 8 p.m.

Program begins at 6 p.m.

Admission is pay what you wish. Cash donations to the Museum and to Second Harvest Food Bank are welcome. Music, cash bar, and light refreshments from Second Harvest’s Providence Catering.

With Migrant Mother, Dorothea Lange captured something universal in the face of Florence Owens Thompson, leading generations of observers to empathize with the stranger in the photograph. Local residents who have lived the migrant experience will share their own stories in this program copresented by the New Winston Museum.

Want more Reynolda? Continue the night at the More Barn Concert Series with Aaron Burdett. Tickets and info at reynoldavillage.com.

GRAB A HUNK OF LIGHTNING

September 28—October 4 Screenings at a/perture cinema For showtimes and tickets, visit aperturecinema.com. Reynolda House members will receive the a/perture member rate.

Award-winning cinematographer Dyanna Taylor, Dorothea Lange’s granddaughter, directed and narrated this intimate documentary that explores Lange’s life, probes the nature of her muses—two great men and the camera itself—and reveals her uncompromising vision.

OCTOBER CONCERT: HARD TIMES AND HOPE: SONGS OF STRUGGLE FROM THE DUST BOWL TO THE BLUE RIDGE

Saturday, October 6, 3 p.m. $40/$30 members of the Museum and students. Tickets include admission to Dorothea Lange’s America and are available at reynoldahouse.org/blueridge.

Reynolda partners with the regionally syndicated 88.5 WFDD radio program Across the Blue Ridge to present this intimate live performance featuring a Grammy Award-winning co-founder of the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Dom Flemons; bluegrass legend Alice Gerrard; and Appalachian singer Kay Justice. Paul Brown, a former NPR journalist, award-winning musician, and host of Across the Blue Ridge, will host the concert with his wife and fellow musician, Terri McMurray.

BOOK TALK: HARD, HARD RELIGION WITH JOHN HAYES

Thursday, October 11, 6 p.m. $10/ $8 members of the Museum and students Free for Wake Forest University employees Historian John Hayes examines the ways folk religion in the early 20th century allowed the South’s poor to listen, borrow, and learn from each other about what it meant to live as Christians in a world of severe struggle. Hayes is associate professor of history at Augusta University. This program is presented with the Wake Forest University Department for the Study of Religions.

EVENTS

MIGRANT MOTHER, MIGRANT GENDER: RECONSIDERING DOROTHEA LANGE’S ICON OF MATERNIT Y, WITH SALLY STEIN

Thursday, October 18, 6-8 p.m.; gallery open from 5:30-6 p.m. $15/$10 members of the Museum, students, and members of a/perture cinema This talk will revisit the great photographic career of Dorothea Lange by offering a new perspective on the making of Migrant Mother, her most famous Depression-era image, and its changing reception over the last eight decades. Stein is professor emerita of art history & film and media studies at University of California, Irvine, and the author of the essay “Peculiar Grace: Dorothea Lange and the Testimony of the Body,” published in Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life.

PAY-WHAT-YOU-WISH THURSDAY PRESENTED BY MACY’S

Thursday, October 25; Museum open until 8 p.m.

Admission is pay what you wish. Cash donations to the Museum and to Second Harvest Food Bank are welcome. Music, cash bar, and light refreshments from Second Harvest’s Providence Catering.

The Crossnore School & Children’s Home brings the pumpkin patch to Reynolda! Paint a masterpiece on your pumpkin just in time for Halloween. Enjoy hot cider and live music while you indulge your inner artist.

OCTOBER —NOVEMBER SUNDAY AFTERNOON FILM SERIES

$15/film; $40 for the series. Films begin at 2 p.m.

The Depression era was one the most significant periods in film history, producing numerous masterpieces and changing the role of filmmaking and moviegoing in American life. In this three-week series, a local film scholar will introduce a screening of, and provide commentary following, three Depression-era films.

October 21: Sullivan’s Travels with Angus MacLachlan, screenwriter and director October 28: I am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang with Dale Pollock, filmmaker, writer, and professor of cinema studies and distinguished scholar at University of North Carolina School of the Arts School of Filmmaking November 4: The Grapes of Wrath with David Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art at Wake Forest University

COMPLEMENTARY EXHIBITION

Walker Evans: Landscapes in Transition; opens October 29 The Charlotte and Philip Hanes Art Gallery at Wake Forest University Walker Evans: Landscapes in Transition will gather a collection of photographs, newly printed from the archives of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., that demonstrate both the formal and social intelligence of the artist. Taken at the height of the Great Depression in the mid-1930s under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration, Evans’s images chart an America in the process of transformation: the idiosyncratic architecture and hand-drawn commercial signage of the American South was giving way to the standardization associated with modern life, of which photography itself played a role. The exhibition will also address decidedly local concerns, featuring photographs Evans took in Winston-Salem.

Dorothea Lange, “Grapes of Wrath” Billboard, 1939. Photo negative, 5 x 4 in. © The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California. Gift of Paul S. Taylor.

One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable.

I have only touched it, just touched it.

DOROTH EA LANGE

R E Y N O LDA H O U S E .O RG/A M E R I CA