… getting back on topic, after the previous diversions…
This is part of the essay, Photographic Facts and Thirties America by Anne Wilkes Tucker in the collection of essays, Observations: Essays on Documentary Photography edited by David Featherstone (1984) — in which Tucker compares the documentary attitude of Walker Evans to that of Dorothea Lange:
He [Evans] assumed that the photograph, like the physical universe it recorded, would have its own internal order, independent of his or his audience’s feelings or beliefs.
versus:
Lange trusted the persuasive power of information; facts that heightened and directed emotional responses were important.
Below, with the above quotes in context, I have included my reactions to some of it in square brackets within the quoted text.
[Dorothea] Lange’s and [Walker] Evans’ differences in their use of photography are apparent in the equipment they used and in the size and quality of their photographic prints. They also differed in their regard for and use of facts. Evans’ subjects were chosen not for their inherent drama nor for their social significance, but rather as cultural and historical referents, and for the pictorial logic Evans wanted them to satisfy. He assumed that the photograph, like the physical universe it recorded, would have its own internal order, independent of his or his audience’s feelings or beliefs. Seeking an intellectual, rather than an emotional appeal, Evans controlled pictorial tension, not the tension between his subjects and the picture’s audience. He strove for clarity of representation, not empathy; in not seeking change he supported the status quo. [I think the word “supported” is not justified here.]
For Lange, a compelling photograph presented an engaging human drama that addressed questions larger than the immediate subject. Her subjects gained importance from external value systems; she was, by her own definition, a social-documentary photographer involved in the social and political events of her time. “We were after the truth,” she wrote, “not just making effective pictures.” [This statement seems contradictory, to me. “Effective” implies personal intent.]
She was concerned with the human condition, and the value of a fact was measured in terms of its own consequences. [The “value” of a fact? Whose value?] When she photographed natural disasters like land erosion or floods, she focused on how the event translated into human experience and on how she could convey the human suffering inflicted and endured. She had, Beaumont Newhall observes “a burning desire to help people to know one another’s problems” because — and this is essential to any understanding of the drive behind the social documentary movement — she believed that knowledge provoked actions, that if people knew about something which required their support, they would act. Lange trusted the persuasive power of information; facts that heightened and directed emotional responses were important. [That last bit, “that heightened and directed emotional responses ” is pretty much a definition of propaganda.] “The consummate need of the thirties imagination,” observed William Stott in his book Documentary Expression and Thirties America was “to get the texture of reality, of America; to feel it and to make it felt.” [Of a selected reality, i.e. a documentary fiction.]
Today, the subjects of Lange’s pictures are, as Therese Heyman has observed, “figures in history whose hardship the present viewer is incapable of easing — symbols of timeless sorrow.” Present day viewers are not action-oriented reformers seeking clarity of issue, but search instead for irony and haunting eloquence. Pictures with these elements are found in the body of Lange’s work, but it is important to understand that she chose not to publish them during the thirties. Because they did not carry a persuasive message, presentation of these pictures was deferred until her retrospective exhibition as an artist in 1966.
I am a big fan of Dorothea Lange but I think Evans, in the quote at the top, has a more realistic estimate of what might be more nearly a documentary photograph. (Note, that in an earlier post, I quoted at length from an Alan Trachtenberg essay that specifically claimed that Evans was making “documentary inventions” himself).
On the subject of social “documentary” photography as propaganda, see my earlier post with quotes from Estelle Jussim on that subject.
-Julie
Coloring 