October 11, 1965—Dorothea Lange, who created tightly composed, fiercely compassionate images that struck at the conscience of Americans as the photographer of poverty-stricken rural Americans during the Great Depression and interned Japanese-Americans(Nisei) after Pearl Harbor, died of esophageal cancer at age 70.
Time and again, Lange – well-educated, urban, of German Protestant stock –photographed subjects whose backgrounds in almost no way resembled her own. No leap of the imagination was required for me to view her as the champion of the disadvantaged and despised – a Joan of Arc with a camera, if you will.
All the more surprising, then, when I discovered that in the fall of 1954, on an assignment for Life Magazine, Lange had taken photographs of Ireland – especially County Clare, the western coastal region where my father was born and spent his first 31 years. Suddenly, a photographer whose work had interested me on a largely dispassionate historical level had reached me in a place much closer – psychologically and spiritually, if not geographically – to home.
A reevaluation of Lange’s career seemed in order. It involved not devaluing her justly acclaimed output, but more clearly understanding its wellspring: her ability to penetrate, without prejudice or condescension, the lives of disparate groups who seldom shared her ethnicity, spiritual outlook, urban sensibility, or educational level.
Many of the best of the 2,400 images from Lange’s Life assignment appeared in Dorothea Lange’s Ireland (1996), by Gerry Mullins. The images inspired an artist in another medium, Irish-American film director Deirdre Lynch, to retrace her steps in the 1998 documentary, Photos to Send. (Amazingly, forty-four years after Lange’s assignments, Lynch found many of her original subjects still alive.)
The “Celtic Tiger” and Culture
Lynch’s retracing of Lange’s steps occurred when Ireland was well-launched into a commercial and creative flowering. Suddenly, Celtic had become not just cool but sexy. The growth of a highly educated young population, entrance into the European Community, and a less punitive tax structure produced a “Celtic Tiger” that was the envy of other European economies. Cheap airfares helped fanned tourism and exposure to continental visitors and workers resulted in a more cosmopolitan outlook. Novelists and playwrights such as Roddy Doyle and Martin McDonough won international acclaim, filmmakers Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan brought luster to the native moviemaking industry, and Riverdance became a transatlantic phenomenon. At the same time, revelations about priest sex abuse and the “Magdalene laundries” (asylums for “fallen women” run by nuns, where the young women were held for years in conditions of extreme cruelty) so rocked confidence in the clergy that it became commonplace to speak of “post-Catholic Ireland.”
The images from Lange’s Irish sojourn differ in tone not only from this environment, but also from the Technicolor scenery and picturesque inhabitants of John Ford’s classic film The Quiet Man or the often gritty, priest-ridden misery of Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes. In contrast to these other depictions of mid-century Ireland, Lange portrays a country facing difficult challenges with an ancestral faith and a hard-won dignity. In her striking portraits of young and old, she presents a visual counterpart to William Blake’s songs of innocence and experience.
DeValera’s Ireland—and My Family’s
At the time of these photos, Ireland was still largely under the influence of its longtime leader, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Eamon de Valera. Only six years before, it finally became an independent republic, capping 32 years that featured, at various points, rebellion, civil war, neutrality during WWII, and half-steps and compromises toward nationhood. Perhaps because of its agonizing birth struggle, Ireland remained uncertain—abroad, subservient in trade with Great Britain; at home, puritanical enough to enact strict obscenity laws that often drove its best creative artists to distraction or exile.
In Western Ireland, land remained of central importance – sustaining life, but often not in abundance. The experience of my father and his six siblings was not uncommon. My paternal grandfather owned approximately 50 acres, but they were seldom fertile to yield enough for all of the family. As a result, several of the children were lent out to childless couples – relatives or neighbors – to bring in more money.
Subtly and unsentimentally, Lange uses linear perspective in “Country Road” (see the photograph accompanying this post) to suggest the physical and psychic toll wrought by the economically and socially constricting environment that induced my father and so many of his siblings to journey beyond their ancestral home.
Anatomy of a Photograph
One lone habitation appears in this image: a white farmhouse, much like the one my father grew up in, with a thatch roof – a substitute for the slate roof that people in their circumstances could not afford at the time, but that their descendants can.
Nearly half of this photograph consists of foreground, and not a particularly appealing one at that: an unpaved bohereen, or “small road.” The most visible form of plant life is not a crop, but roadside turf – a metaphor for the hardness of life. Not a single automobile is in sight, in keeping with an era when auto ownership was more unusual than it is now. In the distance stretch rolling hills – the kind with spectacular emerald vistas featured on millions of postcards. Here, however, the hills appear small against the road, and the beauty of the wet, limy soil has been muted into more monochromatic shadings. (Lange might have used a heavily colored filter over the lens to lighten the green grass and darken the blue sky.)
The dark hat and overcoat of the old man in the photo imply the damp Irish climate. The figure is walking away from the brightest point in the photograph, the farmhouse –and, given the longtime Irish predilection for emigration, one can’t be sure that he’s not leaving for good. In fact, his weatherbeaten attire recalls that of Vladimir and Estragon, the two tramps in a tragicomedy that premiered only a year before the publication of this photo – Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, an Irishman expatriated to France.
Combined with the fact that this figure is all alone against an all-encompassing background, this picture could be viewed at first as highly foreboding – except that it is redeemed by what local photographer and Lange assistant Dennis Wylde called “God’s light.” Moreover, the walker is traveling along a road that significantly widens ahead of him – an element of incurable hope.
“Country Road” is central for appreciating the physical and emotional environment Lange was trying to recreate through film. It also exemplifies one of her best-known summaries of art as photography: “While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.”
The other photos from Lange’s brief but highly creative Irish sojourn, like this one, demonstrate a love of the problematic, yet simple Irish tradition – a way of life now under assault, in a manner that neither the photographer nor her subjects could guess at the time, from every conceivable direction.
Time and again, Lange – well-educated, urban, of German Protestant stock –photographed subjects whose backgrounds in almost no way resembled her own. No leap of the imagination was required for me to view her as the champion of the disadvantaged and despised – a Joan of Arc with a camera, if you will.
All the more surprising, then, when I discovered that in the fall of 1954, on an assignment for Life Magazine, Lange had taken photographs of Ireland – especially County Clare, the western coastal region where my father was born and spent his first 31 years. Suddenly, a photographer whose work had interested me on a largely dispassionate historical level had reached me in a place much closer – psychologically and spiritually, if not geographically – to home.
A reevaluation of Lange’s career seemed in order. It involved not devaluing her justly acclaimed output, but more clearly understanding its wellspring: her ability to penetrate, without prejudice or condescension, the lives of disparate groups who seldom shared her ethnicity, spiritual outlook, urban sensibility, or educational level.
Many of the best of the 2,400 images from Lange’s Life assignment appeared in Dorothea Lange’s Ireland (1996), by Gerry Mullins. The images inspired an artist in another medium, Irish-American film director Deirdre Lynch, to retrace her steps in the 1998 documentary, Photos to Send. (Amazingly, forty-four years after Lange’s assignments, Lynch found many of her original subjects still alive.)
The “Celtic Tiger” and Culture
Lynch’s retracing of Lange’s steps occurred when Ireland was well-launched into a commercial and creative flowering. Suddenly, Celtic had become not just cool but sexy. The growth of a highly educated young population, entrance into the European Community, and a less punitive tax structure produced a “Celtic Tiger” that was the envy of other European economies. Cheap airfares helped fanned tourism and exposure to continental visitors and workers resulted in a more cosmopolitan outlook. Novelists and playwrights such as Roddy Doyle and Martin McDonough won international acclaim, filmmakers Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan brought luster to the native moviemaking industry, and Riverdance became a transatlantic phenomenon. At the same time, revelations about priest sex abuse and the “Magdalene laundries” (asylums for “fallen women” run by nuns, where the young women were held for years in conditions of extreme cruelty) so rocked confidence in the clergy that it became commonplace to speak of “post-Catholic Ireland.”
The images from Lange’s Irish sojourn differ in tone not only from this environment, but also from the Technicolor scenery and picturesque inhabitants of John Ford’s classic film The Quiet Man or the often gritty, priest-ridden misery of Frank McCourt’s memoir Angela’s Ashes. In contrast to these other depictions of mid-century Ireland, Lange portrays a country facing difficult challenges with an ancestral faith and a hard-won dignity. In her striking portraits of young and old, she presents a visual counterpart to William Blake’s songs of innocence and experience.
DeValera’s Ireland—and My Family’s
At the time of these photos, Ireland was still largely under the influence of its longtime leader, Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Eamon de Valera. Only six years before, it finally became an independent republic, capping 32 years that featured, at various points, rebellion, civil war, neutrality during WWII, and half-steps and compromises toward nationhood. Perhaps because of its agonizing birth struggle, Ireland remained uncertain—abroad, subservient in trade with Great Britain; at home, puritanical enough to enact strict obscenity laws that often drove its best creative artists to distraction or exile.
In Western Ireland, land remained of central importance – sustaining life, but often not in abundance. The experience of my father and his six siblings was not uncommon. My paternal grandfather owned approximately 50 acres, but they were seldom fertile to yield enough for all of the family. As a result, several of the children were lent out to childless couples – relatives or neighbors – to bring in more money.
Subtly and unsentimentally, Lange uses linear perspective in “Country Road” (see the photograph accompanying this post) to suggest the physical and psychic toll wrought by the economically and socially constricting environment that induced my father and so many of his siblings to journey beyond their ancestral home.
Anatomy of a Photograph
One lone habitation appears in this image: a white farmhouse, much like the one my father grew up in, with a thatch roof – a substitute for the slate roof that people in their circumstances could not afford at the time, but that their descendants can.
Nearly half of this photograph consists of foreground, and not a particularly appealing one at that: an unpaved bohereen, or “small road.” The most visible form of plant life is not a crop, but roadside turf – a metaphor for the hardness of life. Not a single automobile is in sight, in keeping with an era when auto ownership was more unusual than it is now. In the distance stretch rolling hills – the kind with spectacular emerald vistas featured on millions of postcards. Here, however, the hills appear small against the road, and the beauty of the wet, limy soil has been muted into more monochromatic shadings. (Lange might have used a heavily colored filter over the lens to lighten the green grass and darken the blue sky.)
The dark hat and overcoat of the old man in the photo imply the damp Irish climate. The figure is walking away from the brightest point in the photograph, the farmhouse –and, given the longtime Irish predilection for emigration, one can’t be sure that he’s not leaving for good. In fact, his weatherbeaten attire recalls that of Vladimir and Estragon, the two tramps in a tragicomedy that premiered only a year before the publication of this photo – Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett, an Irishman expatriated to France.
Combined with the fact that this figure is all alone against an all-encompassing background, this picture could be viewed at first as highly foreboding – except that it is redeemed by what local photographer and Lange assistant Dennis Wylde called “God’s light.” Moreover, the walker is traveling along a road that significantly widens ahead of him – an element of incurable hope.
“Country Road” is central for appreciating the physical and emotional environment Lange was trying to recreate through film. It also exemplifies one of her best-known summaries of art as photography: “While there is perhaps a province in which the photograph can tell us nothing more than what we see with our own eyes, there is another in which it proves to us how little our eyes permit us to see.”
The other photos from Lange’s brief but highly creative Irish sojourn, like this one, demonstrate a love of the problematic, yet simple Irish tradition – a way of life now under assault, in a manner that neither the photographer nor her subjects could guess at the time, from every conceivable direction.
1 comment:
Your blog is great!
Here is the url of the blog from the Archives of the Sandusky Library, if you would
like to take a look:
http://sanduskyhistory.blogspot.com/
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