Fotogs Know A Camera Is Nothing More Than A Tool For Learning To See

DOROTHEA LANGE & HER MIGRANT MOTHER SEQUENCE PHOTOS

I recently and belatedly bought my first digital single lens reflex camera, belatedly because although I have been an accomplished photographer for 40 years, I was reluctant to move beyond the analog Nikon SLRs that I have toted around on my world travels and have served me so well. But digital technology has become so phenomenal and MacBook laptops such terrific photo workbenches that my obdurance had become ridiculous.

This transition to digital got me to thinking about photography in general and my relationship to it in particular, dredging up the philosophical arguments about whether photography is art and whether documentary photography, let alone photojournalism, can be a part of a creative pantheon that includes prose, poetry and painting.

Long answer short, who cares?

In any event, I have always believed that photography is 90 percent discipline and 10 percent luck, and I do not come by that equation lightly.  All of my better photographs were a result of being disciplined, but also being lucky.  None of the great photojournalists with whom I worked as a newspaper editor -- among them two Pulitzer Prize winners, one Robert F. Kennedy Prize winner and the first woman to be hired as a staff photographer by National Geographic -- would disagree.

To hammer home the point further, of the perhaps 20,000 photographs I have taken (a wild guess, I guess), I can honestly say that fewer than 100 are really good and of that small number only a half dozen or so are great.  Meanwhile, I don't recall when the notion of the great documentary photographer Dorothea Lange that a camera is nothing more than a tool slipped into my consciousness.  Fairly early on, I think.  And while my first SLR was a Nikon F purchased at Nikon's factory in Yokohama in 1970, I quickly realized that while having a quality camera and lenses mattered, it was how my brain processed what I saw through the viewfinder that ultimately would determine the quality of a photograph.

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Lange's odyssey from darkroom assistant to one of the greatest documentary photographers and one of the first women to attain that stature is told in Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond The Limits (2009) by Linda Gordon.

It is a book that satisfies and surprises.

It satisfies because Gordon, an historian by calling, understands photography well enough and Lange well enough that Lange's odyssey can be told from a technical and visual point of view in addition to the usual comings and goings, romances and marriages.

It surprises because I had assumed, as do probably most people, that Lange was a feminist long before that term came into popular usage.  She was most decidedly not, and you will have to read A Life Beyond The Limits to understand why.  Lange is best known for her images of Americans on the move during the Great Depression, and her most famous sequence is a migrant woman refugee from the Dust Bowl sitting by the side of a California road in a lean-to tent, her children hanging from her haggard frame as she looks out into the distance.

Gordon notes that photographs like these in general and interest in Lange in particular wax and wane with the economic seasons, falling out of style when times are good and becoming popular again when times are tough, which they currently are. 

Top photograph by Cherelle Farmer