Wednesday, March 4, 2009
Lecture on the Great Depression
From the end of the Lange Film in lecture today, I feel that a lot of Dorthea Lange's power comes from the way that she felt when she took the pictures. In the interview segments with her assistant, it was expressed that she felt a lot of anxiety about taking these pictures and and the ideas that they were capturing. She "didn't like the erosion of Civil Rights" that these pictures represented for the Japanese internment camps and was "scared that she would not get the [Great Depression] pictures right". Lange like every other citizen was scared, was anxious, because she knew that there was very little that separated her from the subjects that she was taking pictures of. Her pictures are so powerful because of this point; they not only capture the shame and confusion of the subjects, but transmit the anxiety that Lange is feeling herself, that the rest of the country is feeling in that moment.
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i don't know if this is where I'm supposed to post my reaction posts so i hope that i am doing this right. First, i think you are absolutely right about Dorthea Lang, she was just as anxious and ashamed as everyone else and i think that was a very insightful observation. As far as the internment camps go, i think that a lot of people felt the same way as she did about that too. im not saying that everyone was up in arms about it or anything, they certainly allowed it to happen. However, i think (and i may just be projecting) that many people felt not quite right about internment camps even if not strongly enough to oppose them, especially in light of what was going on in Europe with the Nazi concentration/death camps. i just wish the people had spoke out and maybe we could have avoided the entire situation and the black mark it left on our history.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with you about Dorothea Lange. She had a very powerful point of view, and it seems that she also has a lot of empathy. I don't think her photographs would have had the same effect if you was totally disconnected from the environment/situation/people. Not only that, but I believe Lange knew she was capturing something even greater than the subjects in the photo. One photo wasn't about the poverty of one family, but the suffering of the nation as a whole.
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