00:00:16.040 - 00:00:54.970

one should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken blind to live a visual life. Is that enormous undertaking practically unattainable. But when the great photographs have produced, it will be down that road that I have only touched it. Just touch. This is a

00:00:54.970 - 00:01:13.880

film about one of the great photographers of the 20th century, Dorothea Lange. At the time of her death in October 1965 Dorothea Lange was involved in two major works, one an exhibition of her photographs for the Museum of Modern Art and to plans for a photographic

00:01:13.890 - 00:01:35.620

project to be carried out by a new generation of photographers, a project whose roots could be found in the farm security file of photographs on American life during the Great Depression, the first work, the exhibition was completed. The second, the project, which remains an idea form

00:01:35.620 - 00:01:55.380

only, is Dorothy A. Lang's unique legacy to the young photographers of Today. One of the people with whom she discussed her project was Dr Peter Odegard, professor of Political Science, University of California. These are the roots. I mean, while I while I encountered and what we

00:01:55.380 - 00:02:19.230

who worked in farms security, what we experience? Uhh waas So unique a thing in the history, the short history of photography. It has really made us this group a son of a group of pipe. A lot of us is expected of us on the education that

00:02:19.240 - 00:02:46.260

the government gave us. I don't think was wasted, but known Second Project has followed for this reason for this I'm perhaps many, I don't know. But for years it was in the back of my mind that that we are we photographers who were engaged in it

00:02:47.730 - 00:03:23.550

might take on that commitment to see that some other group, not for the sake of the photographers but to advance the medium itself and its possibilities. Second group shit be given it the assignment to photograph our national life. But this time with emphasis. Um, the city

00:03:24.100 - 00:03:44.670

from the cities that's been the big shift. Still, that why that shift has occurred and what that shift has been is one of the things that has not been photographed that's lost by the cities. You mean the whole metropolitan areas, including suburbs? I mean, the new

00:03:44.670 - 00:04:20.850

metropolis, the new megalopolis megalopolis, the power, um, the important a visual evidence is the germ of the project. It isn't collect more photographs or a many photographs made. We have picture magazines. We have many youths, but actually the world is not being photographed at all because

00:04:20.860 - 00:04:52.730

it's on Lee the spectacular, the sharp and maybe often the bizarre episode. But the underpinning the human condition is lacking the photographs about nothing very much, which described human life. This has been on my mind and in my mind for you. In fact, ever since I

00:04:52.740 - 00:05:24.630

realized what we had done in farm security. The value of that project is not proven. That's a repository, a cultural history that only gradually is crept into people's consciousness. It grew under the hands, actually, of the photographers of responses. No one was ever given exact directions.

00:05:24.640 - 00:05:49.060

Go here and do so himself. You were turned loose in the region on the assignment. Waas see what is really there? What does it look like? What does it feel like? What actively is the human condition? When Dorothy Alang spoke of the human condition, she spoke

00:05:49.060 - 00:06:55.430

from direct insight and experience. No one has photographed the human face more directly or with clearer perception in Georgia 1937 Arkansas 1938 Tennessee 1938 San Francisco 1934 Missouri 1939 California 1935 Texas 1936 California 1938 Arizona 1940 Utah 1941 Ireland 1954 Venezuela

00:06:55.580 - 00:07:47.660

1960 Pakistan 1958 Salon 1958 Vietnam 1958 Egypt 1963 The human face is the universal language, the same expressions air readable, understandable all over the world. It is the only language that I know community Katie's thing that is really university. It yeah, sad

00:07:48.140 - 00:08:18.750

shades of meaning. It's explosion of emotion and passion all concentrate under this part of the human anatomy, where a slight twinge of a few muscles runs the gamut of that person's potential as she worked in the exhibition enforced examination of a lifetime's work reinforced for Dorothea

00:08:18.750 - 00:08:42.190

Lange the basic approach to photography, which she hoped would be carried out in the project. As I said, this has been in my mind for years. I suddenly realized time to give it a shot when I saw the bitter years and saw its effects, how it

00:08:42.200 - 00:09:03.950

served those who looked at it, how it really extended their comprehension of what those years were like, which I'm sure did. Sure, it encouraged me to say it's time. The Bitter Years was an exhibition assembled by Edward Steichen from the files of the Farm Security Administration,

00:09:04.340 - 00:09:22.540

the collective effort of a small group of photographers directed in the thirties by Roy Striker, circulated with great public success by the Museum of Modern Art. The exhibition was one example of the photograph of source material and of the editing or selection of a sequence of

00:09:22.550 - 00:09:44.420

photographs to make a statement about man and the natural and social circumstance in which he lives. It is the extension of this principle into the photographing of the urban society of present day America that Dorothea Lange sought in the new project. As I can see that

00:09:44.430 - 00:10:11.960

it's a project that lasts for five years, that's all it is not so perpetuating begins, and it ends on the photographs that it holds serve as well. The word nowadays is benchmark mhm. It's what has happened is measured against it. What will happen is measured back

00:10:11.970 - 00:10:39.860

to it. Ideally speaking, in another 15 years, it should be done again, but not as a thing which continues and maybe desire. It must be done with very sharp purpose and with great energy, I believe, by young people these air source photograph build. They raised questions

00:10:41.040 - 00:11:01.590

that are not answered, killed. They are question raising photographs. They are not answered giving so that it leads a person into something else rather than I made a photograph that I had for gotten all about until I thought the negative the other day, going through an

00:11:01.590 - 00:11:20.800

old box. It was made during the war, in the in this shipyard, the end of a shift, and that the shipyard workers were coming down step and the camera was down the bottom of the steps and it was a mass of humanity from all parts of

00:11:20.800 - 00:11:42.660

the country. They had their tin hats, um, and they came down in this river. But why made the photograph was so interesting? Waas that they were all looking in different directions. They were not a group of people united on a job it showed so plainly a

00:11:42.670 - 00:12:14.360

very revealing for yeah, yeah, And what's the difference between an illustrative photographs and the kind of photographs you're talking about? Can you tell this in words. Well, I'm not sure I can, but the area in which I'm, um, assuming that this young photographer enters in to

00:12:15.440 - 00:12:52.760

and in photographing modern cities is not the highlight. Okay, not to make what and the kind of picture that illustrate the concepts that have already been formed in people's minds in ordered toe bulwark, a popular conception. Now that's a very big order not to do that.

00:12:53.240 - 00:13:26.840

Yeah, not to do that. It's the difference. That's training. And that's discipline. And that makes this new photographer. He's a new breed, so he's a new breed. Hey, starts in a different place. His observation may be incomplete, but it z base, um, personal direct. I don't

00:13:26.840 - 00:13:51.250

want to use the word research exposure too much really There. To Dorothea Lange, exploring reality involved a process that she called getting lost, detaching herself from all the holes on her in order to live as completely as possible of visual life. What? Pray my mind that

00:13:51.640 - 00:14:15.970

that you would need to make very fine pictures of a very wonderful thing is different from the frame of mind of being on the pavement, jostled, quote and circulating and rubbing up against people. As with no identity at the you cannot do it by not being

00:14:15.970 - 00:14:47.330

lost yourself. When I said I am trying to get lost again, I really expressed a very critical on a point of departure. I'm not very easy to Dio because you always have to do practical things. Be home it for 30 and remember to get the butter

00:14:47.330 - 00:15:08.420

or, uh, get to the post office before they close. Or, you know, in the final months of her life, with the knowledge of imminent death. A daily fact Dorothea Lange continued to work and to refine her ideas of photography. And it's uses. Oh, I don't think

00:15:08.420 - 00:15:42.850

of things that we don't forget Way could follow that and we never attack you. I who realized the great potential that there is in it, the photographic. I mean, I haven't done it either, Um, for things, of course, that are very near to. You are very

00:15:42.860 - 00:16:18.560

difficult, and the camera has not probed it. The business of attempting or working in the photograph in the life of those near and dear to you is an introduction to the other. It's an introduction to the other, but what I do with a camera. If I

00:16:18.570 - 00:16:54.630

did what properly belongs to me? That's the question that isn't asked often enough. But that is the question that underlies from all. I only would say I have never gone close enough. Not really. The middle distance and a big wide shot is never my shop. The

00:16:54.630 - 00:17:23.330

closer for me. Five Pushed close It's Right for me. Over a lifetime, Dorothea Lange explored a world greatly in need of scrutiny. The project was for others to carry on, but her work in photographing California over a period of 30 years suggests the way my photographs

00:17:23.470 - 00:17:52.550

start 30 years ago. But first automobile loaded with a family, which was the first drought refugee dust refugee family that I encounter. This was a period which saw the words migrant and migratory labor camp become everyday words. 1935. Working under the Federal Emergency Relief Act, Dr

00:17:52.550 - 00:18:07.960

Paul Taylor of the University of California undertook a study of the needs of these displaced people and of their effect on the state. He had seen some of Dorothy A Lang's work and hired her to help him, so she had to be officially designated as the

00:18:07.970 - 00:18:28.020

tightest. Their report, in words and photographs was unprecedented and led directly to the establishment of federally sponsored camps for migrant people, a program which later spread over the entire nation. The report also gave great impetus to the creation of the now famous photographic project of the

00:18:28.020 - 00:18:49.850

Farm Security Administration. Tom Collins was managing one of these government established camps for migratory Worker. He got so that when he hosted the American flag every morning over the gate of that camp, it was his camp on. He protected it from the outside world. And he

00:18:49.860 - 00:19:19.310

just was master. Oh, go. He was dedicated to the benefit of the people was the most curious combinations. But he was a great fellow for picking up, written on interesting histories of the people who lived under that with him behind those gates where that American flag

00:19:19.320 - 00:19:50.150

flew, believe May, and it flew in. There he started all kinds of oh, people getting together toe find their own ways out so on, and John Steinbeck somehow or other encountered him and Tom Collins and Tom Collins is a big figure in the book, says I

00:19:50.160 - 00:20:12.430

for Gotten Tom is that can't manager in The Grapes of Wrath. I forgot that myself. I I am really assorted in a way of chronically everyone from by, I think. Oh, I got to remember that the Depression years were followed by the violent years of the

00:20:12.430 - 00:20:32.390

war, and with it came a new and different wave of migration. These were defense years, war years, shipyard years. Everyone was working. There was overtime and swing shift on graveyard shift, and everyone in the family worked, and the migratory workers settled down and slept under a

00:20:32.390 - 00:20:59.800

roof. And the Negroes kept coming in droves, leaving the cotton fields of the south. And everyone was welcome. Following the war, population growth and urban expansion in California developed at a rate never before anticipated. It was explosive and too much for any part of the country

00:20:59.810 - 00:21:31.070

to take all at once, too much, too fast. They'll cut short time and again by serious illness. Dorothea Lange strongly felt the need to record these profound changes. As Californians you and I have witnessed as really remarkable phenomena. We sit here and they're in a world

00:21:31.070 - 00:22:07.760

that's keening with a NFA familiar ways of living. We were submerged in it, there are wonderful and phenomenally beautiful. Pipe is expressing a civilization, which is our responsibility and where we are watching it happen. We are building a curious world. Here we are creating this environment

00:22:08.140 - 00:22:30.430

almost without scrutiny. Her painful awareness that she would not be able to complete the exploration of the New California reinforced her determination delay the groundwork for her project. This is a kind of a project to can't explain right down to its base. You can't got all

00:22:30.430 - 00:22:52.970

the I's and cross all the teams. This is a gamble. Sure it isn't. It is to really toe attempt the unattainable it really is. You make you go in that direction because you're exploring a field that hasn't yet been opened up. They artist photographer is not

00:22:52.970 - 00:23:20.150

a fellow who's attracted by a A disciplinary procedure like this. Actually, it is not a discipline. It seems so to one who hasn't done it. It depends how intense your alliance with the outside world is. Uh, many artists, photographers, alliance with the world is very slight.

00:23:20.410 - 00:23:46.610

Their alliances to themselves on their effort is to translate the outside world in terms of their needs. And this other fellow this new photographer is a different breed. Hey, expresses his responsibility is to the outside world. His alliance is very great with it, but as a

00:23:46.610 - 00:24:07.650

byproduct, if he does it very well indeed, he creates a work of art, but he never knew it. Throughout her career, Dorothea Lange considered photographic beauty, is a by product rather than a goal. The main objective was to fill a need, and it was because of

00:24:07.650 - 00:24:24.890

this that the strength of her vision was effective to a degree which sometimes surprised even her top. That's the car business. Or is that another? There's a couple of cops, but that's the famous one. That's the one. Yeah, Isn't it reversed? No. What? Where these things

00:24:25.000 - 00:24:47.050

doesn't look at it quietly. And then why is he so famous? Well, if people have used it a lot, lots of books, that's all. I have made a few photographs in my life. They have really taken hold. They've really taken root all over the world. It

00:24:47.050 - 00:25:23.760

embarrasses me. Then up no longer my own for some peculiar strange res. I don't understand that I haven't the answer for why those they something in them that has reached people all over. The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camp

00:25:28.540 - 00:25:55.100

to see different relationships, things that are contiguous, from the individual photograph to the complex statement of ideas through the medium of photography, Dorothea Lange has enriched the medium itself and to an immeasurable degree, our own perception of the world and to the very end of her

00:25:55.100 - 00:26:20.750

life. Her attention was directed toward the work of those photographers whose names we have yet to hear. There could, I don't say would. I don't even say this will be a great project. I say it could be, but there could come a really definitive volume on

00:26:20.750 - 00:27:02.470

this country, really revealing a giving it look, texture it feel it, difficulty it glories not made to show how great we are. But to show what it's like, I'm sure that historians people would see things that they never never seen before. And this seems to me

00:27:02.470 - 00:27:24.090

the greater the visual mind has a very great contribution to make here, and it is not being implied, and it's time the cameras unique instrument for this. I'm not saying that the visual mind doesn't come express itself in many other ways. But this is a peculiar

00:27:24.090 - 00:27:36.760

and a powerful instrument for this purpose of saying to you are saying to the world in general this is the way it is. Look at it, look at