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Zollie Lyons, Negro sharecropper, home from the field for dinner at noontime, and part of his family. He has thirteen acres of tobacco and a labor force of five. Upchurch, Wake County, North Carolina
Tobacco worms are bad this year on Zollie Lyons' place. Wake County, North Carolina
Zollie Lyons and son "worming" tobacco. Wake County, North Carolina
Worming tobacco. Note worm. Wake County, North Carolina
Kitchen door of Zollie Lyons' house. Note brushbroom. Wake County, North Carolina
Zollie Lyons repairing the tobacco sleds at beginning of the harvest season. Wake County, North Carolina
Grandchildren of tobacco sharecropper down at barns. Note construction of tobacco sleds which have just been repaired by Zollie Lyons. Beyond them the screened platform in which that member of the family sleeps who tends the fire during the night. Wake County, North Carolina
Grandchild of Zollie Lyons, tobacco sharecropper. Wake County, North Carolina
Two tobacco tenant mothers (related) with some of their children. Wake County, North Carolina
Home of Negro tobacco tenant, with addition of improvised garage. Wake County, North Carolina
Daughter of Negro sharecropper goes up and down the row "worming" the tobacco. Wake County, North Carolina
Tobacco on Zollie Lyons' place, nearly ready for priming. Wake County, North Carolina
Zollie Lyons, Negro sharecropper, home from the field for dinner at noontime, and part of his family. He has thirteen acres of tobacco and a labor force of five. Upchurch, Wake County, North Carolina
Photos by Dorothea Lange, July 1937, from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress
You know, so often it's just sticking around and being there, remaining there, not swooping out in a cloud of dust: sitting down on the ground with people, letting children look at your camera with their dirty, grimy little hands, and putting their fingers on the lens, and you just let them, because you know that if you will behave in a generous manner, you are apt to receive it, you know?
Photographers stop photographing a subject too soon before they have exhausted the possibilities.
I realize more and more what it takes to be a really good photographer. You go in over your head, not just up to your neck.
It is not a factual photograph per se. The documentary photograph carries with it another thing, a quality in the subject that the artist responds to. It is a photograph which carries the full meaning of the episode or the circumstance or the situation that can only be revealed -- because you can't really recapture it -- by this other quality. There is no real warfare between the artist and the documentary photographer. He has to be both.
A documentary photograph is not a factual photograph per se. It is a photograph which carries the full meaning of the episode.
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
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.
Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
This benefit of seeing...can come only if you pause a while, extricate yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image...the viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.
Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion...the subject must be something you truly love or truly hate.
Hands off! I do not molest what I photograph, I do not meddle and I do not arrange.
Art is a by-product of an act of total attention.
2 comments:
"I realize more and more what it takes to be a really good photographer. You go in over your head, not just up to your neck.
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
Hands off! I do not molest what I photograph, I do not meddle and I do not arrange.
Art is a by-product of an act of total attention."
I've copied Lange's remarks so that I can refer to them often. As a statement of aesthetics and a moral statement also, each of these sentences is pretty great. My absolute favorites are the four included above.
If I were going to try to teach a class (in anything), I would commend Lange's statements to my students. I only have one potential student, Jane, so she'll have to do and I believe she will appreciate these.
Yesterday evening she brought me a writing assignment for English. She was asked to write a "mood" paragraph. I was a little worried because, although she's a very good student, sometimes she gets understandably bored by homework assignments, but I marveled at what she presented. I had a couple of suggestions (mostly based on your short poem, Verbs), but I told her they were completely optional. What she wrote was exactly right and consistent with Lange's words, especially the last entry. As you can imagine, it was one of those moments where you think, it's all great if you can experience something this good. Curtis
Curtis,
One could do worse than commit those sentences to whatever future remains, as the bequest of the quality of attention that once made it possible to sustain conscience and art in a single act, even in this always at least half-savage country of ours.
Jane is as fortunate to have you as a generous guide as you are to have in her a willing and alert learner. All this is a cause for hope.
"You go in over your head, not just up to your neck." That, by the way -- accepted as both inspiration and challenge -- was the sentence that made this series of posts happen. They took nearly a month to assemble, and to be honest, I felt I was in over my head just about every inch and fathom of the way, right down to the last infinitely tiny detail of the whole shebang.
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