Childhood Hunger

Bill Shore’s Letters

Letter From a Bookshelf

February 2003

Dear Friend,

When Share Our Strength's friend and supporter Jeff Swartz came to meet with me last week, he brought two gifts: a book and an idea.

Jeff arrived from Los Angeles where he'd just visited the Getty Museum's exhibition about Depression-era photographer, Dorothea Lange. The book contains her photographs of breadlines, waterfront strikes and migrant workers, which had a profound impact on the development of modern documentary photography. Her work was used as evidence of the need for government action to assist hungry Americans.

The idea accompanying the book is to celebrate the upcoming 20th anniversary of Share Our Strength with a traveling photo exhibition... Dorothea Lange's documentary of the faces of hunger, circa 1935... juxtaposed with contemporary black and white documentary photographs of the faces of hunger, circa 2003. Jeff's expansive vision includes Bruce Springsteen as narrator of the exhibition's audio guide, media hits in the cities it tours, and visits to schools where Share Our Strength will conduct service learning projects about hunger.

The only proper way to receive Jeff's gifts and welcome Dorothea Lange into my home was to chase away other visitors and give her my undivided attention. She makes for an amazing houseguest: well traveled, compassionate, vividly descriptive, and forceful but understated at the same time.

The arc of the book's visual narrative is pronounced and painful to witness. Her early work, from the 1920's through the beginning of the 1930's, are portraits, and pictures of family and friends. Eyes shine and sparkle. There are children at play, swimming in a California creek, bathed in sunlight, as innocent as they are naked. They seem not to have a care in the world. It's like a scene Gauguin could have painted. There are smiles, notable only because we will not see a smile again in this book, not even once, in the 200 pages that depict life after 1930.

With the onset of the Depression, Lange's body of work takes a turn. The lightness of childhood is replaced with the weight of worry. The expressions of the children in her pictures are no longer of wonder, but of wondering, about where they will come to rest, when they will eat, why their migration takes them past people who have so much more. It was as if Lange realized that a camera had another use, which it could and must be put to a larger purpose. In this way Lange was not only a talented photographer, but a moral entrepreneur, helping to introduce a new morality into a profession, and a sense of social responsibility that generations of documentary photographers to follow would come to embrace.

Her black and white photography accentuates the starkness of the farmer stranded and stalled in a ditch, the roofing of his truck in tatters and every stain visible on his sleeve. Or of the woman on the high plains in the Texas panhandle, one hand on her brow, the other supporting her neck, a wedding ring with faded promise glinting from the shadows. The book's cover photo is of a young mom with two scruffy children, one of whom nurses from a coke bottle. Their eyes are wary. Having a photographer aiming her lens in front of them must be out of the ordinary, and if there is one thing they've learned in their short lives it is that "out of the ordinary" doesn't break their way.

Dorothea Lange is about people. No landscapes here. No still lifes either. In the entire book, I found less than half a dozen photos in which her camera was not trained on human beings. Like the painter Jacob Lawrence, Lange documents migration. Hers are photographs of people in the midst of the most harrowing journey of their lives. When she died at 75, fellow photographer Eugene Smith eulogized the "belief in the worth of life she has so evidenced in her work."

Each picture can be appreciated for itself, but spend enough time with the entire collection and patterns slowly emerge, like dawn breaking, patterns of what can be seen and not seen. For example, one thing you don't see in Lange's work are whole families. In 264 pages there are only four photographs of children with both their mother and father. Some of the most compelling, like Migrant Mother and the cover photo, Mother and Children On the Road in Tulelake, are of moms with their children pulled close to them. But there are also a few of only dads with the kids. It's as if Lange is saying that food is not the only thing missing here. Take away something as basic and essential as a family's meals, and the very concept of family, so central to our whole society, starts to fracture.

Lange literally looked up to many of her subjects, shooting them from below, adding a heroic dimension, as if to insist on the heroism of human beings who struggle and prevail. That was her doing. But notice how many of the people in Dorothea Lange's pictures, including the now iconic Migrant Mother, are looking up and off into the distance, toward the horizon. Only rarely are they distracted, preoccupied, looking down, or away. Most have lifted their gaze. Searching. Almost expectantly. Because they are American they remain hopeful that something better is coming. They know that hunger is not the natural order of things. It's like they are waiting for the cavalry to arrive. Or maybe they are just looking for you and me.

One of the things that intrigues me about Jeff's idea for an exhibition comparing then and now is that I wonder if the same photos could be taken today. I wonder if those who are hungry would still look up, expectantly, even if naively, seeking and waiting for something better. Unfortunately, tragically, hunger has nearly become the natural order today. I wonder if those being photographed would see their plight as aberrant or normal.

Nevertheless, the exhibition Jeff envisions is essential. Our first obligation, the one that cannot be excused, is to see, to bear witness, to pause and not look away. I am only telling you what Jeff's suggestion told me, what Dorothea Lange tells all of us.

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