Reviews

National Gallery of Art Master Paintings from the Collection /  by Todd Henson

Book cover of Daring to Look

One day when I visited my local library I saw this book, National Gallery of Art Master Paintings from the Collection, displayed near the entrance. I decided to check it out and spend some time with it, and I’m glad I did. I have visited the National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D.C., on several occasions so I’ve been fortunate to personally see some of these paintings. But it was still great to view them at my leisure while at home, granted in a smaller format, though this is an oversized book at approximately 9x12 inches. One big benefit the book has over the museum is the text. There are a number of short commentaries on many of the specific works with plenty of details about the artist and their life.

The book begins with a Director’s Foreword by Earl A. Powell. It’s very short but provides lots of background about the museum and its collection. It’s a very young art museum when compared both to other museums in the US and especially when compared to many of the well-known galleries in Europe. It opened in 1941, founded by Andrew W. Mellon, and began with his collection of 121 master paintings. From then on it has benefited from many donations, both of artwork and of funding to purchase artwork. This book contains roughly 400 paintings from their collection, selected by John Oliver Hand, who also wrote the commentaries.

The majority of the book contains the artwork, with some pages featuring a single piece of work, others with multiple paintings on a single page, and in some cases with some detailed portion of a painting blown up to a full page size. Each painting is accompanied by details such as title, artist, date, media, size, and donator. Many are paired with a commentary providing lots of extra details and background.

The book is organized by century, from the 13th/14th centuries to the 20th century. Within each of these sections the paintings are sorted by schools or art: Italian, Netherlandish, German, Hispano-Flemish, French, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, British, American. I found it fascinating looking for stylistic similarities within schools and differences between them. I also found it fascinating studying how the styles changed over time. And as I found when visiting the actual galleries, there were specific styles and time periods that most appealed to me, and those I generally found least appealing. Being a photographer, I very much appreciated studying how each painter used light within their compositions, how they chose to apply highlights and shading. Some of these paintings really do achieve life-like quality, whereas others intentionally avoid that, using more impressionistic or stylistic techniques.

I struggled to choose a small subset of the 474 pages to show here as samples of what you can expect within the book. Naturally, I leaned towards works I found more appealing for one reason or another. This does mean I haven’t included many modern art pieces, so my apologies if that’s what you’d rather see more of. I obviously had to skip over so many fantastic pieces.

This book is well worth checking out if you can find a copy. And of course the museum is also worth visiting. I’d be curious to read your thoughts on the book, museum or artwork in the comments below.

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Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs & Reports from the Field by Anne Whiston Spirn /  by Todd Henson

Book cover of Daring to Look

While browsing the very small photography section of my local library I stumbled across a book that caught my eye, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs & Reports from the Field by Anne Whiston Spirn, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2008. I’m always open to reading more about Dorothea Lange so I checked it out.

I love this sort of book. It does feature many of Dorothea Lange’s photographs, some of which may have appeared for the first time in these pages. But it’s far more than a portfolio of her work. The author, Anne Whiston Spirn, chose to focus in on a very specific time period in Dorothea Lange’s life, 1939, when Lange visited various locations on assignments, both creating photographs and writing detailed notes about what she found. And this book brings together those photographs as well as the notes, giving amazing insight into Lange’s life during that year as well as into that part of the United States and how it was changing.

Preface

The book begins with a preface that provides an overview of what the book is about, how it focuses on 1939 when Lange largely worked for the Works Progress Administration, an organization that some of the people she photographed said had “ruined the working man,” with others seemingly dependent on their assistance.

Prologue: A Discoverer, a Real Social Observer

The prologue is composed from Lange’s own words and is full of fascinating and enlightening quotes. I quite enjoyed this section of the book, it really provided some wonderful insights into how Lange thought and felt.

When describing how she transitioned from creating studio portraits of people to her more well known documentary work she said, “The only comment I ever got was, ‘What are you going to do with this kind of thing? What do you want to do this for?’ … That was a question I couldn’t answer. I didn’t know… But I knew my picture was on my wall, and I knew that it was worth doing.”

“We have, in my lifetime, changed from rural to urban. In my lifetime, that little space, this tremendous thing has happened. These people on that rainy afternoon in April were the symbol, they were the symbol of this tremendous upheaval like an earthquake.”
— Dorothea Lange
“One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind…. To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable, but when the great photographs are produced, it will be down that road…. I have only touched it, just touched it.”
— Dorothea Lange
“There are moments when time suddenly stands still and gives place to eternity.... moments where all seems to fall in its place, for anyone to understand—if it’s a really good photograph.”
— Dorothea Lange
“Artists are controlled by the life that beats in them, like the ocean beats in on the shore. They’re almost pursued; there’s something constantly acting upon them from the outside world that shapes their existence.”
— Dorothea Lange
“The good photograph is not the object. The consequences of the photograph are the object, and I’m not talking about social work. It can be… something that is extraordinarily beautiful for its own sake…. The consequence of its beauty is the transmission of it; so that no one would say, “How did you do it? Where did you find it?” But they would say, “That such things could be.”
— Dorothea Lange

Part One: Dorothea Lange and the Art of Discovery

Part One of the book is an essay by Anne Whiston Spirn where she describes the Lange she discovered during her research for this book. A most telling quote is: “Dorothea Lange is to photography what John Steinbeck is to literature.” In fact, her photographs inspired Steinbeck when writing The Grapes of Wrath and he used some of her photographs as illustrations in his nonfiction booklet, Their Blood is Strong.

Spirn goes on to describe how she came to write this book, how and where she researched, where she found so many photographs and field notes from Lange, some of them not previously published, seemingly lost and cast aside. This is when we start to learn that Lange didn’t just create photographs but also wrote many notes accompanying the photographs, feeling that just photography couldn’t tell the stories she was sharing, words were also needed. Some of these words were directly written by Lange and others by her assistants, such as Rondal Partridge, and by her one-time boss and later husband, Paul Taylor.

Lange learned over time how to interact with people to get to the real stories: “You go into a room and you know where you are welcome; you know where you’re unwelcome…. Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around because hostility itself is important…. The people who are garrulous and wear their heart on their sleeve and tell you everything, that’s one kind of person, but the fellow who’s hiding behind a tree and hoping you don’t see him is the fellow that you’d better find out why.”

Eventually, Lange went to work at the federal level for the Works Progress Administration and later the Resettlement Administration, which was succeeded by the Farm Security Administration (FSA). It’s with the FSA that she and her assistants travelled all over the country on assignment. Her photos were among the most widely used and recognized of all the FSA photographers, and yet she had a very mixed relationship with her boss at the FSA, Roy Stryker, and was fired three times. Unfortunately, when she was fired for the final time she lost access to much of her work and found it very difficult, sometimes impossible, to obtain copies of her negatives for books or shows. Despite Stryker’s reticence in allowing her the use of her own photos, he had no problem using them for his own book on the FSA and included more of her photos than any other FSA photographer, and he mentioned of her famous Migrant Mother photo, “After all these years, I still get that picture out and look at it.”

Pages 8-9, including the photo Migrant Mother

Thankfully, after getting fired from the FSA Lange applied for a Guggenheim fellowship to help fund her work and became the third photographer ever to receive one, after Edward Weston and Walker Evans, all three being iconic American photographers. Later John Szarkowski approached Lange about hosting a retrospective exhibit of her work at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), where her show was only the sixth to have been dedicated to a single photographer. Those preceding her were Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Edward Steichen. She was in good company. At the entrance to her exhibit were the words of Szarkowski: “What distinguished Lange’s work was a challenging intelligence and an artist’s vision. Her intelligence allowed her to bypass the exceptional—the merely newsworthy—and discover the typical. Her art gave to her observation an irreducible simplicity, the eloquence of inevitability.”

Pages 26-27 of Daring to Look

Pages 26-27, showing handwritten and typed notes

On the essence of a photograph, Lange observes, “What is it in the end? It is a mounted piece of paper with a photographic silver image on it. But in it there is an element which you can’t call other than an act of love. That is the tremendous motivation behind it. And you give it. Not to a person, you give it to the world, to your world… an act of love—that’s the deepest thing behind it…. The audience, the recipient of it, gives that back.”

Part Two: Photographs and Reports from the Field, 1939

Part two is the heart of the book, full of Lange’s photographs and reports from the field, all from 1939, a year in which she created more than 3000 photographs, 149 of which are presented in the book.

Spirn says: “Most of these photographs were never printed in Lange’s lifetime (except as proofs) and appear here for the first time…”

I absolutely loved this section, looking over all the photographs, and especially reading Lange’s thoughts on her interactions with people and places, the events she witnessed and documented. Maps are included that trace the roads Lange followed and the areas she visited.

Pages 64-65 showing a map for the section, The Highway

Pages 82-83

Pages 90-91 showing a map for the section, The Farmers, Black and White

Pages 112-113

Pages 142-143 showing a map for the section, The Migrant Life

Pages 194-195

Pages 214-215

Pages 262-263 and the beginning of Part Three: Then and Now

Part Three: Then and Now

Part three was an unexpected and fascinating part of the book. Here we get more insight into the author, Anne Whiston Spirn. After having spent months of research she wondered what had become of the places and people Dorothea Lange had portrayed. So she took to the road to find some of the locations and attempt to find some of the people, or at least people who knew of them. She wasn’t looking to duplicate Lange’s path or photographs, but to see what Lange might have seen and to get a feel for the landscape. She was curious if she could learn anything from the differences between what Lange saw and what she, Spirn, saw.

Of course, all these years later it was a challenge to find the same locations and even more so to find people. But Spirn did just that, and documents what she found. And she learned something that may seem obvious in hindsight, something in common between then and now: that things keep changing.

“Lange’s words and photographs speak eloquently to the present, for the forces she saw and recorded in 1939 are still in play, forces of that particular moment, but not only of that moment.”
— Anne Whiston Spirn

Pages of 286-287

Appendixes and Final Sections

The book includes five appendixes with additional information:

  • A: Chronology of Dorothea Lange’s Life

  • B: Description of New Deal Organizations and Programs

  • C: Documents Submitted by Lange with General Captions

  • D: Key to Negatives and General Captions

  • E: Additional General Captions from 1919

Ending out the book are sections of notes, an essay on sources, a list of illustrations, and an index.

Final Thoughts

This review ended up much longer, and took me longer to write, than I’d originally intended, perhaps a reflection of how much I enjoyed the book. I think it’s a wonderful piece of history of a slice of time and of geographic regions in the United States, as well as of Dorothea Lange. Anyone interested in the Dust Bowl years, documentary photography, or Dorothea Lange will find something of interest in these pages.

Very sadly, I later went back to the library to check the book out again and found it no longer appears anywhere in the county library system. I’ve no clue what happened, whether it was removed during a periodic pruning of less popular works, whether it was lost or misplaced. I’m considering searching for my own copy, not that I need any more physical books. But this is one I’ve had a desire to spend more time with. Highly recommended.

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Backroads Buildings: In Search of the Vernacular by Steve Gross & Susan Daley /  by Todd Henson

Backroads Buildings: In Search of the Vernacular by Steve Gross & Susan Daley

Have you ever driven some back road and noticed that interesting old building, perhaps in disrepair, perhaps still in use, but with plenty of character? I often do, and yet for whatever reason I rarely stop to photograph these buildings. Reading this book, Backroads Buildings: In Search of the Vernacular by Steve Gross and Susan Daley, I wish I had stopped more often and created a collection of my own photographs of these marvelous buildings that leave one wondering about their long history.

Thankfully, these two photographers have often stopped to photograph the buildings they’ve found. In this book they’ve focused on architecture from around the time of the Civil War to the Great Depression, roughly 1870 to 1930, and stretching along the eastern United States from Vermont down to Louisiana. I often smiled when I saw buildings from not that far down the road in Virginia.

“With their humble beauty and distinctive character, these once-useful structures infuse the American landscape with a strong sense of place. This collection of buildings preserves a sampling of our country’s architecture heritage and encourages travelers to slow down and notice the details.”

As with any collection of photography like this, some photos will resonate with me more than others. Many of the photos felt strictly documentary, and to some extent I think they all were intended to be documentary. The photographers have documented pieces of the past before they fall into complete disrepair or are torn down. But some photos also had an artistic air about them which I appreciated.

The book appears designed to last as long as some of the buildings have, being printed on a very thick smooth white paper well suited to showcasing the collection of color and black & white photographs. Schiffer Publishing has done a fantastic job with both the quality of the book materials and the overall layout. There is very little text throughout, though the book does begin with a foreword by Brian Wallis, followed by a short preface. All the rest of the 144 page book is photography, with each photo having a very short description along with the location of the building.

This is a book that may appeal not just to photographers, but to anyone who appreciates these old everyday buildings along backroads just along the fringes of society. If you’ve ever taken a moment to notice one of these buildings then you may appreciate some of these photos.

I found a copy of Backroads Buildings in my local library. Check your own library and maybe you’ll also find a copy. If you’d rather own a copy then check out the link below to see if it’s in stock.

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