Tag:dorothea lange
Ansel Adams is considered one of the pioneers of photography and the most important landscape photographer of the 20th century. His love of nature inspired his photography. Adams was also a passionate environmentalist who advocated for more National Parks.
His images made him famous as an American West photographer, particularly those of Yosemite National Park, and he used his work and fame to promote the conservation of wilderness areas. In addition, his iconic black-and-white images helped to establish photography among the fine arts.
The Early Years
Born in San Francisco on Feb 20, 1902, he was the son of a businessman and grandson of a wealthy timber baron. At age four, he fell face first into a garden wall during an aftershock of the 1906 earthquake. This resulted in a badly broken nose, and the injury marked him for life. Then, at age five, his family lost their fortune in the financial panic of 1907.
As a naturally shy child with a distinctive broken nose, he struggled to fit in at school. While never diagnosed, it is widely believed he had Dyslexia and possibly ADHD. Unsuccessful at the several schools he was sent to, he left school aged twelve. From then on, he was tutored by his father and aunt.
A photographer emerges
Adams was 12 yrs old when he taught himself to play the piano and read music. He then began taking lessons and intended to become a concert pianist. Being tutored at home gave him the freedom to enjoy long solitary walks in the still wild areas of the Golden Gate. He would hike the dunes or walk along Lobos Creek and Bakers Beach daily. His first visit to Yosemite was in 1916 at age fourteen. Carrying the Kodak Box Brownie, a gift from his parents, he hiked, climbed and explored Yosemite. In 1919 Adams joined the Sierra Club and spent the next four summers in Yosemite Valley as “keeper” of the club’s lodge.
Yosemite Calls
Adams first published photographs appeared in the Sierra Club Bulletin in 1922. In 1928 Adams married Virginia Best, an aspiring singer and the daughter of landscape painter Harry Best. They had met in 1921 when she was 17 years old and he was 19 through their shared love of music.
The wedding followed a six-week courtship and a three-day engagement. The couple were avid hikers, and Best was also a member of the Sierra Club. They wed at the base of a 617-foot waterfall called Bridalveil and, naturally, honeymooned at Yosemite. Their first child, Michael, arrived in 1933, followed by Anne in 1935. Unfortunately, Adams missed the birth of both children, being away on photographic assignments at the time.
Ansel Adams,’ Public Board’, via Wikimedia Commons
Visualisation
In 1927 Adams published his most famous image – ‘Monolith, The Face of the Half Dome“. To get the shot he wanted, he climbed a rock cliff known as the ‘Diving Board’, a steep outcrop 3,500 metres above the Yosemite Valley.
When taking his image of the Half Dome – Adams said he had a vision of what he wanted the image to look like. This led to his visualisation technique. First, he composed the picture in his mind and then factored in tonal values. He felt this would lead to near-perfect negatives.
Adams took his first image using a yellow filter, but it wasn’t quite what he wanted. Then, using his last glass plate, he took another image using a red filter. This filter brightened the snow, created a dark sky and caused the rock face to glow in the midday sun.
Honing his craft
In 1929 he was hired as a photographer for the marketing department of Yosemite Park and Curry Company (the only lodging and dining provider for Yosemite National Park). The company wanted Adams to publish bold, captivating photographs to lure more tourists to Yosemite. To this end, the marketing department coached Adams about the most effective approach to making photographs.
In a letter, the head of the Yosemite Park and Curry Company instructed Adams that, when taking a winter photograph, he should only shoot trees and houses “heavily ladened with freshly fallen snow.” Likewise, Adams was told to take photographs of only the best-dressed ice skaters using the valley’s ice rink.
The Conversation
Straight Photography
Adams also met and became influenced by Albert. M. Benders, a San Francisco patron of the arts. Benders’ financial support and encouragement transformed Adams. Looking at Adams’s High Sierra photography, he declared they had to do a portfolio of them. Bender made all the arrangements for an edition of 100 portfolios, each 18 images, to be sold for $50 each. He also ordered ten copies for himself and handed Adams a check for $500 (approximately $8,500 today). Bender then got on the phone, lining up more supporters until half of the edition was pre-sold.
That same year Adams also met photographer Paul Strand. Strands’ images also had a significant impact on Adams. Adams turned away from the “pictorial” style of painterly, soft focus images he had previously used and began to concentrate on “straight photography” (also known as ‘pure’ photography). Before long, Adams was straight photography’s most articulate and emphatic champion.
The title ‘straight’ photography is, however, somewhat contradictory. Adams still used manipulation in his techniques and would spend hours in the darkroom dodging and burning his prints.
Bests Studio
By 1934 Adams was elected to the Sierra Club’s board of directors. In 1936 Virginia’s father, Harry Best, suddenly passed. She inherited Best’s Studio in Yosemite and, for 36 years, ran what is now The Ansel Adams Gallery. In 1937, Adams left the Yosemite Park and Curry Company to concentrate on his fine art photography, and the couple moved to Yosemite to take over the management of Bests Studio. Living in Yosemite, Adams now had access to the wilderness on his doorstep during all seasons and times of the day. He was now firmly established as a Sierra Nevada photographer and a Yosemite defender.
That same year, his Yosemite darkroom caught fire resulting in the loss of 5000 negatives. In 1941 he formulated the ‘zone system’ with Fred Archer, a technique dividing the negative into 11 zones and ranking tones from pure white to pure black plus eleven greys. Adams used this technique in developing negatives.
Commercial Work
While Adams was well known for his landscapes, it wasn’t until the later years that they provided him with a steady income. He often accepted work as a commercial photographer to keep the bills paid and allow for his creative pursuits. For example, in 1969, his Winter Morning in Yosemite Valley was licensed to the Hill Brothers Coffee Company, appearing on their 3lb tins. The tins still fetch up to $1000 when they come up for auction.
Japanese Internment
In 1943 Adams collaborated with Dorothea Lange on Japanese Internment images. He photographed the internment camp at Manzanar, one of the many camps the government put up for the detained Japanese-Americans. His pictures depicted the detainees’ discriminatory treatment at the U.S Government’s hands. In 1965, he donated his internment collection of more than 200 photographs to the Library of Congress.
“The purpose of my work was to show how these people, suffering under a great injustice, and loss of property, businesses and professions, had overcome the sense of defeat and dispair [sic] by building for themselves a vital community in an arid (but magnificent) environment … All in all, I think this Manzanar Collection is an important historical document, and I trust it can be put to good use.”
Ansel Adams
. California Manzanar, 1943. Photograph. Library of Congress.
. California Manzanar, 1943. Library of Congress
Career highlights & Awards
- Lectured and taught courses at the Museum of Modern Art
- Assisted in the establishment of the department of photography at the California School of Fine Arts
- Received three Guggenheim Fellowships
- Became a consultant for Polaroid
- Named on President Johnson’s environmental taskforce
- Founded ‘The Centre for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona
- “Yosemite and the Range of Light”, a book published which went on to sell over two hundred thousand copies
- Awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter
- Presented with Decoration of “Commander of the Order of the Arts and Letters”, the highest cultural award given by the French government to a foreigner
Ansel Adams, the technical genius of the camera and avid conservationist, passed away in Community Hospital California at age 82 due to a recurring heart problem. As a result of his tireless work, in 1984, the Ansel Adams Wilderness area of more than 100,000 acres was named after him. In addition, in 1985, Mount Ansel Adams, an 11,760-foot peak in Yosemite, was named after him on the anniversary of his death.
Virginia Best Adams outlived Ansel by 19 years, passing away in January 2000, aged 96.
Dorothea Lange was born Dorothea Nutzhorn on May 26 1895, in Hoboken, New Jersey, U.S. Lange was an American documentary photographer famous for her portraits of displaced farmers and Dust Bowl migrants during the Great Depression. Her photos were among the first examples of documentary photography and photojournalism.
Early Years
At age seven, Lange survived a severe polio case, leaving her with a lifelong limp. Her father abandoned the family in 1907 when she was 12, and her mother reverted to her maiden name of Lange. At age seventeen, Lange began working as an office assistant for famous photographer Arnold Genthe and taking photography classes. In 1919, at 24, Lange left home with a friend to travel the world. However, the U.S. had just entered the war, which ruled out European travel. So instead, she planned to travel to Mexico, Hawaii and the Far East.
California Bound
However, a thief scuttled her travel plans a second time. Arriving in San Francisco, a pickpocket stole all their money, leaving Lange and her friend stranded and penniless. Lange then went to work as a photo finisher at a five-and-dime store. Within a year, she opened a portrait photography studio. Her skill brought many of the rich and famous of San Francisco to her door. Through her work at the studio, she met her first husband, wilderness painter Maynard Dixon. Together they had two sons before separating, reportedly due to his long absences and rumours of infidelity. They finally divorced in October 1935. In December that year, she married economist Paul Taylor.
Gift of Paul S. Taylor
A social Conscience
While Lange had a successful career as a portrait photographer in San Francisco, she saw her photographs as tools for social change rather than art. Lange, therefore, began photographing life outside the studio. She took to photographing the unemployed men wandering the streets of San Francisco. Her images, showing the men’s desperate condition, were publicly exhibited and received immediate recognition from the public and other photographers.
The Great Depression
The Great Depression had begun in 1929 and, by 1933, was at its height. Seven thousand banks (one-third) of the banking system had closed. Within the U.S., fourteen million people were out of work bringing hardship, homelessness and poverty to millions. People evicted from their homes were sleeping in parks, sewer pipes and numerous shanty towns. “Hooverville” became a common term for a shanty town, named after Herbert Hoover, President at the start of the depression and widely blamed for it.
Lange visited a nearby breadline she had heard about with her Graflex camera. The breadline had been set up by a woman known as the “White Angel” to feed the many hordes of unemployed. This visit resulted in another iconic image: ‘White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco’, The photograph of a man turned away from the hungry crowd; his interlaced hands and set jaw personified collective despair.
Documenting the Dust Bowl Migrants
Lange’s photographs brought her immediate recognition, especially her image “white angel breadline”. It led to her being offered a commission as a Field Investigator for the Federal Resettlement Administration. The U.S. Agriculture Department hoped that Lange’s powerful images would bring the conditions of the rural poor to the public’s attention. So, throughout the summer of 1936, Lange drove through the South, photographing tenant farms and sharecroppers.
Dust Bowl Migrants
AP reporter Robert Geiger coined the term “dust bowl” to describe the land after years of drought. Following ten years of drought and subsequent dust storms, many sharecroppers and tenant farmers abandoned their land. Some battled on. However, they too were forced out when the banks foreclosed. As a result, around one-quarter of the population of the Great Plains (Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and northeastern New Mexico) were rendered homeless. They packed everything they owned into their cars and trucks and headed west toward California, which was touted at the time as Eden for hard workers. Leaving the drought-ravaged Midwest behind them, the migrants were viewed by Californians as disease-ridden intruders who would sponge off the government.
Unlike our current view of migrants being from other countries, these ‘migrants’ were fellow Americans moving from Great Plains to California. They were disdainfully called ‘Oakies’ and despised by Californians because their circumstances forced them to live in filth and squalor in shantytowns along irrigation ditches and roadsides.
The Migrant Mother
At the end of her trip through the south, as she returned home to the Bay, Lange was hot, tired and missing her sons. Driving down the road, she saw a sign reading, “PEA-PICKERS CAMP,” in Nipomo, California. Though she drove past the sign, it tugged her back, and she turned the car around and returned to the camp. There she encountered Florence Owens Thompson and her children. This led to the most famous image of the depression, if not her career.
“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother as if drawn by a magnet,” she later recalled. “She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding field and birds that the children killed.”
Dorothea Lange
The image Lange took that day, ‘Migrant Mother’ became one of the most iconic and reproduced images in the history of photography. (Unfortunately, as Lange had been working for the U.S. Government then, she didn’t own the image and received no royalties from it).
Lange’s career continues to rise
Lange’s first exhibition was held in 1934, cementing her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer. In 1939 she published a collection of 112 photographs in the book An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. It is considered a masterpiece of the documentary genre. Her second husband, economist Paul Taylor, provided the text. In 1939. John Steinbeck visited the migrant camps with Lange and used her images as research when writing his seminal novel the ‘Grapes of Wrath’. John Ford also used her images as research when he turned the book into a film.
In 1940, Dorothea received a Guggenheim fellowship that gave her enough money to live for one year and focus on her art. So, Lange invited her son Daniel and friend Ansel Adams to join her in photographing Mormon communities in America.
The War Years
However, as World War II escalated, Dorothea and Ansel put the project on hold. They wanted to do something they considered more important. So the War Relocation Authority hired the two colleagues. Their brief was to document the experience of Japanese Americans in internment camps following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour. Dorothea opposed internment policies but felt it was important to witness and document the truth of the camps.
When working for the War Department during WWII, she was forbidden from documenting the Japanese internment camps in any way that suggested they were anything other than organized and dignified. She found creative workarounds, such as photographing the shadow of a barbed-wire fence rather than the fence itself.
Literary Ladies Guild
Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress prints and photographs division, Washington D.C. 20540 USA
Japanese Internment Campos
The army instructed Lange to capture all steps in the process of the camps. But she was too good at her job. Her photographs showed Japanese parents and children in horrific and heartbreaking conditions. This was not the PR the U.S. Army wanted, and they refused to share Dorothea’s photographs with the public. Censored and forgotten, no one saw her Japanese internment photographs for decades.
Finally, in 2006, her work was celebrated when Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, edited by historians Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, was published.
Post War
Following the end of World War II, Lange returned to her projects creating several photo essays for Life magazine, including Mormon Villages and The Irish Countryman. In 1953–54 Lange worked with Edward Steichen on “The Family of Man,” an exhibition organised by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Included in the exhibition were several of her photographs. Over the next ten years, Lange travelled with her husband Paul, who was now a diplomat, photographically documenting countries throughout Asia, notably South Asia, the Middle East, and South America.
Final Exhibition
In 1965 Lange was diagnosed with inoperable esophageal cancer. At the time she was preparing for a retrospective exhibition of her work to be held at MoMA the following year. Her one-woman show was only the sixth ever dedicated to a photographer. And the first ever for a woman photographer. Dorothea Lange died, aged 70, on October 11, 1965. The exhibition opened to wide acclaim three months after her death
