American Photography

Migrant Mother - Dorothea Lange, 1936

 

 

Something made me think of writing a bit about American photography. Many fine books and thousands of articles have been written about the subject, often by the practitioners themselves. I started thinking, what constitutes the archetypal American photograph? The f.64 Group? Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift and Willard Van Dyke trying to establish a purer form of photography, eschewing for instance pictorialist attempts to 'emulate' the 'finer arts'.

Ansel Adams' Yosemite images alone; photographs as magnificent in scale, tone and detail as their so American subject - surely a candidate? How about the Farm Securities Administration photographs of Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee? Lange's Migrant Mother stands practically alone as the image that represents the plight of the dustbowl migrants; surely a nomination? O. Winston Link's astonishing photographs of the last days of American steam railways? Weegee's New York street photography - likewise Elliott Erwitt's candid and slightly surreal take on the street? Ralph Gibson, who I've mentioned before?

The answer is there is no archetype; there are as many 'American' photographs as there are American photographers; each producing images that can be seen as archetypically 'American' in some way. That an art form [as I've said before, the argument about photography's status as art is over] that emanated from Europe's upper classes should be adopted by the new world and taken to its bosom, becoming as American as Jazz and the movies, both also adoptions, is testimony to the original openness of the United States and its willingness to adopt, adapt and innovate: think Abstract Expressionism or Pop Art as exemplars, many of its principals first, second or third-generation migrants from Europe, but producing art in a way that uniquely reflects their American surroundings and cultural milieu.

If I were to choose one image, though, it would Lange's Migrant Mother from the FSA work as it shows that the American Dream has so often been little more than a myth propagated by the wealth-owning classes there, and that the American economy is a fragile and capricious thing for most Americans, most of the time.

Whatever we perceive the US to be at this moment in time with its out of control President threatening to subvert his own country's democratic process, its mad gun laws and persistent race issues; the US has undeniably contributed greatly to global culture, in art, literature, cinematography, music and of course in photography. Let's hope the more rabid and uncultured factions of the American right wing don't succeed in pursuing the usual downward path that they seek to tread, dragging everyone and everything down into the swamp they're creating for themselves.