The Contemporary Exodus

Dorothea Lange Americans are a migrant people; it's precisely the value upon which the country was founded, the move and migration in search of something better. I mentioned manifest destiny in my last post, and while it seems an eighth-grade Social Studies vocab word, it is, I believe, the summation of the American character. The "contemporary exodus," as Lange and Taylor refer to the migrant farmers of the depression, was perhaps contemporary and concentrated to the Depression, but it's analogues can be seen in every moment of American history. And its documentation, either also contemporaneous or retrospective, has been a crucial part of the history.

With documentation, however, are inherent dangers: one cannot possibly document everything, certainly not in a country as large and diverse as America. Even in the things one can document, nothing is concrete, everything is transient and changes often before the documentation is complete. Lange herself addresses briefly these issues, acknowledging, "We show you what is happening in selected regions of limited area. Something is lost by this method, for it fails to show fully the wide extent and the many variations of rural changes which we describe." She deflects appropriately by suggesting the "gain in sharpness of focus reveals better the nature of the changes themselves." Nevertheless, the issues remain, and beyond the issues of transience is still the relationship of documentation or reporting to art, and both to its subjects. James Agee is aware of the potentially exploitative symbiosis, and declares forthright, "Art... has nothing to do with life, or no more to do with it than is thoroughly convenient at a given time, a sort of fair-weather friendship, or gentleman's agreement, or practical idealism, well understood by both parties and by all readers." This, I feel, is certainly true of writing, of painting and film. Unfortunately, the most crucial tool of the documentation of the Great Depression was none of these, and instead was the photographic camera.

Photography, unlike other mediums and perhaps without corroboration, tends to be taken at face value. That is, the understanding between both parties, artist and audience, that art is not life but merely a reflection or facet of life in a certain moment, carefully constructed by the artist to express precisely what the artist wants to express, is often absent. This loss, I think, is occasionally fault of the artist, but much more so a fault of the audience. A camera, supposes the layman, he without practical knowledge on how a photograph is constructed beyond the press of a shutter, captures what is real, what is there. For, by definition, a camera cannot photograph what is not there, as a painter can add from his imagination to a still life or a film can be edited to juxtapose many scenes at whim. If this were the case, however, all that would be required of a photographer is that depress of the shutter, and anyone with any finger dexterity could be as genius an artist as any other.

Photographs, in fact, are edited in precisely the same way as all art. Before and after, with thing intentionally left out or added in, angles and lighting considered as much or more so than the subject itself. But we don't consider all art exploitative, or, if we do, we are willing to overlook it for the representation of a greater truth it provides. And that, I think, is the purpose of most documentations, certainly of the Great Depression and a displaced people: to show a larger truth through a focused perspective, to show a truth of a problem, and a problem that persists today, rather than an individual struggle or even a communal but passing hardship.