Fact or Fiction?

A less well known image of Dorothea Lange's "Migrant Mother": Are documentary images more influential in raising social awareness than works of fiction?In “The Mother of Literature: Journalism and The Grapes of Wrath,” William Howarth writes about Steinbeck's novel as a form of social documentary. I started to wonder what my own conception of documentary art is...can fiction be a form of documentary? Can it help to fuel social change? It's an interesting question, one which I've thought a lot about, since I do a lot of my own writing and photography. According to Howarth, documentary style tends to flourish in periods of social crisis. The Depression marked a change in expression, signaling the rise of the “documentary imagination,” the idea that individuals could use documentary as a way to spread truth, right wrongs, and shape a new social order. Apparently, the final chapters of the novel actually do stem from real events that Steinbeck witnessed in 1938 near Visalia, CA. That winter, local streams flooded, leaving thousands of migrant families homeless and starving. Steinbeck joined relief efforts there for several days, but felt guilty due to the fact that he was wealthy from writing books that reflected other people's pain. “Funny how mean and little books become in the face of such tragedies,” he said. He was actually in Visalia at the time to gather material for a text and picture book about farm migrants, one photo of which was of a mother nursing her baby, which was assumed to influence the creation of Rose of Sharon's character. He later revealed to his photographic partner, who had selected the images to be published, “I'm sorry to tell you, but I've decided it's too big a story to be just a photographic book. I'm going to write it as a novel” (hence, Grapes of Wrath). For more research, Steinbeck made extensive trips through the Central Valley, visiting squatter's camps, working as a field hand, and talking to people along the way. But he intentionally chose fiction as a method to bring attention to the plight of the migrant worker. Howarth writes, “he chose fiction to make his story more artful, not truthful. In fiction he could fabricate at will, making up people and events by splicing and reshaping materials garnered from research.” He goes on to argue that many other documentaries of the time did the same thing in order to dramatize social history. It's interesting to think that fiction could be a better way of drawing attention to a cause than making a documentary film, or publishing a news article. We tend to assume that the former leads to more awareness about an issue and ends up promoting more social activism, but maybe fiction and other creative, more interpretive art in general, can sometimes be more powerful in telling a real story. I wonder if Dorothea Lange's photographs raised more awareness about the plight of the migrant worker than Steinbeck's novel. Do we respond with more empathy to real people or fictional ones? It's an interesting push and pull that I think still affects a lot of writers and artists today who struggle with choosing the right media in which to tell their story. We often view documentary and fiction as two opposing methods, but maybe they are more similar than we think.