Jul 2020
I saw the spirit of Dorthea Lange as I looked out my window two days ago.
It was not an accident. It was not an apparition. It is time for her spirit to
come again to the great American wasteland. It is time for Dorthea to prepare for another dispiriting, but at once brutal and honest, recording of the anguish and torment and crushing poverty that awaits so many of us in the near future. No, she will not be taking portraits of Bezos and Buffett and Gates and the other other American billionaires; rather, her spirit will see again the homeless, the jobless, the hopeless, the hungry. the utterly forlorn and forsaken of millions of us in interminably long soup lines and fellow citizens lying on folded cardboard boxes on cold cement sidewalks of virtually every city
and town in our great America. Perhaps Dorthea will create another photographic classic like "The White Angel Breadline." No doubt, the spirit of Dorthea will be joined by the spirits of the other photographers who chronicled the American misery of the Great Depression for the Farm Bureau Administration: Walker Evans; Gordon Parks; Jack Delano; Russell Lee; Carl Mydans; Arthur Rostein; John Vachon; Theo Jung; Ben Shahn; John Collier; Marion Post Wolcott. The spirits of Dorthea and her colleagues will document again the scourge of rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant workers. Dorthea Lange's iconic "Migrant Mother" is the photographic equivalent of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath." Steinbeck won a Nobel Prize for his literay canon. Dorthea Lange should have won a Nobel Prize for her photographic portfolio. Shortly, we all shall feel the presence of Dorthea and her fellow photograpers, for soon our fellow Americans will be without jobs, without homes, without food, without hope. In fact, the beginning of this abject disaster is aleady behind us, but we are blind to what is to become.
Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks
It was not an accident. It was not an apparition. It is time for her spirit to
come again to the great American wasteland. It is time for Dorthea to prepare for another dispiriting, but at once brutal and honest, recording of the anguish and torment and crushing poverty that awaits so many of us in the near future. No, she will not be taking portraits of Bezos and Buffett and Gates and the other other American billionaires; rather, her spirit will see again the homeless, the jobless, the hopeless, the hungry. the utterly forlorn and forsaken of millions of us in interminably long soup lines and fellow citizens lying on folded cardboard boxes on cold cement sidewalks of virtually every city
and town in our great America. Perhaps Dorthea will create another photographic classic like "The White Angel Breadline." No doubt, the spirit of Dorthea will be joined by the spirits of the other photographers who chronicled the American misery of the Great Depression for the Farm Bureau Administration: Walker Evans; Gordon Parks; Jack Delano; Russell Lee; Carl Mydans; Arthur Rostein; John Vachon; Theo Jung; Ben Shahn; John Collier; Marion Post Wolcott. The spirits of Dorthea and her colleagues will document again the scourge of rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant workers. Dorthea Lange's iconic "Migrant Mother" is the photographic equivalent of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath." Steinbeck won a Nobel Prize for his literay canon. Dorthea Lange should have won a Nobel Prize for her photographic portfolio. Shortly, we all shall feel the presence of Dorthea and her fellow photograpers, for soon our fellow Americans will be without jobs, without homes, without food, without hope. In fact, the beginning of this abject disaster is aleady behind us, but we are blind to what is to become.
Copyright 2020 Tod Howard Hawks
A graduate of Andover and Columbia College, Columbia University, Tod Howard hawks has been a poet, a novelist, and a human-rights advocate his entire adult life.
