Dorothea Lange captured for an entire nation the faces people forever would associate with the 1930s Depression.
Her legendary photographs poignantly show whole families fleeing poverty and desolation with all their remaining possessions heaped in and on their automobiles.
The photographs remain compelling as a universal statement of human suffering and are so often reproduced it is difficult to remember that Lange continued to take photographs after the Depression and until her death in 1966.
An exhibit opening Friday at the Museum of Contemporary Photography at Columbia College introduces many of the little-known images from this later period of Lange`s career. It also includes several of her most famous Depression era images. The photographs were selected from among 400 placed with the museum on extended loan by Katharine Taylor Loesch, daughter of Lange`s second husband Paul Taylor.
These later photographs show scenes that convey what Loesch describes as Lange`s sense of celebration. Her subjects include three little girls playing on a lawn in Sunday dresses, a father`s hand resting fondly on a toddler`s head, a well-dressed woman leaning on a parking meter with skyscapers towering around her and a street scene in Egypt.
Loesch, who lives in Chicago and teaches oral interpetation of literature at the University of Illinois at Chicago, was 13 when her father married Lange.
Taylor was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and an expert in migration patterns when the Depression flooded California with the Dust Bowl migrants.
``He thought this was a very important thing to document and he was one of the first to document his articles with photographs, his own at first. But then he thought he should have a great photographer,`` Loesch says.
He went to Willard Van Dyke`s gallery in Oakland, Calif., to find such a person and there, by coincidence, he met Lange, whose work was on exhibit.
Lange had already traded her studio portrait photography of San Francisco`s upper crust for documentary photography. ``What she wanted to do and what my father wanted to do dovetailed,`` Loesch says.
Lange brought two children and Taylor brought three children to the marriage, but that didn`t keep them from traveling for their work. Together, they published ``An American Exodus`` (facsimile edition available from Ayer Co. Publications, $20), a compilation of their work during the Depression.
Lange brought an uncompromising social vision to her pictures. The migrant workers she photographed might have been destitute, but she invariably showed them as proud and noble as well.
``She felt strongly about conveying a sense of dignity and pride,``
Loesch says. She adds that Lange`s photographs brought out the dignity and pride her subjects themselves conveyed. The photographs offer a telling comparision between views of poverty then and now.
Lange herself was fiercely proud. She was a polio victim and out of her own experience with pain ``she was particularly moved by physical suffering,`` Loesch says.
Lange of course combined with her social vision an artist`s ability to see and compose a scene. ``She felt it was incumbent upon her to teach her children and grandchildren to see better,`` Loesch says. ``She would pick things up on the beach to show us or show us a view through the camera.``
The influence took root in at least one grandchild, Dyanna Taylor, a freelance motion picture photographer who did the photography for ``Pumping Iron II,`` the recent movie about women body builders.
One of the most interesting aspects of the Lange exhibit is that it offers a rare opportunity to see a great photographer`s working prints, unretouched and lined with orange crop marks in some cases.
``These weren`t stored archivally. There are pin holes all over them. She was obviously hanging them up, working from them,`` says Kathy Pilat, the guest curator of the exhibit and a graduate student in photography at Columbia.
LINK`S GHOST TRAINS
O. Winston Link has a flair for the dramatic.
It wasn`t enough for him just to photograph the steam engines roaring along America`s railroads, mastodons of industrialization. He shot the pictures at night, illuminated in a blaze of flash. He synchronized multiple flash units and arranged them around the Main Streets, drive-in movie houses, switch yards and dams that lined the tracks.
``I wanted those engines to glisten,`` Link says. The lights made them glisten and the lights transformed ordinary puffs of smoke into ethereal clouds.
It all fit because Link`s trains were in a sense mythical trains, about to be overtaken by the diesel engines just down the track. Shooting the last of the steam engines in the mid-1950s, his photographs retold the age-old story that all things powerful are also ephemeral.
An exhibit of Link`s photographs, ``Ghost Trains: Railroads of the 1950s,`` opens at the Museum of Contemporary Photography Friday along with the Dorothea Lange exhibit.