The road to hard times

Early in his career as a photojournalist, Horace Bristol deflected the criticism of another, better-known artist by declaring humbly, “I’m just like a stonemason working on a cathedral.” The analogy held true for him through the 1930s, ‘40s and ‘50s, as he chronicled everyday life and culture in the U.S. and Asia. He was a single-skilled individual, laboring toward something grand and affirming, a “Family of Man”-style humanism.

Dorothea Lange shared Bristol’s humility but applied a more potent aesthetic sensibility to the task and exercised greater ambition to effect change. She understood keenly the power of photography to influence perception -- not just visually, but politically, sociologically, historically. “The camera,” she once stated, “is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.” And propaganda, she believed, was merely another word for something you believe in strongly.

The J. Paul Getty Museum recently opened a stirring pair of shows, drawn primarily from its collection, featuring the photographs of Bristol (1908-1997) and Lange (1895-1965). “About Life: The Photographs of Dorothea Lange” is the larger, a survey in 80 pictures, anchored by her searing documentation of migrant labor in the ‘30s. The Bristol show focuses on just one series of photographs, which covers some of the same turf as Lange’s landmark, Depression-era work. Unlike hers, Bristol’s work from this period did not constitute the core of his career.

Lange recorded concisely and eloquently the conditions of the Dust Bowl migration through the expressions and postures of laborers, the textures of their lives. Her image of a weary and pensive mother, her young children clinging to her like barnacles, has become an icon -- perhaps the icon -- of the era. Although none of Bristol’s images attained that same iconic status, he, too, was instrumental in shaping our collective understanding of the period through his role in the creation of another landmark work of art from the period -- John Steinbeck’s novel “The Grapes of Wrath.”

This is the month that Californians are encouraged to read and discuss Steinbeck’s book, as part of a statewide initiative by the California Council for the Humanities, in partnership with the California Center for the Book. The Lange and Bristol shows at the Getty provide a precious opportunity to confront the very faces that populate Steinbeck’s tale.

In 1937, newly hired as a staff photographer for Life magazine, Bristol proposed a photo essay, with text by Steinbeck, on the migrant workers of California’s Central Valley. He had been inspired by Lange’s work on the same subject and had even accompanied Lange on some of her visits to photograph farm workers. The magazine’s editors dismissed Bristol’s proposal as too much of a downer, but he and Steinbeck headed out anyway, aiming to put together a magazine article and possibly a pictorial book. They spent between five and seven weekends of a particularly wet winter immersed in the lives of the Dust Bowl migrants around Visalia.

Bristol’s pictures show the dismal, muddy plots where families set up their tents, a line of workers hauling in barrels of peas, for which they were paid a penny per pound, a family applying for aid, and an assortment of the camp’s desperate and weary characters.

By the spring of 1938, Bristol told Steinbeck he had enough pictures for a book, but Steinbeck shook loose of the partnership. Unbeknownst to Bristol, he had already started writing a novel about the lives they witnessed. (He had also previously published several newspaper articles on Central Valley laborers, illustrated by Lange’s photographs.) When “The Grapes of Wrath” was published in 1939, Steinbeck received the Pulitzer Prize. Bristol simply moved on to another assignment, photographing the people of Bali. His photographs never did make it into book form as he had hoped, but they appeared twice in Life -- not on their own merits, but on the coattails of Steinbeck’s fame. Both magazine spreads are on display in the Getty show. One compares stills from the 1940 film version of “The Grapes of Wrath” with the Bristol photographs used as reference material. Vivid similarities are noted, as are several compromises made in the story’s translation to the big screen. The 30 pictures in the Getty show, “The Grapes of Wrath: Horace Bristol’s California Photographs,” convey bitter truths about the hardships of these migrant workers’ lives, but, ironically, the message came through louder and clearer as fiction.

Lange’s work from the same period has a more distilled, epic quality on its own. It represented her prolonged commitment to exposing the plight of the rural poor and, through such educating, to enact change. Although she knew as a teenager in Hoboken, N.J., that she wanted to be a photographer, she didn’t initially have social documentation in mind. She trained briefly with Clarence White (who disseminated Arthur Wesley Dow’s compositional principles emphasizing contrast, harmonious spacing and line), and set up a portrait studio in 1918 in San Francisco. Her business thrived, she married painter and illustrator Maynard Dixon, and they had two sons. They traveled together to the Southwest, the source of Dixon’s imagery, and there Lange made some beautiful but mostly conventional portraits and ethnographic studies of Taos Indians that make up the first section of the Getty show.

By the early 1930s, the circumstances of the Depression had thrust themselves upon her and those around her with undeniable force. She and Dixon split, and she began venturing out onto the streets to photograph labor struggles, strike meetings, demonstrations and unemployment lines. Her “White Angel Breadline” (circa 1933) exemplifies her ability to illuminate a daunting social condition through the description of a single individual, in this case, one shabbily dressed man turned away from a mass of others, in finer suits, waiting for a handout.

In 1935, Lange married Paul Taylor, an economist and social scientist, who taught at UC Berkeley and provided documentation to a state emergency relief agency. Lange began making photographs to supplement his reports and was soon hired by the federal government’s Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration) to record the impact of drought, economic depression and mechanized farming on rural life. Her photographs reflect the mission of the agency, to illustrate the need for government relief and to testify to the effectiveness of existing programs.

Over and over in her photographs from the ‘30s, she distills a subject to its essence, and in its particularity, it comes to represent something far bigger than itself, something universal about both suffering and dignity. In 1942, Lange was hired by the government to document the implementation of Executive Order 9066, calling for the internment of Japanese Americans. Only two photographs from this commission appear here, but one is classic, extraordinary Lange. It shows a little girl of Japanese descent at school in San Francisco, before her evacuation. She stands in the front row of her class, hand on her heart, reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, hers just one in a sea of earnest, variably shaded faces. The image attests to a fundamental human equality that the girl’s impending fate denies.

Although the photograph (and others documenting this episode) was meant to be tucked away in government files, it makes its poignant plea still.

As this exhibition succinctly demonstrates, Lange, in the course of her career, photographed a surprisingly wide range of subjects: street life in Oakland, the clean lines of a doorway in a Mormon town in Utah, utopian communities in Iowa, the elegant tracery of Berkeley oaks seen from below, tender family scenes of her son, pregnant daughter-in-law and grandchildren. All of it, though, stems from the same documentary impulse -- fiercely humanistic, lucid, and truthful.

For 40 years, she kept on her darkroom door a quote by Francis Bacon: “The contemplation of things as they are / Without error or confusion / Without substitution or imposture....” Honesty, her work attests, campaigns on its own behalf.

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On view

What: “The Grapes of Wrath: Horace Bristol’s California Photographs”

“About Life: The Photographs of Dorothea Lange”

When: Tuesdays to Thursdays and Sundays, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Where: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles

Ends: Feb. 9

Price: Free; $5 parking, parking reservations required before 4 p.m. on weekdays

Contact: (310) 440-7300