Dorothea Lange's Post-FSA Work

© Dorothea Lange 

Dorothea Lange is perhaps better known for her work for the FSA during the Great Depression. While documenting the dispossessed of the American society she captured the image of the ‘Migrant Mother’, a picture that has become not only iconic, but has also been reproduced in almost every book that refers to a history of photography.

Although, Lange’s career has been overshadowed and haunted by her work for the FSA in general and the image of Florence Owens Thompson in particular, she produced work which has not drawn so much attention, but is nevertheless as important and historical.

Some 69 years ago, on December 7^th 1941 Japan launched a surprise military attack on Pearl Harbour, Hawaii, which resulted to the death of more than 2,000 military personnel. The next day the U.S.A declared war to Japan and officially entered WWII. But, the U.S response to this unexpected attack was not only her involvement with the war, but also it was aimed internally having as a primary target American citizens of Japanese descent living in the Pacific Coast of the U.S. With the motto ‘a Jap’s a Jap’, combined with political and media propaganda, which enforced prejudice and influenced the white population of the area, the relocation and internment of more than 150,000 Japanese-Americans started in 1942.

Lange was commissioned in the same year by the War Relocation Authority to record the Zeitgeist of the Japanese community and its internment in camps. But the photographer’s critical stance, which was to showcase the ‘Americanism’ of the Japanese-Americans and by expansion to signify their unjust treatment made the Army to seize her images and her job was to stop there.

To me these pictures are not only historical, but also contemporary. Foremost, they remind me of the little attention international media have paid on the backlash against the American Muslim communities after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And to quote George Santayana: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’

Michael Wolf’s Tokyo Compression

© Michael Wolf http://www.photomichaelwolf.com/tokyo_compression/

Michael Wolf in his project titled Tokyo Compression brings us face-to-face with the passengers of the Tokyo metro. Wolf, although loyal to the aesthetics of his previous practice, provides the viewer with a new hint of ‘street’ and ‘portrait’ photography.

Wolf’s subjects are not only literally compressed in the tube, but also figuratively. The use of this particular camera angle and the tight cropping around the subjects brings us in a very close proximity with what these individuals are experiencing. The photographer decided to capture and showcase the facial characteristics and the state of each individual in this claustrophobic enclosed space. He has refused to give us a more general and wider view of the carriages. A wider representation of the scene would surely depict the crowd in a rather uncomfortable situation, but it would not give us much information about the individual passenger.

Therefore, the photographer has critically grasped a fragment of the post-modern city life and in extension has achieved two things. On the one hand, by isolating his subjects, he fuses the notions of the public and the mundane with that of the private and the intimate. Although the passengers are in the public space of the metro and they are going through a collective experience, at the same time they are caught in a rather lonely and intimate moment. Some look straight in the camera, while other people’s faces are drawn with fear, anger, discomfort and stress. Their vulnerability makes them victims of our gaze, which in turn creates a feeling of desperation. They are exposed to our gaze and there is nothing they can do about it; they do not have the choice of consent.

On the other hand, Wolf by bringing us in such a close proximity with his subjects provides us with a broader image, that of the socio-economic status quo and this is the reason why I find Wolf’s project interesting and successful. In the current metropolis, where capital has become the ruling force, people rush to their offices for a 9-5 dry, money driven productivity without any sense or notion of togetherness. Career has become synonym to life and vice versa, with nothing left beyond that. The fact that the images were taken in Tokyo, Japan makes Michael Wolf’s case even stronger. Japan, whose economy nearly collapsed in the nineties, is the country with the highest suicidal rate in the world.

Wolf’s pictures show us the agony, fear, discomfort and, sometimes, deliberate day-dreaming of the commuter trying to displace herself in another dimension, away from what the post-modern city has to offer her. Nevertheless, just like a flock of chickens in a barn these individuals are nothing more than the representation of our own image, of our own distress and Michael Wolf, through his unique eye, effectively reminds us of that.