(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
It's the hot summer. It is London and the brown waters of the Thames, and Theresa May who has taken leave from the Brexit drama. It's my son and I, the third summer we are in London – the hottest summer since the 40 century. It is referred to as an "alarm clock" – but will it be remembered as that? Will the dangerous heat leave deep enough traces? On the way to a photo exhibition we talk about such things. Also about what will happen to the photograph, at a time when it no longer represents truth.
The story of the story
My son is fourteen now, and preoccupied with the wars – World War I and World War II. The interest in the story is a wedge in to him, through the games I do not play, the concepts I do not understand or pronounce incorrectly. His spring has agreed to sell doruls in the neighborhood to raise money for school trips with the "white buses". He has understood that there is fake news. That pictures can lie. That there is a difference between documentation and propaganda.
Winship's images reflect the economic downturn in the United States and form a map of the country's history of violence.
The first London day we spend at the Imperial War Museum, where we see parts of The triumph of the will from 1935, the Nazi propaganda film whose director Leni Riefenstahl insisted was a documentary right up to his death. Hitler is portrayed as fully as a god, flying from the sky to the people, where he arrives at the Nuremberg National Day in 1934. Even the cat in the window sill turns after him, almost hovering through the city in an open car.
I have told my young traveling companion that the exhibition we are heading to may be able to show some other sides of the story than the ones we have seen at the war museum. Therefore, despite his reluctance, he has joined. We see the British Vanessa Winship (b. 1960) and American Dorothea Langes (1895-1965) photographs.
connection Lines
My son already has seen Lange's famous picture of Florence Owens Thompson from the Depression in the United States, known by the name "Migrant Mother." The image is iconic but not problematic: Thompson was persuaded by Lange to give the poverty of that time a face, but for Thompson himself, the picture did not change a thing.
Both Lange and Winship have worked with photography as a political tool. Both have photographed traveling, Winship including Eastern Europe and the United States, often with a poetic approach to their objects; Long in large parts of the world, focusing on border zones and injustice.
The exhibitions are dedicated to each floor, but with their many connecting lines they still form a coherent whole. The deceased Lange bears the present colleague on his shoulders, also in the literal sense: From Winship's top floor we can look at Lange's photographs – and be reminded of the paradox with this art form: "It captures the now which is immediately the past." (Winship )
Winship works, as Lange also did, mostly in black and white – most of all to mark the photograph as a representation. The pictures take on themes such as identity, boundaries and memories, and with them often appear texts – writing on the wall, audio logs, mail correspondence – which give a generous insight into the context of the images: what happens before and after the photograph is taken.
Art of change
The exhibition is part of Barbican Art Gallery's 2018 initiative "The Art of Change", which focuses on the potential of art to influence the social and political landscape. In 2011, Winship received the Henri Cartier Bresson Award – and thus she was given the opportunity to create the series She Dances on Jackson (2011–2012), which reflects the economic downturn in the United States and forms a map of the country's history of violence.
Some of the portraits People carry scars and tattoos – words and drawings on the body. They often stand in front of an urban or natural landscape. Together with the cleaner landscapes – for example, of a car on a cracked asphalt road – they lead the mind to the violence we exert against each other, ourselves and nature through the way we live our modern lives. This is where Winship's images are most in dialogue with Langes, especially with the latter's work from the three-year crisis.
New news
Courtesy National Archives, photo no. 210-G .epsilon.241
Lange's exhibition opens with her early studio work – but soon her eyes turn to the world. For a long time, they did not even call their pictures documentary, but did not find any better words. On the wall, she should have had a quote by Francis Bacon that perhaps elaborates on her attitude to the world as well as to photography: "The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention. ”
Long tells the stories of men and women, children and the elderly, as well as using places, landscapes and details as markers of a larger political context. Unlike Riefenstahl, Lange does not emphasize one at the expense of the other; Neither the content nor the focus testify to a hierarchical approach to the objects (although sometimes I wonder about the portraits' experience of being photographed).
Faces and hands are important elements of Lange's images, revealing anger and powerlessness, but also hope.
My son is checking the years the pictures were taken against historical events, such as the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Long photographs from the same time show Japanese-Americans in detention camps; people deprived of work, home and identity. We are looking for consequences in the faces of those we see. In your hands. Both are important elements in Lange's images, revealing anger and powerlessness, but also hope.
Dorothea Lange lived a long life behind the camera, aiming to shed light on injustice and create change. Considering today's United States, many of her photographs seem intrusive again – for both the fourteen-year-old and me.
See also the leader of the month.
Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing
Vanessa Winship: And Time Folds
Barbican Art Gallery, London.
The exhibition will be on display from 22 June to 2 September 2018
See also: www.pbs.org/wgbh/roadshow/stories/articles/2014/4/14/migrant-mother-dorothea-lange/
www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2018/event/dorothea-lange-vanessa-winship
And: Dorothea Lange, Aperture Masters of Photography Series (1981)
