Kerry Kilburn Artist Post: 2 Artists from "Land" Exhibit 2/22/2016

Dorothea Lange Wikipedia
Dorothea Lange MoMA
Dorothea Lange Manzanar Historic Site

Men Cradling Wheat, Near Sperryville, Virginia, June 1936

Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) helped found the field of documentary photography. A graduate of Columbia University's photography program, she is best known for her work during the Dust Bowl with the Farm Security Administration, photographing rural poverty in California, the midwest, and parts of the south. In 1941 she was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship, but gave it up when WWII started and instead worked for the War Relocation Authority, documenting the internment of Japanese Americans. She later joined the faculty of the photography department at the California School for the Fine Arts (at Ansel Adams' invitation) and co-founded Aperture magazine. Lange suffered from poor health in the last two decades of her life and died of cancer in 1965.

According to this photograph's label, it shows "humans living in perfect harmony with the land, but many viewers would have seen the farming as pitifully outdated." These men, for example, had no idea what a combine harvester was. I was forcibly struck, both the the idea that these two men could be living in perfect harmony with nature and that people looking at the image at the time it was made would feel sorry for them. The juxtaposition of the two thoughts suggests that the people of the time felt that modern farming methods meant being quite deliberately out of harmony with nature. If someone today made an image of two men using manual labor farming techniques, I think it would be viewed with nostalgia and with a kind of hope that we could return to a better balance with the natural world than we have managed to achieve. In fact, I think that sort of nostalgia would inform the modern viewer looking at this image. That said, I think we should be careful not to overly romanticize the past: that kind of life was difficult to say the least, and left little time for education, art, music, and other pursuits.

___________________________________

Diann Rolfe Fiery obituary

Diann Rolfe Fiery (1935-2015) earned a bachelor's degree in studio art at the University of Maryland and, after raising three daughters, returned to school to study art photography, first at the University of Virginia, and later through the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, and has won numerous awards.

This pair of photographs, according to their label, "cleverly questions where nature ends and civilization begins, showing the grand drama of the seasons as they play out on a well-kept lawn." The question of where nature ends and civilization begins is a huge and timely one, especially as humans make more and more incursions into wild places. We like to have our cake and to eat it, too - we like to live close to natural spaces, but don't always like what nature offers us in return - whether it's coyotes and mountain lions or hurricanes and fires. I am reminded of one of Burtynsky's photographs that showed a development butting hard up against the border of the Navajo reservation in Arizona - it looked like the two were separated by an invisible wall. That's not how it works with us and nature; we get a semipermeable membrane at best. Of course, if it were up to me, we wouldn't have well kept lawns in any event, but that's another discussion . . .