Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize

September 19, 2005–January 8, 2006
Juanita Kreps and Lyndhurst Galleries

Things As They Are: Fifteen Years of the Lange–Taylor Prize

by Tom Rankin, Director of the Center for Documentary Studies

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.—Francis Bacon [Posted on Dorothea Lange's darkroom wall]

From the earliest days of the Center for Documentary Studies the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize has given support to photographers and writers working in the long tradition of documentary collaboration, embracing the notion of two independent artists creating an interdependent voice. This Web site, along with a special issue of Document and the Center’s exhibition, Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize, features the work of a selection of past prizewinners, whose photographic and literary approaches reveal the range and power of the documentary arts and bear witness to the diversity in documentary expression that has flourished over the last decade and a half.

Since the Center awarded the first Lange–Taylor Prize to Keith Carter and Suzanne Winckler for their fieldwork in Tunica County, Mississippi, then among the poorest counties in America, the prizewinners’ projects have taken them from as close to home as the North Carolina mountains and Brooklyn, New York, to as far away as the Czech and Slovak republics, Ajerbaijan, and Samoa. The Lange-Taylor Prize has been awarded to documentary artists whose cameras and pens are directed at central issues of our time. Projects have documented the lives of the severely mentally ill, the rise of Salvadoran gangs in U.S. cities, the influx of immigrants to Italy, the way the incarcerated hold on to a sense of identity, the dislocation and change brought about by highway construction in Appalachia, to name a few. In its breadth and range, this work is as important for its clarity of purpose as for its eloquence in communicating truths of human experience, the unexpected journeys of our neighbors across the globe, what they’ve lived through, how they get by day to day. Dorothea Lange articulates this power, the promise of documentary expression, in a 1940 essay: “Documentary photography,” she writes, “records the social scene of our time. It mirrors the present and documents for the future.” The values inherent in the work and spirit of Dorothea Lange, with her husband and creative partner Paul Taylor, have been guiding principles for the documentary projects of all the Lange–Taylor prizewinners, and we honor their words and photographs, their ambitious work, here.

Dorothea Lange, a photographer, and Paul Taylor, an economist, first collaborated in California when Taylor, working for the Rural Rehabilitation Division of the California State Emergency Relief Administration, asked for a photographer to help him with his research and final report. The response from his supervisors was, “Why would you need a photographer? Would social scientists generally ask for a photographer?” Taylor later recounted, in an article in 1970, that he said no, it was not a typical request: “I explained that I wanted to bring from the field itself visual evidence of the nature of the problem to accompany my textual reports made to those unable to go into the field but responsible for decision.” His reasoning won out and Dorothea Lange was added to the payroll as a “typist,” since the agency had no place in its budget for hiring a photographer. This was the beginning of a lengthy partnership (including marriage), a creative collaboration that has become a model of interdisciplinary documentary expression grounded in the arts and directed at the hearts and minds of people in places of influence and beyond.

One of Lange’s abiding instincts, which she shared with Taylor, was an interest in ordinary people and their daily struggles. When they published their seminal An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties in 1939 (republished for the Oakland Museum by Yale University Press in 1969), Lange and Taylor revealed the innovative result of their shared “contemplation of things as they are.” “This is neither a book of photographs nor an illustrated book in the traditional sense,” they wrote in the foreword. “Its particular form is the result of our use of techniques in proportions and relations designed to convey understanding easily, clearly, and vividly. . . . Upon a tripod of photographs, captions, and text we rest themes evolved out of long observations in the field.” This work, informed by their respective backgrounds in the arts and economics, was intended not only for academicians and artists but also for a broad public audience. The text and photographs were assembled, edited, and presented with clarity—as a reflection of one of the core values of their work, Lange and Taylor sought to humanize the subjects of Lange’s photographs through interviews, to “let them speak to you face to face.”

This marriage of words and photographs in the service of documentary work is as old as the documentary tradition itself. John Thomson and Adolphe Smith, in their 1877 book Street Life in London, presented straightforward images of people in the streets with writing that attempted to enlarge the reality of the photographs, using what they called “accuracy of testimony” to “present true types of the London Poor.” Likewise, Jacob Riis, striving to influence public policy, recognized the power of photography to magnify the force of his words describing the living conditions in New York’s tenements. These examples, and there are many others, offer the briefest background to the notable proliferation of documentary books in the 1930s, when a number of teams of writers and photographers attempted to challenge readers with their vision and understanding of the truth of the day. Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White, James Agee and Walker Evans, Louise Rosskam and her husband, Edwin Rosskam, all worked to create books that gave equal importance to text and images, neither one subjugated to the other. Seen this way, Lange and Taylor were part of a movement of sorts, a practice and belief that merging documentary representation across mediums, when done honestly, artfully, and with clear intent, could result in something more powerful and revealing than the work of a single artist, no matter how brilliant he or she in solo expression might be.

The Center for Documentary Studies, under the guidance of then-Executive Director Iris Tillman Hill, launched the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize with the desire to support new fieldwork in the long tradition of such documentary collaborations. There was—and there remains—no other competitive grant of its kind. Importantly, the prize committee has never sought to select pairs of artists just like the prize’s namesakes. The artistic and collaborative values inherent in the work of Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor have directed our thinking, but philosophies of collaboration and of relevant subject matter always evolve over time.

As one example of this progression, the focus of work by prize applicants has become increasingly international. Every year we see submissions from many different countries proposing projects that attempt to respond to shifting cultural and political landscapes. Documentarians, like journalists, gravitate toward moments of change and crisis. Like the work of Lange and Taylor, and all serious documentarians, the competitive applicants to this prize have a point of view derived from an in-depth understanding of place, history, and the current situation, in concert with a personal relationship to the proposed work. Ultimately, their commitment is to use documentary expression to motivate the thinking and reflection of others.

Over the last fifteen years, the Lange–Taylor Prize has served as a powerful catalyst in the documentary arts—this work, seen in magazines, exhibitions, and books, has had the opportunity to influence many other documentary artists as well as viewers and readers at large. As I look at the words and images presented here, I am reminded of something Taylor wrote in 1970 about Lange. “To the question, ‘What are you going to do with the photographs?’ she recommended the answer, ‘Don’t let that question stop you, because ways often open up that are unpredictable, if you pursue it far enough.’” What Lange said then should be held close now. The impulse to do the work, to take the picture, to write the words, is the thing to most encourage, follow, and support, realizing that good documentary work finds many uses, many forums, and often long lives. The work of Lange and Taylor has certainly demonstrated a lasting power. Our prize has already proven its wide reach, an influence, like that of Lange and Taylor themselves, that continues to enrich the nature of collaborative documentary work as it deepens human understanding.








banner image:

Installation view of Hand & Eye: Fifteen Years of the Lange–Taylor Prize. Photograph by Christoper Sims.


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