The White Angel Breadline……

20/10/17

I looked through several books from the list of photographers we were given and was most drawn to the work of Dorothea Lange. Turning the pages of the book Grab a Hunk of Lightening by Elizabeth Partridge, I was captivated by the overtly human element of Lange’s black and white images. Each one seemed to reveal the story of an individual or moment that became more intricate and emotionally engaging, the longer I looked at them. The absence of colour seemed to add to the depth of feeling in the photographs, making them more about the narrative of the subject and less about the composition or feel of the actual image on the page. I was particularly taken with a picture of an old man standing in a crowd titled “White Angel Breadline”.

Dorothea Lange is well known for documenting the great depression, her photograph ‘Migrant Mother’, became an image that seemed to encapsulate the whole era. She had been a successful commercial portrait photographer but with the onset of the financial crisis faced by her clientele and the chaos erupting around her, she decided to get involved and take to the streets to document the plight of the common people. ‘White Angel Breadline’ was taken during her first day on the streets of San Francisco in 1933, the turning point in her career. She headed towards the slums, accompanied by her brother, and began to capture images of unemployed men at a soup kitchen organised by a woman who called herself ‘The White Angel’.

The photograph itself is of a group of men, all wearing fedoras or caps and facing in the same direction, with the exception of the main subject; an older man who faces away with a hat that seems to tell a different tale to that of all of the others. His posture is pensive, his face tired, leaning on a fence with his empty cup in front of him. Clasping his hands together, he appears almost tense but despondent. He seems more dignified than the others, despite his shabby appearance; more wise and more patient, uninvolved with the commotion but with a sense of shame and frustration at his situation. It is almost as though he is putting off accepting charity until the last moment, until he has to come to terms with it being his turn. The rest of the crowd have an eagerness but he seems to know something the others do not. Everyone else looks to be in the moment, looking towards the future, but he is deep in thought, contemplating the past. He is waiting for something different to all of the others, lining up is pointless, his fate is inevitable and out of his control. It is almost as though he has done this all before. The thing that catches my eye the most is his hat. So different to the others, tired, beaten and dirty, showing the battle scars of a hard life but still serving its purpose, still struggling on. The hat itself seems to tell us so much about the subject, maybe because we cannot see his eyes, the hat tells his tale instead.

I think given that Dorothea Lange was very new to this style of photography, she may have been shy of thrusting the camera in someones face, of upsetting a group of already down-trodden men. She has though, captured the essence of the moment, the story of an old man and the imagination of the viewer in a respectful way. By not showing the subject’s eyes, Dorothea Lange has not invaded the man’s privacy, but captured him as a dignified symbol of one individual’s story. The photograph reinforces the reality that crowds of people are made up of individuals, all fighting their own battle, each with own story to tell.

 

Ref: Dorothea Lange “Grab a Hunk of Lightening” Her Lifetime in Photographs by Elizabeth Partridge 2013 http://artsedge.kennedy-center.org/students/features/story-behind-the-picture/lange-white-angel-breadline