ยฉ Dorothea Lange
Fame Works by Subtraction
A photographer is whoever their most famous photograph forces them to be. It sounds uncomfortable as a sentence when you have worked for years trying to be recognized. And yet when a single image of yours breaks through, the rest of the career slips into the background. Fame works by subtraction.
Dorothea Lange, an American photographer, worked for forty years. In March 1936 she made five or six exposures at Nipomo, California. One of those photographs, Migrant Mother, became the icon of an entire era. The rest of her output shrank behind that single image, even though she kept shooting for another thirty years.
The part that concerns you directly is what public culture chose to forget. Between February and July 1942 Lange produced more than eight hundred photographs on the internment of Japanese-Americans. It was a job commissioned by the government and so critical that the military stamped Impounded on the prints and locked them in the national archives. They came out only in 2006, sixty-four years later. Her most politically courageous work was buried, while the icon of the Dust Bowl mother became the only thing she is remembered for.
Florence Thompson, the woman in the picture, always said she never saw a dollar and that she had asked in vain that the photograph not be commercialized. She is the first to pay. Lange pays second, less visibly, while four decades of career get compressed into ten minutes of 1936. The aggregate value of an entire life of work coincides in public memory with one exposure out of a handful.
When you hope a photograph of yours breaks through, you are asking for two things at once. One is recognition, the other is that everything else you do gets covered by that single image for the rest of your public life. It is a craft warning before it is an argument against success. You do not pick which of your photographs becomes an icon. The culture picks for you, and it picks the one that serves itself.
Marco Savarese
Editor-in-Chief
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Marco Savarese
Marco Savarese is Editor-in-Chief at Eyeshot, the independent publisher he founded in Italy in 2018. He spends most of his year reading portfolios, judging the Open Call, and editing the magazine catalogue. The reading desk is open, and he takes one-to-one Professional Reviews from photographers working seriously on long-term projects.
Who Finishes Your Photograph
NOTE #210. A photo isn’t finished until it survives to where people see it. Paul Strand chose hand photogravure for Photographs of Mexico so the printed copy kept the tonal weight of his prints. Protect the tone to the end, or the worst medium decides for you.
What the Dark Does
NOTE #209. A face lost in shadow reads as underexposed, a defect to fix. Gordon Willis kept Brando’s eyes in the dark in The Godfather and held it against the studio. Before you rescue a shadow, ask what it does; if you can say it, you decided it.
The Place After
NOTE #208. Of a huge event, often only an ordinary place is left. In On This Site (1996) Joel Sternfeld photographed fifty banal American places where violence happened, each with a line of text. Photograph the aftermath, and let the line do the work.
The Photo Made Together
NOTE #206. Street photography teaches you to steal people; there’s another way. In Malick Sidibรฉ’s Bamako studio the youth chose how to be seen. Before you take someone, ask how they’d want to look, and make the photo together.
Write Your Own Rules
NOTE #205. The thing that improves you most isn’t a new camera, it’s a short list of your own faults. Tony Ray-Jones kept a notebook of orders to himself and it shaped Martin Parr. Write your three rules and keep them in your pocket.
Watch the Master Work
NOTE #204. You don’t learn from a master’s finished prints, you learn from watching them work. In 1962 Joel Meyerowitz watched Robert Frank shoot, quit his job that day, and picked up a camera. Watch the body, not the result.
The Work Before the Name
NOTE #203. The worth of a photo and the worth of the byline are two different things. Koudelka shot the 1968 Prague invasion anonymously as ‘P.P.’ and revealed it sixteen years later. Photograph what must be photographed even when no one will know it was you.
The Subject You Run From
NOTE #202. The strongest subject you have is the one you’d rather not photograph. Ishiuchi Miyako went back to Yokosuka, the occupied base town she was taught to fear, and made it her life’s work. Point the camera where it’s uncomfortable.