Dorothea Lange

Today, we are speaking with photographer, printer, filmmaker, author, and probably a few other things [laughs] that I've forgotten to list, Neil Selkirk.

Uh, Neil and I are going to talk about his new book, Why Photographs? A Book Without Photographs, which is a collection of essays, excerpts, introductions, quotes, uh, by Neil himself, Berenice Abbott, Julian Barnes, Dorothea Lange, Siegfried Kracauer, one of my favorites in the book, Paul Graham, and really so many more.

Uh, it is a book that is historical, philosophical, and humorous, all about photography.

But maybe most importantly, it's a book that really reminds you of why you fell in love with photography and why we still look for meaning in the photograph.

And that's what writers are doing.

Um, and, and, and, and the applications, this idea that it's a, um, it's about observation and, and, and the importance of observation and, and how difficult observation can be.

You know, there's that wonderful Dorothea Lange quote that was on her darkroom door, uh, that, uh, a camera is a wonderful device for learning how to see without a camera.

[laughs]

And really, it was just a lot of reading, reading, reading, newspaper accounts, uh, survivor accounts.

There are the remarkable Dorothea Lange photographs, uh, that so beautifully, you know, show the era.

So really, it was just another, you know, example of we know some of this story, we know The Grapes of Wrath, um, but we didn't know enough about what ordinary women were doing, and that's what I went in search of.

How, how do you keep your children alive at a time like this?

He was like, no, Ansel Adams didn't do Dust Bowl.

You're thinking of Dorothea Lange.

Ansel Adams did the nature with the blacks and the whites that were really contrasted.

Sorry to this woman.

Right.

Um, yeah, you might know about Dorothea Lange, and Cartier-Bresson, and, um, Annie Leibovitz, and Carrie Mae Weems, and Dana Bay, but do you know enough about the history of Emmett Till to write about this?

Yeah.

You know? That's, that's what I mean about the training piece, so-

Right.

I mean, we've seen this right now with the history, our erasures.

But you can think of the work of Dorothea Lange in that context, you know-

Mm-hmm

I think it was 1922 to San Francisco and went up into Maynard Dixon's studio.

And Maynard Dixon was married to Dorothea Lange at that time.

And she photographed several of his great images.

And she said it was like two old-time Native Americans sitting around talking, as she observed kind of in the background.

Fusilli.

My guest on this episode of Writers at Work is Neil Selkirk, a photographer and author whose latest book is Why Photographs? It's a collection of essays and occasional poem and quotes by Neil and some three dozen other artists, including Berenice Abbott, Margaret Atwood, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, whose essay is 13 words in total, and W.G.

Sebald, as well as Philip Larkin, Thomas Hardy, and Francis Bacon.

Quite a lineup, isn't it? A native of London and a longtime New Yorker, Neal studied photography at the London College of Printing.

The camera wants everything.

And so the photographer needs to use the device as a discovery machine, as a mechanism for finding out what's actually out there.

There's that wonderful Dorothea Lange quote in the book, which she had pinned up on her darkroom wall, that a camera is a great device for figuring out how to see things without a camera.

You know, that cameras see stuff.

And so to look to the past and say, how did you process it? How did you keep yourself from falling apart? And how did you get through it? Always has something to teach us.

So today we are going to learn about the artist, Dorothea Lange.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm sure many people know Dorothea Lange who are listening.

Even if you don't know you know her, you most likely have seen her iconic image.

And to say iconic feels like an understatement.

And so obviously we are going to be diving right into...

Well, I guess we're going to start in the late 1800s because that's when she was born.

FSA, I'm sorry.

You know, Dorothea Lange, all those, the, you know, the-

Mm-hmm

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