MoMA Magazine Podcast:
Across her long career, from her landmark 1939 photo book An American Exodus to the pages of Life magazine in the mid-1950s, and from the pages of government reports to the walls of museum exhibitions, pioneering photographer Dorothea Lange grappled with the relationship between words and pictures, the subject of MoMA’s recent exhibition. In 1961 she concluded that, “All photographs…can be fortified by words.” Whether or not one agrees with this statement, the intersection of photography and poetry merits special attention.
In 1938 the poet (and soon-to-be-appointed Librarian of Congress) Archibald MacLeish published Land of the Free, which he described as “the opposite of a book of poems illustrated by photographs. It is a book of photographs illustrated by a poem.” The vast majority of these photographs were by Lange, including eight of the first nine. In the exhibition cataloguewe reproduced these spreads, allowing readers to appreciate the ways in which MacLeish’s “soundtrack” (as he referred to his poem) serves as a visual counterpoint to her memorable images.