One of the great photographers of the last century, Dorothea Lange is known for producing a number of images that went on to become icons of her time. So it's a little strange to have to push through a throng of magazine reading, time killing department store shoppers just to get a decent look at her original prints. But that's Fnac for you.
To it's credit, the French department store is successful at promoting culture, especially photography. It has incorporated photo galleries into both of its Taipei locations, and shows are usually interesting. But when the photographers are really good and really famous -- Lange merited her own retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1966 -- it's always a bit of a shock to see them in a shoppers' lounge.
On the third floor of the Fnac near the Taipei Train Station, which is located at 12 Kuanchian Rd., 32 of Lange's black and white prints will be on display through Sept. 5. Ten of them are in a room for reading and watching videos. While I was there one weeknight around the time of the evening rush, an opera was being shown on one wall, and most of the 30 or so chairs were filled with people and bunched on the opposite side of the room, blocking access to photos I had studied in college, like Cotton Picker, (1940). So to look at a few great photos, I had to push through people who were comfortably seated and zoning. It was kind of a crappy way to see art. Generally speaking, I like Fnac's conception of the Casual Gallery, but this was ridiculous.
But then again, maybe Lange's photos, as great as they are, don't have much to say to a youngish crowd of Taipei commuters. Lange is famous for her photographs of America's Great Depression. Along with Walker Evans, she produced the images that have come to define that era. In 1935, she and Evans embarked on a project jointly commissioned by America's Farm Security Administration and Federal Resettlement Administration to document the great changes then taking place.
Over the next seven years, Lange captured the sharecroppers of the south, displaced farmers of the midwest, convoys of unemployed Okies headed for California, and the bread lines and migrant worker camps that formed when they got there. And this is what's on display at Fnac, including famous images like Migrant Mother, (1936), White Angel Bread Line, (1932), and Street Demonstration, (1933).
But if her photos are irrelevant, then why show them? And of course they're not irrelevant. In addition to defining a slice of history, Lange's work represents both aesthetic and ethical developments in photography's history. Though she never considered herself an artist, she is remembered for a severe, graphic style that influenced later photographers of the 1950s and 1960s, like Irving Penn and Richard Avedon, who eventually carried photography the rest of the way into minimalism.
As a documenter and early photojournalist, Lange was one of the first to show people within their social context, and her rule was to shoot only what she saw, never to set up or manipulate her scenes. As such, she rightfully earned her reputation as one of the greats of the 20th century, so her photos deserve a decent viewing area. Had Fnac put them at their Nanking location, it would have been a better choice.
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