The first series you see is by Russell Lee (1903-1986), a photographer whose work is new to me. He lived for a while among a farming community in the oddly named Pie Town, New Mexico, focusing on the sense of their community, the small rituals of their dogged lives. In Saying Grace, he captures a gaggle of men, women and children standing and praying before an outdoor barbecue at the New Mexico State Fair in the fall of 1940. God is in the detail. The men's hats are in their hands, revealing the paleness of their foreheads at odds with the ruddiness of their faces. In that one detail you sense the labor and struggle that underpins these stoical lives. Lee's eye for atmosphere is unerring, too. Couple at a Square Dance is extraordinary in its visceral energy. Men cling to women in the misty darkness, their shirts drenched with sweat from their exertions. The sense of desperate release is tangible.
Jack Delano's photographs are more studied and, here and there, seem almost posed. A row of black workers sweep hoes across a sun-baked Georgia field in almost perfect symmetry; a handsome man stands by a brightly painted trailer at the Vermont State Fair; a sideshow barker swigs lemonade in front of a billboard advertising Teddy the Wrestling Bear. This is a real America, too, of course, but it seems slightly too close to Walton's Mountain for comfort.
More evocative still are Marion Post Wolcott's studies of migrant workers at rest and play. She has captured a world where leisure seems like a still tentative, almost unreal, prospect. A group of men, dressed in the ubiquitous denim and check, lounge outside a rickety juke joint in Belle Glade, Florida, drawn there by the promise of cheap beer and music. In Louisiana, by a bend in a river, she encounters a telegraph pole bedecked with faded shirts and trousers, their owners unseen. Everything here is suggested, the tone often as drowsy and still as a sultry Southern afternoon. Her Boys Fishing in a Bayou cannot help but conjure up Huck Finn, whose wardrobe they seem to have raided, but the intensity of their concentration is all too real.
Everywhere you look in this fascinating exhibition, color seems to have added a poetic glow to the landscape and the faces of the people, and yet the more you look, the more you see the suffering that suffuses these nomadic lives. In more ways than one, nothing here is black and white.
And yet, for all that, I was drawn back to one monochrome image in that stark back room: Dorothea Lange's The Road West, New Mexico, 1938. This is such a stark and elemental photograph, and so full of dark resonances, that it seems to contain Thirties' America within its frame. Here, America's fabled endless highway offers little hope for renewal or regeneration; there is no sun, no blue sky, no people, just an eerie expanse of gray, a vast emptiness into which the road in question eventually disappears. In this single image, Lange tells you that no one who passed down this bleak road was bound for glory.
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