Alan Watts Reads “One of the Greatest Things Carl Jung Ever Wrote”

Carl Jung found­ed the field of ana­lyt­i­cal psy­chol­o­gy more than a cen­tu­ry ago, and many ref­er­ence his insights into the human mind and con­di­tion still today. Alan Watts cer­tain­ly did his bit to keep the Jun­gian flame alive, what­ev­er the out­ward dif­fer­ences between a Swiss psy­chi­a­trist and an Eng­lish inter­preter of Tao­ism, Hin­duism, and Bud­dhism, espe­cial­ly of the Zen vari­ety. Both men believed in cast­ing a wide spir­i­tu­al net, all the bet­ter to expose the com­mon core ele­ments of seem­ing­ly dis­parate ancient tra­di­tions. And in so doing they could hard­ly afford to ignore the reli­gious under­pin­nings of the Euro­pean civ­i­liza­tion, broad­ly speak­ing, from which they emerged. In fact, Watts became an ordained Epis­co­pal priest at the age of 30 — though, owing to the com­plex­i­ties of his beliefs as well as his per­son­al life, he resigned the min­istry by age 35.

But Watts’ invest­ment in cer­tain tenets of Chris­tian­i­ty endured, and he named as one of Jung’s great­est writ­ings a lec­ture deliv­ered to a Swiss cler­gy group. “Peo­ple for­get that even doc­tors have moral scru­ples and that cer­tain patient’s con­fes­sions are hard even for a doc­tor to swal­low,” begins the speech as Watts reads it aloud in the video above. “Yet the patient does not feel him­self accept­ed unless the very worst in him is accept­ed too. No one can bring this about by mere words. It comes only through reflec­tion and through the doctor’s atti­tude towards him­self and his own dark side.” To help anoth­er per­son, in oth­er words, one must first accept that per­son as he is; but to accept anoth­er per­son as he is first requires tak­ing one­self straight, less-than-admirable qual­i­ties and all.

Accord­ing to Watts, Jung him­self demon­strat­ed this rare self-aware­ness. “He knew and rec­og­nized what I some­times call the ele­ment of irre­ducible ras­cal­i­ty in him­self,” says Watts in a talk of his own pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. “He knew it so strong­ly and so clear­ly, and in a way so lov­ing­ly, that he would not con­demn the same thing in oth­ers, and would there­fore not be led into those thoughts, feel­ings, and acts of vio­lence towards oth­ers which are always char­ac­ter­is­tic of the peo­ple who project the dev­il in them­selves upon the out­side, upon some­body else, upon the scape­goat.” As Jung puts it to his cler­i­cal audi­ence, “In the sphere of social or nation­al rela­tions, the state of suf­fer­ing may be civ­il war, and this state is to be cured by the Chris­t­ian virtue of for­give­ness and love of one’s ene­mies.”

What Chris­tian­i­ty holds as true of the out­er world goes just as well, Jung argues, for the inner one. “This is why mod­ern man has heard enough about guilt and sin. He is sore­ly beset by his own bad con­science and wants, rather, to know how he is to rec­on­cile him­self with his own nature, how he is to love the ene­my in his own heart and call the wolf his broth­er.” He “does not want to know in what way he can imi­tate Christ, but in what way he can live his own indi­vid­ual life, how­ev­er mea­gre and unin­ter­est­ing it may be.” Only by being allowed to fol­low this “ego­ism” to its con­clu­sion of “com­plete iso­la­tion” can he “get to know him­self and learn what an invalu­able trea­sure is the love of his fel­low beings”; it is only “in the state of com­plete aban­don­ment and lone­li­ness that we expe­ri­ence the help­ful pow­ers of our own natures.” With­out know­ing our own natures, we can hard­ly expect even the most time-test­ed belief sys­tems to put an end to the civ­il wars inside us.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Zen Mas­ter Alan Watts Explains What Made Carl Jung Such an Influ­en­tial Thinker

Carl Jung Explains His Ground­break­ing The­o­ries About Psy­chol­o­gy in a Rare Inter­view (1957)

Alan Watts On Why Our Minds And Tech­nol­o­gy Can’t Grasp Real­i­ty

Face to Face with Carl Jung: ‘Man Can­not Stand a Mean­ing­less Life’ (1959)

The Wis­dom of Alan Watts in Four Thought-Pro­vok­ing Ani­ma­tions

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

How Norman Rockwell Used Photographs to Create His Famous Paintings: See Side-by-Side Comparisons


More than 40 years after Nor­man Rock­well’s death, the ques­tion of whether his paint­ings are real­is­tic or unre­al­is­tic remains open for debate. On one hand, crit­i­cal opin­ion has long dis­missed his Sat­ur­day Evening Post-adorn­ing visions of Amer­i­can life as sheer­est fan­ta­sy. “A lit­tle girl with a black eye, an elder­ly woman say­ing grace with her grand­son, a boy going to war: Rock­wellian scenes rep­re­sent a cer­tain sen­ti­men­tal Amer­i­ca — an ide­al Amer­i­ca, or at least Rock­well’s ide­al,” says a 2009 NPR sto­ry on his work.

On the oth­er hand, if Rock­well’s admir­ers give him a pass on this sen­ti­men­tal­i­ty, his detrac­tors often turn a blind eye to his obvi­ous tech­ni­cal mas­tery. Say what you will about his themes, the man might as well have been a cam­era.  Indeed, his process began with an actu­al cam­era. Accord­ing to that NPR piece, he “used pho­tos, tak­en by a rotat­ing cast of pho­tog­ra­phers, to make his illus­tra­tions — and all of his mod­els were neigh­bors and friends,” res­i­dents of his small town of Stock­bridge, Mass­a­chu­setts.

The cam­era­men includ­ed a Ger­man immi­grant named Clemens Kalis­ch­er: “An artist-pho­tog­ra­ph­er him­self, Kalis­ch­er was at odds with the trac­ing tech­niques and sac­cha­rine sub­ject mat­ter in Rock­well’s work. After all, Rock­well nev­er paint­ed free­hand, and almost all of his paint­ings were com­mis­sioned by mag­a­zines and adver­tis­ing com­pa­nies.”

But “although he may not have clicked the shut­ter, Rock­well direct­ed every facet of every com­po­si­tion,” as you can see by exam­in­ing his paint­ings and ref­er­ence pho­tos togeth­er, fea­tured as they’ve been on sites like Petapix­el.

At Google Arts & Cul­ture, you can scroll through a short exhi­bi­tion of Rock­well’s late work on race rela­tions in Amer­i­ca that reveals how he had not just one but many pho­tographs tak­en as source mate­r­i­al for each paint­ing, which he would then com­bine into a sin­gle image. This qua­si-cin­e­mat­ic “edit­ing” process brings to mind the “sto­ry­board­ing” of Edward Hop­per, who stands along­side Rock­well as one of the most Amer­i­can painters of the 20th cen­tu­ry.

But while Hop­per gave artis­tic form to the coun­try’s alien­ation, Rock­well — whom his­to­ry has­n’t remem­bered as a par­tic­u­lar­ly hap­py man — cre­at­ed an “Amer­i­can sanc­tu­ary oth­ers wished to share.” And though nei­ther Hop­per nor Rock­well’s Amer­i­ca may ever have exist­ed, they were craft­ed from the pieces of Amer­i­can life the artists found every­where around them.

via Petapix­el/Messy­Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nor­man Rock­well Illus­trates Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer & Huck­le­ber­ry Finn (1936–1940)

NASA Enlists Andy Warhol, Annie Lei­bovitz, Nor­man Rock­well & 350 Oth­er Artists to Visu­al­ly Doc­u­ment America’s Space Pro­gram

Nor­man Rockwell’s Type­writ­ten Recipe for His Favorite Oat­meal Cook­ies

Edward Hopper’s Cre­ative Process: The Draw­ing & Care­ful Prepa­ra­tion Behind Nighthawks & Oth­er Icon­ic Paint­ings

Yale Launch­es an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Nikon Offers Free Online Photography Courses During the Holidays

A quick heads up. From Novem­ber 23rd through Decem­ber 31st, you can stream for free all class­es offered by Nikon School Online. Nor­mal­ly priced at $15-$50 per course, this 10-course offer­ing cov­ers Fun­da­men­tals of Pho­tog­ra­phy, Dynam­ic Land­scape Pho­tog­ra­phy, Macro Pho­tog­ra­phy, Pho­tograph­ing Chil­dren and Pets, and more.

Find­ing the cours­es on the Nikon site is not very intu­itive. To access the cours­es, click here and then scroll down the page until you see a yel­low but­ton that says “Watch Full Ver­sion.” From there you will get a prompt that allows you to sign up for the cours­es…

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via PetaPix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Annie Lei­bovitz Teach­es Pho­tog­ra­phy in Her First Online Course

Take a Free Course on Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy from Stan­ford Prof Marc Lev­oy

Learn Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy with Har­vard University’s Free Course

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

How Errol Morris Became Obsessed with — and Figured Out — the Truth of a Famous War Photograph

Errol Mor­ris did­n’t go all the way to the Crimean Penin­su­la just because of a sen­tence writ­ten by Susan Son­tag. “No,” he once explained to a friend, “it was actu­al­ly two sen­tences.” Found in Regard­ing the Pain of Oth­ers, Son­tag’s late book-length essay on war pho­tog­ra­phy, these lines deal with the fact that “many of the canon­i­cal images of ear­ly war pho­tog­ra­phy turn out to have been staged, or to have had their sub­jects tam­pered with.” Take Val­ley of the Shad­ow of Death, pio­neer­ing war pho­tog­ra­ph­er Roger Fen­ton’s famous­ly des­o­late 1855 image from the Crimean War. Fen­ton actu­al­ly shot this land­scape twice: in one pic­ture, “can­non­balls are thick on the ground to the left of the road, but before tak­ing the sec­ond pic­ture — the one that is always repro­duced — he over­saw the scat­ter­ing of the can­non­balls on the road itself.”

Or did he? Mor­ris had his doubts — and, as the mak­er of such acclaimed doc­u­men­taries on the nature of truth and its rep­re­sen­ta­tion as The Thin Blue Line and Stan­dard Oper­at­ing Pro­ce­dure and the author of the book Believ­ing is See­ing: Obser­va­tions on the Mys­ter­ies of Pho­tog­ra­phyhe clear­ly has an intel­lec­tu­al invest­ment in the sub­ject.

“I spent a con­sid­er­able amount of time look­ing at the two pho­tographs and think­ing about the two sen­tences,” Mor­ris writes in a 2007 New York Times blog post. “How did Son­tag know that Fen­ton altered the land­scape or, for that mat­ter, ‘over­saw the scat­ter­ing of the can­non­balls on the road itself?’ ” How, for that mat­ter, “did Son­tag know the sequence of the pho­tographs? How did she know which pho­to­graph came first?”

Unable to turn up any per­sua­sive evi­dence, Mor­ris launched an inves­ti­ga­tion of his own, inter­view­ing experts, dig­ging into Fen­ton’s let­ters, and even­tu­al­ly mak­ing his way to the Val­ley of the Shad­ow of Death itself (not to be con­fused with the oth­er, bet­ter-known val­ley across which Ten­nyson’s Light Brigade charged). All of this Mor­ris did in the name of find­ing out which came first, the pho­to with the can­non­balls beside the road, or the one with the can­non­balls on the road. You can hear him dis­cuss this increas­ing­ly obses­sive quest for the truth in the video above from Vox’s Dark­room, the series that pre­vi­ous­ly gave us a break­down of the very first faked pho­to­graph. But then, as this and oth­er inves­ti­ga­tions by Mor­ris into the rela­tion­ship between images, lan­guage, and real­i­ty have under­scored, there is no such thing as a true pho­to­graph.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Errol Mor­ris: Two Essen­tial Truths About Pho­tog­ra­phy

Errol Mor­ris Med­i­tates on the Mean­ing and His­to­ry of Abra­ham Lincoln’s Last Pho­to­graph

How the “First Pho­to­jour­nal­ist,” Math­ew Brady, Shocked the Nation with Pho­tos from the Civ­il War

Why the Sovi­ets Doc­tored Their Most Icon­ic World War II Vic­to­ry Pho­to, “Rais­ing a Flag Over the Reich­stag”

The First Faked Pho­to­graph (1840)

Errol Mor­ris Makes His Ground­break­ing Series, First Per­son, Free to Watch Online: Binge Watch His Inter­views with Genius­es, Eccentrics, Obses­sives & Oth­er Unusu­al Types

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Iconic Photography of Gordon Parks: An Introduction to the Renaissance American Artist

I felt the need for me to some­how or anoth­er, use human­i­ty to get peo­ple to become aware of how peo­ple suf­fered. That was what drove me to it.

Poet, nov­el­ist, jazz pianist, clas­si­cal com­pos­er, co-founder of Essence mag­a­zine, and first Black direc­tor of a major Hol­ly­wood film, based on a book he him­self wrote.… Oh, and he also direct­ed Shaft, the high water­mark of Blax­ploita­tion film and a pro­duc­tion, says Evan Puschak, the Nerd­writer, above, “that helped to save MGM and the larg­er stu­dio sys­tem from bank­rupt­cy.” Gor­don Parks lived “enough for ten lives,” but the resume above miss­es out on Parks’ “great­est con­tri­bu­tion to Amer­i­can art in the 20th cen­tu­ry… his pho­tog­ra­phy.”

The self-taught Parks began tak­ing pic­tures at 25, inspired by news­reel footage of the bomb­ing of an Amer­i­can gun­ship. After see­ing the film, he pur­chased his first cam­era and soon moved to Chica­go, where he honed his craft in the ear­ly 40s and devel­oped the skills that would bring him to the New Deal’s Farm Secu­ri­ty Admin­is­tra­tion. There he worked under the leg­endary Roy Stryk­er, the for­mer Colum­bia econ­o­mist who also hired Dorothea Lange, Walk­er Evans, Edwin Rosskam, and oth­er pho­tog­ra­phers who went on to have long careers in pho­to­jour­nal­ism.

None of these Depres­sion-era gov­ern­ment pho­tog­ra­phers neglect­ed the Black expe­ri­ence in Amer­i­ca; under Stryker’s direc­tion, the FSA did its best to faith­ful­ly doc­u­ment work­ing-class and poor Amer­i­cans of all back­grounds. Before being com­mis­sioned to do so, how­ev­er, Parks, the only Black pho­tog­ra­ph­er in the group, was already seek­ing out can­did, inti­mate images of life on the South Side of Chica­go. When he began work­ing for the FSA, he pro­duced one of the most icon­ic images of the peri­od, “Amer­i­can Goth­ic,” a solo restag­ing of the Grant Woods paint­ing fea­tur­ing a clean­ing woman named Ella Wat­son, broom in one hand, mop in the oth­er.

Stryk­er, one of the most dar­ing pho­to edi­tors of the time, helped estab­lish the bold doc­u­men­tary style that dom­i­nat­ed in the com­ing decades of Look and Life mag­a­zines. But even he saw Parks’ “Amer­i­can Goth­ic” as too incen­di­ary. As Parks remem­bers in a clip above, “he says, ‘Well, you’re get­ting the idea, but you’re going to get us all fired. (Laughs) He says, ‘This is a gov­ern­ment agency, and that pic­ture is an indict­ment against Amer­i­ca.’” Parks did not get fired. Instead, he went on to work for the FSA’s suc­ces­sor, the Office of War Infor­ma­tion, and pho­tographed the Tuskegee Air­men.

Parks’ skills as an artist were wide-rang­ing: his vision took in every­thing. He doc­u­ment­ed the Black expe­ri­ence in the 20th cen­tu­ry with more sen­si­tiv­i­ty and depth than any oth­er pho­tog­ra­ph­er. His pho­to essay of a Harlem gang leader earned him the first staff appoint­ment for a Black pho­tog­ra­ph­er at Life in 1948. He would go on to doc­u­ment the Civ­il Rights move­ment and both cel­e­brat­ed and ordi­nary peo­ple around the coun­try and the world for the next sev­er­al decades, return­ing often to the fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy in which he got his start. He was a renais­sance artist with an activist’s heart. Parks once called the cam­era a “weapon against pover­ty and racism,” but he tend­ed to wield it much more like a paint­brush.

You can view gal­leries of Parks’ pho­to­graph­ic work at The Gor­don Parks Foun­da­tion web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Art of the New Deal: Why the Fed­er­al Gov­ern­ment Fund­ed the Arts Dur­ing the Great Depres­sion

Yale Presents an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Found: Lost Great Depres­sion Pho­tos Cap­tur­ing Hard Times on Farms, and in Town

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him @jdmagness

Take a Digital Drive Along Ed Ruscha’s Sunset Boulevard, the Famous Strip That the Artist Photographed from 1965 to 2007

Ed Ruscha has lived near­ly 65 years in Los Ange­les, but he insists that he has no par­tic­u­lar fas­ci­na­tion with the place. Not every­one believes him: is dis­in­ter­est among the many pos­si­ble feel­ings that could moti­vate a paint­ing like The Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um on Fire? Nev­er­the­less, the plain­spo­ken Okla­homa-born artist has long stuck to his sto­ry, per­haps in order to let his often cryp­tic work speak for itself. Orig­i­nal­ly trained in com­mer­cial art, Ruscha has paint­ed, print­ed, drawn, and tak­en pho­tographs, the most cel­e­brat­ed fruit of that last pur­suit being 1966’s Every Build­ing on the Sun­set Strip, a book that stitch­es his count­less pho­tographs of that famous boule­vard — both sides of it — onto one long, con­tin­u­ous page.

What­ev­er you think of such a project, you can’t accuse it of a mis­match between form and sub­stance. Nor can you call it a cyn­i­cal one-off: between 1967 and 2007, Ruscha drove Sun­set Boule­vard with his cam­era no few­er than twelve times in order to pho­to­graph most or all of its build­ings.

These include gas sta­tions (an archi­tec­tur­al form to which Ruscha has made the sub­ject of its own pho­to book as well as one of his most famous paint­ings), drug­stores, appli­ance deal­ers, Cen­tral Amer­i­can restau­rants, karate schools, trav­el agen­cies, car wash­es, Mod­ernist office tow­ers, and two of the most char­ac­ter­is­tic struc­tures of Los Ange­les: low-rise, kitschi­ly named “ding­bat” apart­ment blocks and L‑shaped “La Man­cha” strip malls.

The mix of the built envi­ron­ment varies great­ly, of course, depend­ing on where you choose to go on this 22-mile-long boule­vard, only a short stretch of which con­sti­tutes the “Sun­set Strip.” It also depends on when you choose to go: not which time of day, but which era, a choice put at your fin­ger­tips by the Get­ty Research Insti­tute’s Ed Ruscha Streets of Los Ange­les Project, and specif­i­cal­ly its inter­ac­tive fea­ture 12 Sun­sets. In it you can use your left and right arrow keys to “dri­ve” east or west (in your choice between a van, a VW Bee­tle, or Ruscha’s own trusty Dat­sun pick­up), and your up and down but­ton to flip between the year of the pho­to shoots that make up the boule­vard around you.

Many long­time Ange­lenos (or enthu­si­asts of Los Ange­les cul­ture) will motor straight to the inter­sec­tion with Horn Avenue, loca­tion of the much-mythol­o­gized Sun­set Strip Tow­er Records from which the very Amer­i­can musi­cal zeit­geist once seemed to emanate. The Sacra­men­to-found­ed store was actu­al­ly a late­com­er to Los Ange­les com­pared to Ruscha him­self, and the build­ing first appears in his third pho­to shoot, of 1973. The next year the ever-chang­ing posters on its exte­ri­or walls includes Bil­ly Joel’s Piano Man. About a decade lat­er appear the one-hit likes of Lover­boy, and in the twi­light of the 1990s the street ele­va­tion touts the Beast­ie Boys and Rob Zom­bie. In 2007, Tow­er’s sig­na­ture red and yel­low are all that remain, the chain itself hav­ing gone under (at least out­side Japan) the year before.

12 Sun­sets’ inter­face pro­vides two dif­fer­ent meth­ods to get straight from one point to anoth­er: you can either type a spe­cif­ic place name into the “loca­tion search” box on the upper right, or click the map icon on the mid­dle left to open up the line of the whole street click­able any­where from down­town Los Ange­les to the Pacif­ic Ocean. This is a much eas­i­er way of mak­ing your way along Sun­set Boule­vard than actu­al­ly dri­ving it, even in the com­par­a­tive­ly nonex­is­tent traf­fic of 1965. Nev­er­the­less, Ruscha con­tin­ues to pho­to­graph­i­cal­ly doc­u­ment it and oth­er Los Ange­les streets, using the very same method he did 55 years ago. The build­ings keep chang­ing, but the city has nev­er stopped exud­ing its char­ac­ter­is­tic nor­mal­i­ty so intense­ly as to become eccen­tric­i­ty (and vice ver­sa). What artist wor­thy of the title would­n’t be fas­ci­nat­ed?

Explore the Get­ty Research Insti­tute’s Ed Ruscha Streets of Los Ange­les Project here.

via Austin Kleon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Artist Ed Ruscha Reads From Jack Kerouac’s On the Road in a Short Film Cel­e­brat­ing His 1966 Pho­tos of the Sun­set Strip

Roy Licht­en­stein and Andy Warhol Demys­ti­fy Their Pop Art in Vin­tage 1966 Film

A Brief His­to­ry of John Baldessari, Nar­rat­ed by Tom Waits

Take a Dri­ve Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Ange­les with Vin­tage Through-the-Car-Win­dow Films

Watch Randy Newman’s Tour of Los Ange­les’ Sun­set Boule­vard, and You’ll Love L.A. Too

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Dorothea Lange Digital Archive: Explore 600+ Photographs by the Influential Photographer (Plus Negatives, Contact Sheets & More)

Short­ly before her death in 1965, one of the New Deal’s most famous pho­tog­ra­phers, Dorothea Lange, spoke at UC Berke­ley. “Some­one showed me pho­tos of migrant farm­work­ers they had just tak­en,” she said. “They look just like what I made in the ‘30s.” We can see the same con­di­tions Lange doc­u­ment­ed almost 60 years lat­er, from the pover­ty of the Depres­sion to the intern­ment and demo­niza­tion of immi­grants. Only the cloth­ing and the archi­tec­ture has changed. “Her work could not be more rel­e­vant to what’s hap­pen­ing today,” says Lange biog­ra­ph­er Lin­da Gor­don.

As an Amer­i­can, it can feel as if the coun­try is stuck in arrest­ed devel­op­ment, unable to imag­ine a future that isn’t a retread of the past. Yet activists, his­to­ri­ans, and ther­a­pists seem to agree: in order to move for­ward, we have to go back—to an hon­est account­ing of how Amer­i­cans have suf­fered and suf­fered unequal­ly from eco­nom­ic hard­ship and oppres­sion. These were Lange’s great themes: pover­ty and inequal­i­ty, and she “believed in the pow­er of pho­tog­ra­phy to make change,” says Erin O’Toole, asso­ciate cura­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy at the San Fran­cis­co Muse­um of Mod­ern Art

Among famous Bay Area col­leagues like Ansel Adams and Edward West­on, Lange is unique in that “her archive and all that mate­r­i­al,” says O’Toole, “stayed in the Bay Area,” held in the pos­ses­sion of the Oak­land Muse­um of Cal­i­for­nia. Now, more than 600 high-res­o­lu­tion scans are avail­able online at the OMCA’s new Dorothea Lange Dig­i­tal Archive, which also “con­tains con­tact sheets, film neg­a­tives and links relat­ed to mate­ri­als as addi­tion­al resources for the many cura­tors, schol­ars and gen­er­al audi­ences access­ing Lange’s body of work,” Emi­ly Mendel writes at The Oak­land­side

The dig­i­tal archive will like­ly expand in com­ing years as the dig­i­ti­za­tion process—funded by a grant from the Hen­ry Luce Foun­da­tion—con­tin­ues. The phys­i­cal archive is vast, includ­ing some “40,000 neg­a­tives and 6,000 prints, plus oth­er mem­o­ra­bil­ia.” These were inac­ces­si­ble to any­one who couldn’t make the “huge trek to OMCA,” Lange’s god­daugh­ter Eliz­a­beth Partridge—author of Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Light­ning (2013)—remarks. The project is “the most impor­tant thing,” says Par­tridge, “that has hap­pened to her work since it was giv­en to the muse­um decades ago” by her sec­ond hus­band Paul Tay­lor. 

The online archive-slash-exhib­it divides Lange’s work in four sec­tions: “The Depres­sion,” “World War II at Home,” “Post-War Projects,” and “Ear­ly Work/Personal Work.” The first of these con­tains some of her most famous pho­tographs, includ­ing ver­sions and adap­ta­tions of Migrant Moth­er, the posed por­trait of Flo­rence Thomp­son that “became a famous sym­bol of white moth­er­hood” (though Thomp­son was Native Amer­i­can) and “moved many Amer­i­cans to sup­port relief efforts.” We can see how the icon­ic pho­to was tak­en up and used by the Cuban jour­nal Bohemia, the Black Pan­ther Par­ty news­pa­per, and The Nation, who imag­ined Thomp­son in 2005 as a Wal­mart employ­ee.

In the sec­ond cat­e­go­ry are Lange’s pho­tographs of Japan­ese intern­ment camps, unseen until rel­a­tive­ly recent­ly. “When she final­ly gave these pho­tos to the Army who hired her,” Gor­don notes, “they fired her and impound­ed the pho­tos.” Lange’s skilled por­trai­ture, her uncan­ny abil­i­ty to human­ize and uni­ver­sal­ize her sub­jects, could not suit the pur­pos­es of the U.S. mil­i­tary. “She used pho­tog­ra­phy,” O’Toole says, “as a tool to uncov­er injus­tices, dis­crim­i­na­tion, to call atten­tion to pover­ty, the destruc­tion of the envi­ron­ment, immi­gra­tion…. The protests that are hap­pen­ing today would be some­thing she’d be pho­tograph­ing in the streets.”

Maybe in a dig­i­tal age, when we are over­whelmed by visu­al stim­uli, pho­tog­ra­phy has lost much of the influ­ence it once had. But Lange’s images still inspire equal amounts of com­pas­sion and curios­i­ty. As Amer­i­cans con­tend with the very same issues, we could do with a lot more of both. Enter the Dorothea Lange Dig­i­tal Archive here

via Austin Kleon

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Dorothea Lange Shot, Migrant Moth­er, Per­haps the Most Icon­ic Pho­to in Amer­i­can His­to­ry

478 Dorothea Lange Pho­tographs Poignant­ly Doc­u­ment the Intern­ment of the Japan­ese Dur­ing WWII

Yale Presents an Archive of 170,000 Pho­tographs Doc­u­ment­ing the Great Depres­sion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The 100 Most Influential Photographs: Watch TIME’s Video Essays on Photos That Changed the World

We live in a cul­ture over­sat­u­rat­ed with images. Videos of vio­lence and death cir­cu­late with dis­turb­ing reg­u­lar­i­ty, only rarely ris­ing to the lev­el of mass pub­lic out­rage. Social media and news feeds bom­bard us not only with dis­tress­ing head­lines but with pho­to­graph after photograph–doctored, memed, repeat­ed, then dis­card­ed and for­got­ten. It’s impos­si­ble to do oth­er­wise than to for­get: the sheer vol­ume of visu­al infor­ma­tion most of us take in dai­ly over­whelms the brain’s abil­i­ty to sort and process.

As if insist­ing that we look and real­ly see, the judges of the Pulitzer Prize have giv­en the award for fea­ture pho­tog­ra­phy almost exclu­sive­ly to images of tragedy in recent years. In most cas­es, the con­flicts and dis­as­ters they depict have not gone away, they have only dis­ap­peared from head­line news. Whether we can say that pho­tog­ra­phy is los­ing its pow­er to move and shock us in the over­whelm­ing sea of visu­al noise is a sub­ject for a much longer med­i­ta­tion. But I can think of few recent images com­pa­ra­ble to those in the TIME 100 Pho­tographs series.

Of course the say­ing “time will tell” isn’t just a pun here: we can only know if a pho­to will have his­toric impact in hind­sight, but in near­ly all of the 100 pho­tos featured—which have been giv­en their own mini-doc­u­men­taries—the impact was imme­di­ate and gal­va­niz­ing, inspir­ing action, activism, wide­spread, sor­row, anger, appre­ci­a­tion, or awe. The emo­tion­al res­o­nance, in many cas­es, has only deep­ened over the decades.

The image of Emmett Till’s face, bat­tered into unrec­og­niz­abil­i­ty, has not lost its pow­er to shock and appall one bit. Although the spe­cif­ic con­text may now elude us, its details still mys­te­ri­ous, we can still be moved by Jeff Widener’s pho­to­graph of a defi­ant Chi­nese cit­i­zen fac­ing down the tanks in Tianan­men Square. Alber­to Korda’s 1960 por­trait of Che Gue­var­ra became not only icon­ic but a lit­er­al icon.

What will we see fifty, or 100, years from now, on the oth­er hand, in “Oscars Self­ie” (2014), by Bradley Coop­er? The pho­to seems to me an eeri­ly cheer­ful por­tent from the point-of-view of 2020, just a hand­ful of years lat­er, with its well-groomed, smil­ing, mask-less faces and lack of social dis­tanc­ing. It is an image of a gen­uine­ly sim­pler, or at least a pro­found­ly more obliv­i­ous, time. And it was also just yes­ter­day in the scale of TIME’s list, whose ear­li­est pho­to dates to almost 200 years ago and hap­pens to be the “first known per­ma­nent pho­to­graph.”

TIME itself, once a stan­dard bear­er for pho­to­jour­nal­ism, shows us how much our inter­ac­tion with pho­tog­ra­phy has changed. The so-called “turn to video” may have been most­ly hype—we con­tin­ue to read, lis­ten to pod­casts, and yes, pour over strik­ing pho­tographs obses­sive­ly. But hard­ly any­thing these days, it seems, can pass by with­out a mini-YouTube doc­u­men­tary. We may not need them to be emo­tion­al­ly moved by these pho­tographs, yet tak­en alto­geth­er, these short videos offer “an unprece­dent­ed explo­ration,” writes TIME, of how “each spec­tac­u­lar image… changed the course of his­to­ry.”

Watch all of the 21 short doc­u­men­tary videos cur­rent­ly avail­able at TIME’s YouTube chan­nel, with more, it seems, like­ly to come.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The Sto­ry Behind the Icon­ic Pho­to­graph of 11 Con­struc­tion Work­ers Lunch­ing 840 Feet Above New York City (1932)

The First Pho­to­graph Ever Tak­en (1826)

The First Faked Pho­to­graph (1840)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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