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Dorthea Lange's iconic portrait of migrant Florence Thompson that has come to be known as "Migrant Mother"
Working in Washington, D.C., in the 70’s, I was assigned to shoot numerous Congressional hearings at the Capitol. I was one of the photographers that you see only on C-Span, sitting below the Congressmen and taking aim with long lenses at those testifying about the price of pork bellies or how Iran-Contra came to be.
And while this was (inserting tongue firmly in cheek) incredibly glamorous work, I would tear myself away from the meeting rooms during lunch or a long recess and stroll two blocks to another government building within which lay a world apart from mundane coverage of the body politic.
The building houses the largest library in the world – the United States Library of Congress (LoC) .
I’d go right to the research area that housed the photo files of the Farm Security Administration. These were Roy Stryker’s people … Walker Evans, Dorthea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Carl Mydans, Russell Lee, Ben Shahn, and Arthur Rothstein.
The heavy, green government issue file cabinets held thousands of silver gelatin black and white prints. From 35 millimeter contact sheets to working prints made from 4 x 5 nitrate film.
It was humbling as I would don white gloves and thumb through original prints of some of the most important documentary work of the twentieth century.
On my second visit to the LoC , I was on my knees searching through a bottom file drawer when I came across a familiar scene. It looked like Dorthea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” but instead of the familiar, tightly framed vertical portrait, the image was a wide, loose horizontal showing the destitute woman and her children under a single pitched piece of dark canvas.
I kept pulling prints from the file – and one by one – five appeared – all captured within a few minutes – and then I found a masterpiece. A master print of Migrant Mother.
I carried the five prints to a reading table, removed each from their annotated glassine envelope and began to recall Lange’s recounting of creating the photographs.
In 1960, an article in Popular Photographer magazine quoted Lange: “I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.”
And so here I was sitting with this great document of the great American Depression in my hands. It was like holding the Mona Lisa.
The disappointment was that Lange’s prints (and original negatives I was told) were scratched and degrading. Handling, environmental conditions and just plain aging were taking a toll on the images.
Copy negatives were made from the master prints and reproductions were printed and sold through the Library’s store, but sadly the damage remained on the prints as most remained in unrestored condition.
Now turn the clock forward thirty plus years.
With advances made in digital technology and the ability to restore digital copies of the worn and damaged photographic prints, I’ve decided to form a small company – American Photoarchive – to restore, preserve and sell images such as Lange’s, Matthew Brady and the works of hundreds of other photographers.
As an online entity, our overhead is low and this allows us to devote more of our resources to restoration (an image may take 30 minutes to 7 hours to restore) and still pass savings along to the collector. For example, if ordered through the Library of Congress online store, the price of an 8” x 10” photographic print is $28.00. American PhotoArchive’s price is $15.95 for the same image as a restored archival photographic print – you realize a significant savings and a much faster delivery time.