Review
Art
Attention
Culture
5 min read

The very image of kindness

Photography risks cruelty in search of sensation. Andrew Davison contrasts such works with Dorothea Lange’s compassionate gaze.

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

A black and white close up of a mothers cradling her jaw in worry as children cuddle into her.
'Migrant Mother', Lange's best known image.
Public Domain, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

Do you like your photography cruel or kind? I’m generally an enthusiast for kindness – an unsung virtue – but I was mesmerised by a 2019 show of photography by Diane Arbus (1923–71) at the Heyward Gallery, London, and she’s the cruellest of the lot. Her photographs are a study in the awkward, the disturbing, and the unusual: a pair of brothers with extraordinarily large ears, a child with a grimace and a toy hand grenade, a boy from a pro-war parade, wearing with straw boater and “Bomb Hanoi” badge. 

Arbus’s photographs have an undeniable charge. They hold your view. I’m glad, however, that I stand in front of her prints, not in front of her lens. She was not out to show you at your best. Here is Germaine Greer, describing a photoshoot with Arbus in the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan. 

'Clutching the camera she climbed on to the bed and straddled me, moving up until she was kneeling with a knee on both sides of my chest. She held the Rolleiflex at waist height with the lens right in my face. She bent her head to look through the viewfinder on top of the camera, and waited… as soon as I exhibited any signs of distress, she would have her picture… Nothing would happen for minutes on end, until I sighed, or frowned, and then the flash would pop. After an eternity she climbed off me, put the camera back in her bag and buggered off. A few weeks later she took an overdose of barbiturates and slit her wrists.' 

Reviewing the Aperture monograph that would secure Arbus’s fame, Susan Sontag described her work as ‘a hymn to the isolation and atomization of the individual’. I am not sure that’s entirely fair. There was undeniable cruelty to Arbus. “You see someone on the street,” she wrote, “and essentially what you notice about them is the flaw.” Perhaps all photography risks cruelty, depicting us warts and all (at least before the advent of the Instagram filter, although I’m inclined to call Instagram filters the worst indignity of all). Yet, even in Arbus, just in portraying the human as human, compassion lurks at least just round the corner. 

But sometimes compassion is nearer at hand, even centre stage. For that, I turn to Dorothea Lange (1895–1965), and to a recently-opened show of her work at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, entitled Seeing People. It holds Lange before us as the archetype of compassionate photography.  

Lange could not have produced the photographs she did, however compassionate she might have been, without time, care, and attention. 

Lange trained as a portrait photographer, establishing a successful studio in San Francisco in the 1920s. Her approach to photography as a humane act developed during her work documenting rural poverty in the decade that followed. With it, she drew public attention to the effects of the Great Depression and the dust bowl, and helped to shift the public mood. From 1935, she did that under the auspices of what would soon become the Farm Security Administration. A photograph taken in March 1936 – “Human Erosion in California” (eventually known as “Migrant Mother”) – proved to be her career-defining shot. It shows Florence Owens, mother of ten children, photographed in the pea pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California. She and her family were in a dire situation, constantly moving to find new, transitory work.  

In the 1940s, Lange documented the suffering of Japanese Americans during the Second World War (“Japanese American-Owned Grocery Store, March 1942”), not least once Japanese Americans began to be moved into internment camps (“Grandfather and Grandson of Japanese Ancestry at a War Relocation Authority Center, July 1942”). For the rest of her career, Lange would travel to places in the United States that rarely, if ever, feature in genteel conversation, to photograph people scraping through on very little, never failing to capture a sense of their dignity. 

So, Lange was a compassionate photographer. I knew that before this show opened, and kindness is there in print after print. I was expecting that. What struck me for the first time is that Lange’s compassion was no light, easily achieved affair. She was careful, prepared, painstaking. She spent extended periods in deprived parts of her country, sometimes travelling for months at a time. She immersed herself in the life of a community, not least in its religious life, rather as an anthropologist would. She took detailed notes, and laboured over how to describe her subjects in captions and accompanying prose. 

It is too easy to say that Lange was compassionate in way in which Arbus was not: too easy, if that implies that the fruits of her compassion were easily achieved. Lange could not have produced the photographs she did, however compassionate she might have been, without time, care, and attention.  

She ‘saw people’, as the name of this exhibition reminds us. She saw people is because she took time to look. Before she clicked her shutter, she looked, she saw, she listened. 

In contrast to Lange’s deliberate intent, Arbus was a wanderer. She had a remarkable eye, and she took what she wanted. She is among the greatest of opportunist photographers. Sontag got to the heart of that, remarking that Arbus treated human beings like the “found objects” that Surrealists elevated to the status of art: 

What may seem journalistic (read “sensational”) in Arbus’s photographs places them, rather, in the main tradition of Surrealist art—with their taste for the grotesque, the proclaimed innocence with respect to their subjects, their claim that all subjects are merely objets trouvés.  

Therein lies the difference from Lange. 

The world could do with more compassion. Who would deny that? The message of the Washington exhibition, and of Lange’s work as a whole, is that compassion is not the work of a moment. Posting outrage to social media, or posting solidarity for that matter, is not going to change very much at all. It may make things worse. Lange’s lesson for this hour is that compassion requires us to take time. Her message is in her anthropological attention to people, communities, stories. She ‘saw people’, as the name of this exhibition reminds us. She saw people is because she took time to look. Before she clicked her shutter, she looked, she saw, she listened. 

  

Dorothea Lange: Seeing People runs from 5 November 2023 to 31 March 2024 in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Entry is free. 

Review
Culture
Death & life
Film & TV
Trauma
5 min read

Bridget Jones: a brilliant mess of a movie

A fresh expression of lost, stolen, love.
A couple sit on outdoor seats, her resting her head on his shoulder.
Working Title Films.

I cannot overstate how low my expectations were going into this film. I love the first Bridget Jones, a classic of the (specifically British) romcom genre. The two sequels were tedious retreads, and the idea of number four in the series elicited the opposite of delight. I went to see Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy out of parochial duty – many of the film’s beautiful exterior shots were filmed in my parish, at the church school and the surrounding streets. I wanted to ‘represent the parish’ and show some local pride. I wasn’t alone; I saw many faces I recognised from the school gates, and I ended up sitting next to a parishioner. Thank goodness cinemas are dark!  

You’ll understand by the end of the review. 

The film opens on Bridget, rather disorganised and dishevelled in just the manner we’ve grown to love, getting ready for a night out while also preparing dinner for her children. She and Mark Darcy now have two children, and the house looks like a cyclone has passed through. She calls Daniel Cleaver, who engages in some raunchy chat, and then insists he’s on his way. Oh no! Have she and Darcy divorced? Has that bounder and cad Cleaver wormed his way back in?  

Cleaver arrives at her home…to babysit!?  

Bridget hurries off to her dinner, and as she approaches her host’s front door she smiles. Darcy is walking towards her from the other end of the street. They meet at the door and lovingly complement each other’s appearance. They ring the bell. The door opens. Bridget in standing there. Alone. 

Bridget is a widow and a single mother. Her children are adorable, but hard work. She hasn’t worked properly since Mark died. She is both overwhelmed and yet also numb. She has no life or purpose outside of the chaos of her home. Her friends – especially her gynaecologist – encourage her to re-invent and re-emerge. Go back to work, go back to socialising, go back to dating. 

This is the first five/ten minutes of the film and sets the scene.  

To begin with the positive. The script is very funny. The direction is competent and even throws in a few unexpected and moving tableaux. The cast are on fire! Renée Zellweger could sleepwalk this role, scrunching her eyes in that endearing way on command. Leo Woodall is smouldering and hunky as the young lover, and Chiwetel Ejiofor is pure charisma and chemistry as the new science teacher Mr. Wallaker. Emma Thompson chews the scenery and delivers the best jokes as Bridget’s gynaecologist. The standout is Hugh Grant, who has immeasurable fun turning the roguish lothario Cleaver into the wittiest silver-fox we’ve seen on screen for many a year. He is at the peak of his career, and it is a joy to watch. 

But… 

None of it really hangs together. There is no real plot; there are little comedy sketches and episodes that jump from one to the other – never entirely unrelated, but never entirely coherent. 

This is a film of many subplots. The subplot of Bridget and the mums at the school gate. The subplot of Bridget getting back to work. The subplot of Bridget smoothing the rough edges off Mr Wallaker (who uses a whistle like a weapon). The subplot of Daniel, of her friends from the first film, of her parents, and so on and so on.  

There is the subplot of Bridget developing a new, modern, Tinder romance with a hunky Hampstead Heath ‘ranger’ (the ‘boy’ of the title). It could be argued this is the main subplot: Bridget finding new confidence and a new lease of life via a summer romance with a handsome younger stranger. It is also the most forgettable. It’s shallow, and is really only an excuse to make updated references to the original film. 

The film is a mess. 

And yet… 

I cried. I cried more than once, and proper tears. Thank goodness cinemas are dark, because no priest wants their parishioners to see them blubbing, especially while watching a Bridget Jones sequel! This mess of a film has a single strand that runs through it, gives shape to its episodic nature, and turns it from an ‘okay’ film into a brilliant film.  

Grief. 

Bridget is grieving Darcy. Her children are grieving their father. Cleaver is grieving the life he could have had – so committed to debauchery was he, that he has no one permanent in his life (except Bridget) and he hasn’t spoken to his son for nearly two decades. She and her friends are grieving the passing of the years, and the reality that they are 25 years older. Through the raunch, and crude jokes, and slapstick set-pieces, this film surprised me by being a slow-burn meditation on grief. I won’t say too much more about the film because – and I can’t believe I’m saying this about a Bridget Jones film – this film really does need to be experienced fresh.  

This is a welcome supplement and corrective to the Valentine season: an exploration of love that is lost or stolen away, and is sorely missed. It is a life-affirming bit of cinema, that takes you through the stages of grief (there is even a scene where her friends debate just how many stages there are) and the various methods we have for dealing with them. It even includes a clumsy little science/faith debate, and yet manages to conclude by encompassing all views. 

The film has a truly pastoral message. Grief cannot be avoided. Grief is a sign that love was real, and also that love cannot be snuffed out…even by death. Bridget intermittently has visions of Mark, and by the end of the film she has managed to make peace with those visions. They won’t leave her – her love for Mark won’t leave her – even as she experiences new love. Bridget ends the film recognising that her grief won’t leave her…and she can still live the fullest and happiest life possible. 

Go see it. It’s good to have a cry sometimes. 

4.5 stars 

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