Dorothea Lange introduced a tenderness to documentary photography, which has since elevated her images to an iconic status and pushed US citizens to come to terms with darker aspects of their collective history.

On Monday 20 July 2015, the Frontline Club hosted a preview screening of the PBS documentary Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning. The film looks back at the photographer’s life through the spectrum of preparations for an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1966 – the first retrospective that the museum had dedicated to a woman photographer. Dyanna Taylor, director and Dorothea Lange’s granddaughter, joined the Frontline Club audience for a discussion via Skype following the screening.

Taylor spent 11 years investigating her grandmother’s life and work. “Learning about her as an adult and deeply understanding her from an adult perspective was very different from my childhood memory of her,” she said.

“The image of the white horse was where it began when I was a child. That image carried me through the entire time,” Taylor remembered. She added that she personally connected most to ‘Death of a Valley’, a photographic series documenting the mass displacement caused by the construction of the Monticello dam in California.

Taylor told the audience that the most exciting part of the filmmaking experience was, “working to get the black and white material of her that was taken in the sixties.”

Great evening @frontlineclub for the preview screening of Dorothea Langue’s life story!

— Georgie Hazell (@GHHazell) July 20, 2015

Taylor also explained that she was not able to include certain of her grandmother’s photographs, because a number of batches from the later-impounded series on the internment of Japanese Americans had been, perhaps intentionally, lost. What remains is now available online. “The work was quietly released by the United States National Archives,” she explained.

Taylor said that she had wanted to highlight that Dorothea Lange’s creative process had depended heavily on her collaboration with others. “I wanted to bring my grandfather [Paul Taylor] forward in the film, because he was a very understated and private individual,” she said.

The photographer was able to pursue her vocation in a way that was common and accepted only for men at that time. But this dedication to her work came at a high price. “The complexity came when she had children, and when she was forced to choose between the two,” Taylor said.

Sending her children to live with different families was the ransom that Lange paid for her many professional achievements. “It did great damage to my family and I think she ultimately saw that damage at the end of her life,” Taylor said.

The filmmaker decided to focus largely on family history rather than addressing the story behind ‘Migrant Mother’, Lange’s most widely-recognised photograph.

An audience member asked Taylor to comment on the story behind the iconic image: Florence Owen Thompson, the photograph’s subject, has since commented that information published alongside her image was incorrect. Taylor agreed that such a photograph would be much harder to snap today.

“It’s very hard for us now to really show what’s happening in the world, certainly in the United States,” she said.

George Carey brought his Storyville documentary Hitler, Stalin and Mr. Jones to the Frontline Club on Friday night, exploring the life and tragic murder of Welsh journalist Gareth Jones (1905-1935).

Jones grew up in Barry, south Wales, attended Cambridge University on a scholarship, became fluent in Russian and German, and showed a flair for networking into circles of power.

In early 1933, he found himself invited to fly with Hitler and Goebbels across Germany. Carey’s narration:

"Gareth’s diary that day makes for real reading:  ‘The Leader is coming […]  out steps a very ordinary looking man […]  surprised me by his smile: quite intelligent, natural.’"

In mid-air Jones jotted:

"If this aeroplane should crash, the whole history of Germany would change."

But it was Jones’ reporting from the USSR that defined his legacy, and which may have resulted in his death.

Stalin had launched his First Five Year Plan, breaking the back of the Soviet peasantry by enforcing collective farms that required all grain to be given to the State.  Massive famine resulted, but few in the West were aware of such events.

Jones sidestepped Soviet officials, wandering into the Ukrainian countryside himself.  In his diary he noted:  

"Everyone with whom I’ve talked, they all have the same story:  ‘there’s no bread.’"

Upon returning, he issued a press release detailing grisly experiences, of bloated stomachs, lying officials, and death on a scale of millions. His writing fell on deaf ears.  

In the midst of the Great Depression, Communism and Fascism competed with war-weary democracies to provide the most compelling vision of the future.  Many Western intellectuals sided with Communism, and Jones’ report threatened to shatter their dream.

Foreign correspondents at The New York Times and other outlets published denials of Jones’ accounts, thus preserving their ties to Moscow.  The Kremlin banned Jones and wrote scathingly to his major benefactor, former UK Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who had launched Jones’ career but then promptly cut ties.

Two years later, Jones was captured and killed by bandits while reporting in Inner Mongolia.  Carey’s film hints that a German double-agent for the Kremlin had befriended and subsequently betrayed Jones.

After Jones’ death, Lloyd George remembered his former protegé:

"I had always been afraid that he would take one risk too many.  Nothing escaped his observation […]  he had an almost unfailing knack of getting at things that mattered."

George’s words haunt in relief against the memory of Jones’ death shared by his niece in the film, and of a letter Jones had written his mother years before.  Jones wrote:

"I should consider myself a flabby little coward if ever I gave up the chance of a good, interesting career, for the mere thought of safety."

Yet his niece remembered the family reacting to the news of Jones’ killing:

"We were all miserable.  It was such a sad thing to have happened.  I don’t suppose that any of us could have expressed how we felt, really and truly.  We were just devastated."