Just back from filming in China, I'm starting to think about the run-up to Christmas. Tomorrow I'll post a China wrap-up; other topics for the coming couple of weeks include news of our new performance production, more about Hamlet (but nothing today) and responses to drama DVDs, including The Henrik Ibsen collection (available in or from the USA) and the new Alan Bennett at the BBC. Today I want to wander along an online trail about Dorothea Lange's photography, but as usual I'm also keen to encourage your comments about stage productions or films that you've seen recently -- or other things that you think might be of interest. And to give you a taste of what we're hoping for, take a look at the great posts by Zoe, Debbie and Lisa last week.

For the rest of the post, I want to re-run an online journey. In itself, it's far from remarkable and the hopping from link to link that I describe is the kind of thing we all now do without thinking. But once again I was struck this morning by how the internet has profoundly changed -- and enhanced -- even the reading of a single article, and how it has created the potential of new forms of discovery and learning. I recognise that pointing this out will seem naive (of course everyone knows this), but there are times when I think it's worth pausing to recognise how thrilling these possibilities are.

Here's where I started: Tyler Green's always interesting blog Modern Art Notes and the post A season of books on Dorothea Lange. Green's post highlights Jonathan Raban's article American Pastoral for the New York Review of Books which reviews two recent books about the photographer Dorothea Lange. Lange (there's a Wikipedia entry here) is best known for her photographs in the 1930s for the US Farm Security Administration and in particular for an image, reproduced in the Raban piece, known as Migrant Mother, taken in Nipomo, California in 1936.

You can find and download Migrant Mother (as I did) at the Library of Congress Archive, along with a discussion about and detailed bibliography for the image together with a rights statement indicating that because it was produced for a government agency it's a public domain image and its use is unrestricted. There's also an unretouched version of the image (before a thumb was removed) along with other variants made of the subject.

Back to Raban. At the top of his article he references William Emson's 1935 book Some Versions of Pastoral which explores the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poems about shepherds and the like, idealising 'the lives of the poorest people in the land'. And Raban goes on to suggest that the pastoral is a key strand in American culture, underpinning Fenimore Cooper, Bret Harte, the films of John Ford and the paintings of Frederic Remington.

The chief loci of American pastoral have been the rural South and the Far West, while most of its practitioners have been sophisticated easterners for whom the South and West were destinations for bouts of adventurous travel. They went equipped with sketchpads and notebooks in which to record the picturesque manners and customs of their rustic, unlettered fellow countrymen.

Thus, for Raban, the work of Dorothea Lange -- and especially Migrant Mother.

The picture defines the form of pastoral as Empson meant it, and the closer one studies it, the more one's made aware of just what a queer and puzzling business it is. A woman from the abyssal depths of the lower classes is plucked from obscurity by a female artist from the upper classes and endowed by her with extraordinary nobility and eloquence... It's a portrait in which squalor and dignity are in fierce contention, but both one's first and last impressions are of the woman's resilience, pride, and damaged beauty.

Raban develops these ideas in a rich review of tw new volumes about Lange, Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits by Linda Gordon and Anne Wiston Spirn's Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field. In the course of his richly interesting essya he also discusses a photo-essay that Lange shot in Ireland 1954. And in a supplementary NYR Blog post he shows How to Find the Best of Lange. Including the LIFE article Irish Country People, a detail of which I have reproduced above, in the LIFE archive hosted by Google.

I've enthused frequently here about this online archive, and its liberal policy of allowing the personal use of its images, but I hadn't realised that it contains digitised (and indexed) versions of every page of every issue from 23 November 1936 to 29 December 1972. Every page -- including (as you can see with Mars above) all the advertisments. This is, simply and straightforwardly, an incredible research resource -- and one in which you quickly find you've spent an hour or two just browsing. You can, for example, find another photo-essay by the figure LIFE calls Miss Lange, about Mormon towns in the USA. from 6 September 1954 co-photographed by Ansel Adams.

Oakland Museum holds the Dorothea Lange archive and the Online Archive of California has many of its images and other materials online (although the user-friendliness of the facility could be enhanced). Then there are many more images online in the Library of Congress' Prints and Photographs holdings. So the opportunities for your own supplementary research are manifold.

Now, it happens that Migrant Mother also features in another recent online discussion of photography -- a compelling seven-part series on filmmaker Errol Morris's Zoom blog at the New York Times site. Morris is an acute photography critic and in the past month he's been exploring the dust bowl photographs of Lange, Walker Evans and others. His focus has been the extent to which these images were 'faked' and for the final post he interviews photographer Bill Ganzel.

In 1974 Ganzel began a project to revisit many of the scenes of the FSA photographs and to interview some of their subjects -- including the women in Migrant Mother, Florence Thompson. She was snapped by Ganzel in a comparatively prosperous suburban backyard, along with her three daughters, but she also recalled the context in 1936 in which the photograph was taken.

[W]e started from L.A. to Watsonville. And the timing chain broke on my car. And I had a guy to pull into this pea camp in Nipomo. I started to cook dinner for my kids, and all the little kids around the camp came in. “Can I have a bite? Can I have a bite?” And they was hungry, them people was. And I got my car fixed, and I was just getting ready to pull out when she [Dorothea Lange] come back and snapped my picture.

If you're still with me, there's a full Wikipedia page about Florence Owens Thompson, together with a host of further references. But by now you've got the idea -- or more probably, given up. I've had a fascinating morning following these references -- and I know I've learned things in ways that I woiuld never have been able to a decade ago. Which is precisely why, when I think that this is just a single thread of a vast repository of knowledge, I'm entirely happy to apply the word thrilling -- and to feel that we shouldn't simply take the possibilities of this for granted.

Image: a detail from a LIFE magazine spread featuring the opening page of a Dorothea Lange photo-essay about Ireland (and an advertisment for Mars). This 21 March 1955 issue of LIFE is available via the LIFE archive hosted by Google; © Time Inc.