Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Monday, July 27, 2020

Dorothea Lange's "A very blue eagle. Along California highway, 1936"


Dorothea Lange, "A very blue eagle. Along California highway, 1936"
















Of all the photographs on display in Johanna Fateman’s interesting “A Different Side to Dorothea Lange” (newyorker.com, April 12, 2020), the one that's stayed with me is “A very blue eagle. Along California highway, 1936.” It's an unforgettable image of terrible suffering and eventual death.

Reading Bookforum’s excellent summer issue yesterday, I encountered “A very blue eagle” again. It’s featured in Zack Hatfield’s capsule review of Sam Contis’s Day Sleeper, a collection of lesser-known Lange images. Hatfield describes the picture as showing “an eagle crucified on a barbed-wire fence.” I suppose crucifixion is one way to view it. The outstretched wings caught on barbwire certainly suggest it. But I think the situation was likely more accident than execution. That’s the thing about great photographs; they’re endlessly interpretable. This one by Lange is no exception.  
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