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.