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Photography by Lynn Geesaman
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“Young family, penniless, hitch-hiking on U.S. Highway 90, California. The father 24 and the mother 17, came from West Salem, North Carolina, early in 1935. Their baby was born in the Imperial Valley, California, where they were working as field laborers.” Dorothea Lange, November 1936.
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Wheels, 1939, Charles Sheeler
Close-up, this monumental object becomes a different object. The drive wheel and rounded edges of the locomotive’s condenser cylinders are barely contained within the frame, which harnesses the engine’s powerful movement. With this photograph, Charles Sheeler demonstrated the camera’s ability to represent the dynamism of the Machine Age.
Sheeler was a Precisionist painter whose style was marked by sharply defined geometric forms and flat planes of focus. Fittingly, he took this photograph while on a commission from Fortune magazine to create a series of paintings entitled “Power.” Like many photographers, Sheeler frequently used his camera in the same way that a painter uses a sketchbook. This photograph was eventually used as a study for a painting, but it has the strength of a fully realized image.
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On August 10, 1945, a day after the Nagasaki bombing, Yōsuke Yamahata began to photograph the devastation, still working as a military photographer. Over a period of about twelve hours he took around a hundred exposures; by late afternoon, he had taken his final photographs near a first aid station north of the city. In a single day, he had completed the only extensive photographic record of the immediate aftermath of the atomic bombing of either Hiroshima or Nagasaki.
20 years later, Yamahata was diagnosed with terminal cancer of the duodenum, probably caused by the residual effects of radiation received in Nagasaki in 1945. He died on April 18, 1966, and is buried at Tama Cemetery, Tokyo.
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Portrait by Gjon Mili, actress Jeanne Moreau weeps in a scene from the film, Five Branded Women, 1960.
