Damaged Child, Shacktown, Elm Grove, Oklahoma

In the catalogue for the recent exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The American Century: Art and Culture 1900-1950, Barbara Haskell discusses the work of photographers including Lange and Walker Evans during the Depression and the use of their imagery as a means of effecting social change. "As in her famous Migrant Mother, taken in a migrant pea-pickers camp in California, she presented the universal in the guise of the particular. Even when Lange combined her images with commentary and the words with her subjects, as she and Paul Taylor did in the documentary book An American Exodus (1939), her subjects appeared not as individuals but as generic types. But it is precisely for this reason that they functioned so compellingly as human documents and elicited complex emotional responses. The captions accompanying Lange's photographs inevitably shaped their meaning, as they did for all RA/FSA photographs. Photographers sent captions along with field reports to the FSA, but they were often changed in the editing process by Stryker or the publisher. Although Stryker considered Lange's captioning exemplary, the two often disagreed about where and in what form - and with what captions - her photographs would appear. Ultimately, the conflict led to Lange's dismissal from the agency in 1939." (op cit., pp. 249-250.)
With its simple, yet arresting title, Damaged Child speaks volumes not just about the suffering experienced by this child but by many during the period. The child's sunken eyes and soiled sack cloth dress leave an indelible, haunting image with the viewer. One of her most poignant portraits of children, Lange's depiction of stolen innocence directly reflects her efforts to incite change.

Vintage prints of this image are considered rare.