Getty Museum

J.R. Butler, President of the Southern Tennant Farmers union, Memphis, Tennessee

Date

negative June 1938; print about 1950s

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Culture

American

Department

Photographs

Institution

Getty Museum

> Tenancy was the post-plantation system of cultivation by families who owned their mules and tools but paid their lessor with crop and feed and thus were allowed to stay on the land, although usually without chance of ownership. According to the sociologist Margaret Jarman Hagood, with whom Lange traveled in 1939, it was the biggest economic problem facing the country in the later 1930s. The depression only meant further exploitation for these farmers, who already had a hard time staying out of debt and were sometimes obliged to give the landlord half of their crop in order to retain shelter and a livelihood. Tenant farmers and sharecroppers organized in 1934 in an attempt to pressure both the Roosevelt Administration and the landowners to recognize their dilemma. The latter responded with threats and evictions for the union leadership. > > J. R. Butler, who is identified as a country schoolteacher and a sharecropper in the exhibition catalogue to Dorothea Lange's 1966 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, was the president of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union and was probably presiding at a meeting of the group when Lange photographed him in Memphis. The full negative presents a waist-length portrait of Butler, hair recently cut, dressed in a reasonably new shirt and striped tie with a couple of pens clipped to his breast pocket. Positioned against the background of an empty, mottled wall that has a damp institutional look, he is obviously posing for Lange's camera, but his wide-eyed, questioning expression seems to convey surprise nevertheless. The extreme cropping of the present print may have been the result of what John Szarkowski, the former curator of photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, has called Lange's redefinition of pictures through later "reframing." Here she utilizes just the central part of her negative. In stripping almost everything away save the rough, lined surface of Butler's face and the worried depth of his eyes, she creates a confrontation, not simply with a farmer or a struggling union leader, but with the humanity of one individual. Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange,* In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 34. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.

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