Images of a Dark Century

By Richard Lacayo

Like Robert Capa and Margaret Bourke-White, Carl Mydans helped to transform American photojournalism from a source of inert head shots and ceremonious poses into a supple narrative art. As a staff photographer for LIFE, Mydans was present and accounted for at the darkest moments of a dark century: the Depression, World War II, Korea and Viet Nam. The retrospective of his work at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth offers a chance to review his pictures uncoupled from the periods they defined and the magazine pages they were designed to serve. A museum show is the acid test for photojournalism. Mounted on a wall, these pictures are asked to speak for themselves. They do, eloquently.

A migrant farm family at a tent encampment, a dead German soldier on the road to Rome, the rough justice meted out to Nazi collaborators in France. These stinging images have become a first route of approach to understanding our era. Mydans' work also encompasses the famous faces of the age: Churchill, Truman, Nehru, William Faulkner, Thomas Mann and Ezra Pound. He caught them with an economy that satisfies the requirements of design and psychology in the same camera angle, as when he found the egg-shaped perimeter of Nikita Khrushchev's head sweeping to a comic climax in the dark hole of his open mouth.

Ansel Adams once defined a great photograph as "a true expression of what one feels about life in its entirety." By that criterion, Mydans, 78, made a great photograph in one of his first assignments for LIFE. In the oil town of Freer, Texas, he turned his camera on the restless men loitering before a wood-frame lunchroom. Shooting from across the muddy street and above the roof line, his view takes in everything from a distant filigree of oil rigs to the ratty classicism of the restaurant porch. Harnessing the camera's broad indecisiveness, he reports both the sociology of a boomtown and the sparkle of sunlight in a puddled alley.

More than a decade later, covering the fighting between Nationalist and Communist forces in China, Mydans could use an opposite strategy to relay the pain of an old woman in the ruins of her village. His picture of a Texas town works through addition, building a superabundance of facts; his shot of a bereft woman is a masterpiece of subtraction, paring away everything that is extraneous to one victim's grief.

Mydans would take many such pictures of the uprooted and crushed: a man carrying the body of his wife through the chaos of an earthquake in Japan, a young Korean mother as she flees the fighting around Seoul, a Vietnamese grandmother during the Tet offensive in Viet Nam. Against these even his sunnier bits of Americana--schoolchildren at play, a general store--seem to be glimpses of an imperiled tranquillity. Even an unemphatic shot of street sweepers clearing the route of a Red Army parade column describes a world where great powers lunge through, leaving lesser souls to deal with the damage.

Most of Mydans' work was done for LIFE, which he joined in 1936 as the first issue was going to press. But he took his first pictures of consequence in the preceding year. At the age of 28, he joined the fabled team of photographers for the historical section of the U.S. Farm Security Administration, a group that included Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Ben Shahn. Examining an impoverished rural America, they made some of photography's most trenchant and memorable images. In the FSA, Mydans learned the moral dimension of photography. No eye cast upon the hardships of those years could afterward decline into a tool for pretty picturemaking. A natural storyteller, he also learned with the FSA to look for his story in faces, in the unsettled gaze of transient cotton choppers and the cocksure grins of oilfield roustabouts.

At LIFE, Mydans met his wife Shelley. They became a reporter-photographer team, covering Mussolini's Italy, the fall of France and wartime London. By 1941 Mydans was in Chungking to record China as it was devoured by Japan. The next year he and his wife were captured by the Japanese in Manila. They spent nearly two years in prison camps in the Philippines and China, fending off malnutrition and chafing at the thought of the stories they were missing on the outside.

Mydans was released in time to cover the fighting in Italy and France, then accompanied General Douglas MacArthur's campaign in the Philippines, where he took one of the war's best-known shots: Mac Arthur sloshing onto the beach at Luzon. For a home front with fresh memories of the war's bleak beginnings, it was more than a picture; it was an encapsulation of every hope. Forty years later, we see not just the redoubtable general but also the canny military showman who knows that victory is the ultimate photo opportunity.

Life as theater, even as a theater of war, is a notion that emerges unexpectedly from many of these pictures, where the war sometimes seems a bizarre welter of chaos and formality, anarchy and self-conscious ceremony. The accumulated effect is not to mock human behavior as in-authentic but to acknowledge a yearning for dignity and order. Mydans' work springs from that same benign instinct. Through decades when each year put forward new varieties of suffering, he recorded the world's dislocations and helped to shape the heart's reply. --By Richard Lacayo