REVIEWS
In a Rugged Land: Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and the Three Mormon Towns Collaboration, 1953– 1954
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By James R. Swensen
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Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, in cooperation with the Charles Redd Center for Western Studies, 2018. 432 pp. Paper, $34.95
With In a Rugged Land, James Swensen offers the big backstory for the work of Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams as they pursued the “Three Mormon Towns” project for Life magazine in 1953 and 1954. He does so via a set of concentric contexts, including subject biographies; national, regional and local history; art history and criticism; and literary, aesthetic, and intellectual history. Although Lange and Adams were longtime friends, these two famous photographers approached their work very differently. Dorothea Lange focused on human-centered, very personal images, blending documentary photography with Life magazine–like photojournalism; while Ansel Adams offered breathtaking, human-less landscapes that he prepared with the highest of technical artistry in his darkroom. As Swensen details, both artists fought against these labels, and each pushed the other to work differently. The relationship between Lange and Adams—warm in the long term but sometimes strained—is carefully described in this book. The two photographers—Lange mostly, but also Adams—were committed to documenting everyday life, with a good deal of focus on women, children, senior citizens, and couples; pioneer homes, outbuildings, community celebrations, religious services, and street scenes; and gender-based divisions of labor; and too the towns’ or church’s leading men. Finally, their focus on human topography, via close-up portraiture— hands, shoes, and everyday clothing—created all together a body of photographic documentation of life in mid-twentieth-century rural Utah that is unsurpassed. Swensen adds to this deep personal engagement by tracking down
and interviewing Lange and Adams’s surviving subjects. Swensen explains the ideological frameworks that informed Lange and Adams work, including the interest of Paul Taylor (the University of California Berkeley economist married to Lange) in studying and encouraging the Jeffersonian ideal of the independent farmer, amid a self-sustaining village. The photographers wanted to document what they saw as the closing vestiges of the Mormon village—which had survived amid scarcity, was committed to community cooperation, and whose people were bound in their common beliefs. This anthropological impulse, as Swensen describes, was informed by the early proponents of studying Utah more scientifically, particularly the practitioners of Mormon village studies from the 1920s to 1950s. Those who advised the photographers included Lowry Nelson, Wallace Stegner, Juanita Brooks, and Edward C. Banfield, all of whom saw this unique institutional pattern as worthy of study. Swensen’s explanation of these ideological contexts are some of the most contributing aspects of his book. At the same time, Swensen contextualizes the world of the people who lived in those three Utah villages. He describes, for instance, the advice given to Lange and Adams, which they carefully followed, to secure approval at the offices of the LDS church First Presidency before committing to the project. Concurrently, the small-town Mormon bishops confirmed these arrangements with the same church leaders, demonstrating just how powerful, even in regards to private actions, the LDS church was in midcentury, rural Utah. Although a social science framework undergirded “Three Mormon Towns,” Lange and Adams were inescapably driven by nostalgia and a romantic ideal—a sense of loss felt in the mid-twentieth century, just after the majority of Utah’s population began to trend urban and after scores of small Utah towns began a depopulation slide. This was only a decade after
