In 1998 I was commissioned to do a radio piece that was meant to be part-review, part-monologue and part-performance responding to a magnificent exhibition of Dorothea Lange’s Depression-era images.  I think it was a ten-minute spot, with some unscripted chat top & tailing it.

I found the script recently, two decades on from what seems a few weeks ago.  I discovered it didn’t make me cringe.  Here it is.

START.

I’ve driven all night toward the basin of angels.

I've driven all night without understanding anything.  Need or desire, this desert, neon signs remorseless as beacons.

I'm talking about America.  The thing itself. 

I'm talking about loneliness.

I've driven all night to find myself here.

Look around you, even now look around you.

That’s the American poet, Campbell McGrath, writing in 1993. He's part of a rhapsodic tradition that has nourished American culture at least from the time of Walt Whitman and Abraham Lincoln.  This tradition gets expressed in all artforms: for example, the music of Charles Ives, the writing of James Agee and John Steinbeck, the cinema of John Ford, the singing of Woody Guthrie and the acoustic ballads of Bruce Springsteen.  It's the tradition that finds wonder in dusty American light and in the tarnished things and tired actions that ordinary folk live with.  It's the tradition that gives us the moments of enlightenment that move through the paintings of Edward Hooper and Andrew Wyeth.  Also, in this overwhelmingly male domain, it brought Dorothea Lange to light. 

So I'm talking about an IDEA of America, not the squalid political corporation that is so difficult to admire nowadays.  I'm talking about the vision of a society that exalts in the possibility of democracy, a society that welcomes dissimilar people, an America that insists that people estranged and mystified by each other might still be able to scan across their mutual alienation and find ways to know themselves without negating idiosyncrasy.

I'm talking about the idea that produced Dorothea Lange.  She was a poverty-struck young easterner who limped her polio-kinked body over to San Francisco during the Depression years.  On the west coast she learned how to be a not-quite-successful commercial photographer.  And then she had her Big American Lucky Break when she was employed by the now-fabled Farm Security Administration. 

Her task: to document the everyday life of the displaced poor as they struggled to maintain self-respect during the early days of Roosevelt's New Deal presidency. 

But as soon as she started, Lange encountered her Big Problem: how to record these people without demeaning them or romanticising them?  How to look at them in such a way that they can look back levelly and freely?  James Agee met the same challenge when he went to Alabama during the 1930s.  He paused to examine his conscience before venturing into his masterpiece, LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN.  This is what he wrote as he got started, wondering what his commissioning editors really wanted: 

It seems to me curious, not to say obscene and thoroughly terrifying that it could occur to an association of human beings  ... to pry intimately into the lives of an undefended and appallingly damaged group of human beings ... for the purpose of parading the nakedness, disadvantage and humiliation of these lives.

Agee found ways to analyse, vilify and transcend the obscenity all around him.  The obscenity funding him.  He was exceptional.  Most decent people, when they encounter the Big Problem ... they just pack up and drive home.  Modern TV journalism, by contrast, usually turns on its porta-lights and cameras and chases people down back-lanes and corridors.  Out among the viewers and listeners, we hear ourselves asking, "What good can come of the prying?" 

With that caveat in mind, should we worry that the collection of Lange's work, on show at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, is owned by that Institution of Sentiment and the Picturesque -- the Hallmark Card Company?  Are they in danger of being co-opted, these pictures that Lange tried so diligently to keep unvarnished and unsweet? 

Thankfully, NO.  For, beautiful as they are, Lange's pictures refuse to be nice.  They cut through trite manners and show something more vital: they show COURTESY. 

Most commentators say it's NOBILITY that gets pictured by Lange.  The nobility of the people being photographed.  Well, OK.  But I think Lange is more important than that.  Her photographs offer proof that strangers can create situations where they face one another with RESPECT.  Lucid, unsentimental respect.  The respect of a photographer looking to negotiate power down to a minimum; the respect of subjects finding ways not be ashamed in encounters that pry into their undeniable powerlessness.  In a fundamental, politically crucial way, these photos declare that THIS PERSON IS HERE AND IS NOT QUAINT OR PICTURESQUE OR EXPENDABLE. 

In regimes that seek to erase difference and dissent, such a forceful, factual assertion is vital.  Before the New Deal, America was such a place -- it tried to forget huge portions of its people.  And what about today?  Do we know societies like that today?  Perhaps we do. 

As a vaccine against such poisonous regimes, we probably need evidence that respect between strangers is still possible, that people pulled apart by class, race, sexuality or history might somehow become reconciled if the powerful can learn to look unsentimentally before listening and doing all the other actions that proceed when true communication occurs

So, let's see if I can conclude with the clear vision that Lange's photographs deserve  ...  ...  It's worth your while to look at Lange's work.  Her pictures are part of a tradition that manages to survive even now; they are driven by an imperative that reaches back to the days when Abraham Lincoln invoked "the better angels of our nature"; an imperative that reaches forward from Lange’s time to the present, when Campbell McGrath urges, "Look around you, even now look around you."  Conscious of his responsibility to honour this American tradition, McGrath keeps looking and chanting with his characteristically muted rhapshodic brogue, unfettered by poetic line-breaks now:

Rising from Newark, I see the cars of the homebound commuters assembled like migrating caravans.  Lush as glow worms, gregarious as electric eels in their dusty blue Hondas and plush Monte Carlos, they jam the tollways and access roads, flood the exits and passing lanes, circle the sinuous cloverleaves until they are nothing but rivers of dun and aluminium and butter-coloured light.

As he signs off, McGrath gazes directly at these throngs of over-tired, working-stiff America and he can't help but say it: "That's it," he exclaims, "that's it, our greatness, right there."

It could be Dorothea Lange stepping out from the darkroom of American history.  Same tradition.  Same dream of everyday transcendence and respect.  True democracy.  The thing itself.