DÉRIVE: PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSICA LANGE Book Review

In 2020, during the early days of the COVID pandemic, New York was among the world’s hardest-hit cities in infections and deaths – and accordingly had one of the most extensive lockdowns intended to limit the spread of the virus. As the actress and now photographer Jessica Lange notes in DÉRIVE, her new book of photography, she like many other New Yorkers left the city entirely during the pandemic shutdown. After an absence of seven months, she returned to a still locked-down NYC to find a bizarrely quiet and nearly empty Manhattan. Wondering how she would pass the time during the upcoming winter months in the mostly shut-down city, her son asked if she was familiar with the theory of Dérive (French for drift) proposed by the French philosopher Guy Debord.

Debord defined Dérive as “a journey in which “one drops all their usual motives for movement and action and lets themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain—usually urban, and the encounters they find there. “ Lange took her son’s suggestion and decided to walk the city, camera in hand. In her words, “taking the time to really look, often stopping to speak with people living out there on the street.” Her new book, Dérive, is a collection of 47 of the photos she took on her walks around the city over six months.

DÉRIVE: PHOTOGRAPHS BY JESSICA LANGE has images both hopeless and hopeful

With the power players and the armies of well-paid professionals mostly off the streets of Manhattan, Lange photographed people who were always there, but unnoticed or deliberately ignored by those who under normal circumstances would be engaged in “their usual motives for movement.” The 47 images published here struck this writer as alternately hopeful and hopeless. Some of them depict people apparently experiencing homelessness – and others are people who are simply out of the mainstream in terms grooming and wardrobe. Images of people sleeping on sidewalks in front of shuttered storefronts seem to suggest a sense of uselessness or unimportance for both the people and the structures. One photo depicts a poster showing a young boy with the headline I survived AIDS pasted on a boarded-up storefront window. Will the store survive the pandemic? In this unusually underpopulated pandemic-stricken city, Lange’s photos show a sense of isolation to be unusually acute for these New Yorkers, who, even in the best of times, have been said to feel lonely in a crowd. As New Yorker theatre critic Hilton Als says in his introduction to this book, “Manhattan is the penultimate place to be alone together.”

Still, other images suggest a hopefulness and a reassurance that life does and will go on. We see flowers and birds thriving in the city. We see a young girl and an outdoor wedding in parks. The final image is of an immigrant woman dressed in old world garb standing alongside New York harbor, with the Statue of Liberty in the background.

What are the stories behind the images?

We can only surmise the stories behind the people and situations depicted in DÉRIVE. Lange says in her afterword that she often stopped to speak with the people on the street whom she photographed. Perhaps she will share some of these stories in her talk at the Chicago Humanities Festival on November 12.

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About the Author: John Olson

John Olson is an arts carnivore who is particularly a love of music, theatre and film. He studied piano, trombone and string bass into his college years, performing in bands and orchestras in high school and college, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. While working as an advertising agency account manager, he began a second career as an arts journalist and is now principal of John Olson Communications, a marketing and public relations business serving arts and entertainment clients.