What Can Be Shown, What Must Be Told

For a documentary photographer who seeks to change the world, images go only so far. Dorothea Lange, a pioneer in the field, put it simply: All photographs, she said, “can be fortified by words.”

Photographs raise questions; they rarely provide answers. In the face of suffering and injustice, theyare far better at evoking feeling than thought, at arousing empathy or horror, not at winning an argument. And so, photographers turn to words. Their challenge is to decide when it is better simply to show and at what point they must step forward to tell.

The risk is that a sea of words will drown pictures, not strengthen them. That was the case, for me, with the later portraits in LaToya Ruby Frazier’s midcareer retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. The show opens with compelling family photographs that require only brief captions. But the portraits that record people struggling with contaminated water in Flint, Mich., and with the closing of an automobile factory in Lordstown, Ohio, are embellished by long wall texts that dutifullyexamine circumstances too complicated for pictures to parse.

Asking viewers in a museum to stand in front of scroll-length explications is asking a lot. Even in the accompanying catalog, which a reader may fairly be expected to read, the written Flint and Lordstown testimonies overwhelm photographs that become formulaic, as if the artist has lost conviction that a camera can transmit her message.

Striking the right balance between words and images is tricky. In 1939, Lange, collaborating with her husband, the progressive economist Paul S. Taylor, published a book, “An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion,” that incorporated material from interviews she had conducted from her subjects.

It was not something that photographers normally did. But the addition bolstered the photographs immeasurably, as with her portrait “Ma Burnham, Conroy, Arkansas” (1938). The image of quiet survival is powerful. It gains even more strength when you read Ma Burnham’s words, including: “I don’t know whether that drought was the Devil’s work or the Lord’s work — in three days everything wilted.”