“I’ve suffered bouts of depression my whole life,” says two-time Oscar-winning actor Jessica Lange. “They ebb and flow. I have a hard time separating the sadness, the depression, from my overwhelming sense of loneliness.”
Speaking from Ireland, where she is filming an adaptation of Long Day’s Journey into Night, Lange again has loneliness on her mind. “I could be feeling that even more acutely right now because I’m starting to play [drug-addicted matriarch] Mary Tyrone again. I’ve gone through the play and counted how many times she says ‘alone’.” High-wire performances in films such as Frances and Blue Sky have also taken their toll.
But Lange, now 73, has found solace on the other side of the camera. In Dérive, her third book of photographs, she faces the subject head on, and the result illustrates her talent for diffusing melancholy with a curious eye. The book is a visual account of her walks through New York City during lockdown. On the advice of her son Walker, she practised the art of dérive – or drift – a concept proposed by the midcentury French philosopher Guy Debord in which “one drops all their usual motives for movement and action to let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain”. But rather than exacerbating the pervading mood, Lange found walking aimlessly with her camera “a comfort. Because our usual mode of moving through a city is determined, time-sensitive; we’re not looking,” she says. “People are really in their own worlds. You get a sense of anger. They’re rushing; there’s no time for kindness.”
Lange’s pictures capture a woozy timeless metropolis: grainy shots of the façades of strip joints harken back to the ’70s, other images look like echoes from the 19th century. One features a solitary young girl, dressed in white, standing by a lake. “I had walked up to Central Park that day and there she was like some kind of spectre,” says Lange. Stripped of its vitality, Manhattan “had an eeriness to it – that I was immediately drawn to”, she says. “It was almost as if it was in suspended animation. It never scared me, but it was unnatural for that city. You could walk for blocks and blocks and blocks and not see anybody.”
From her apartment in Greenwich Village, Lange walked up to 10 miles a day through areas she barely knew. The homeless people she met were anxious to tell her their stories. The result was a “human exchange that I normally wouldn’t have had when the streets were crowded. We were all desperate for someone to talk to”. An assortment of other lone figures also make a connection through the camera – a fishmonger peers over his lobsters, an elderly man smokes a pipe. “You pick up pictures like that and however much time has passed it’s as if they are looking directly at you,” she says.