Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  This inner world/outer world distinction needs to be qualified, however. What Lange saw in her subjects came partly from her own consciousness. Her portraits of sharecroppers and interned Japanese Americans express her emotions as well as theirs. Yet there is a durable distinction between gazes turned inward and those turned outward. Critic Linda Nochlin pointed out that artistic realism arose as a democratic form, originally reserved for representing the common people, deriving from the anti-aristocratic movements of the nineteenth century.9 Lange’s realist approach was itself a democratic form, representing others, no matter how plebeian, as autonomous subjects, most certainly not as emanations of herself. She did this through portraiture. Her documentary photography was portrait photography. What made it different was its subjects, and thereby its politics. She looked at the poor as she had looked at the rich, never stereotyping, never pretending “to any easy understanding of her subjects,” in the words of Getty museum curator Judith Keller. “Every Lange portrait subject is complex, and to some degree, inscrutable. . . . She never provides any superficial suggestion that we understand that person immediately.”10 That final, impermeable layer of unknowability is the basis of mutual respect and, in turn, the basis of democracy.

  FOR ME AS a historian, this book has been a new kind of undertaking. I am neither biographer nor photography expert, and most of my previous writing focused on the history of national policy issues. But once Lange came to my attention, I could not let her go. Lange’s life trajectory, though nothing like mine, sounded and resounded themes that resonated with my concerns, forming an obbligato underlining significant episodes and problems in U.S. history.

  The book I wrote just prior to this one constituted, perhaps, a step toward biography: By telling a story of events that happened in a small town in just a few days, what historians call a “microhistory,” I used a tiny fragment of history to illuminate large themes and problems. Because this book has a larger time frame—two-thirds of the twentieth century—it is both “micro,” as it is the story of only one person, and “macro,” since it intersects with crucial events and problems of the twentieth-century United States: deadly polio epidemics, the development of bohemian and arts countercultures, the Depression, World War II, the Cold War and McCarthyism, the transformation of agriculture by technology and corporatization, the birth of environmentalism, U.S. foreign assistance, and the civil rights movement.11 Moreover, her life affords a view of aspects of this history often unnoticed. Her 1920s San Francisco experience suggests that West Coast modernism, even in big cities, was significantly less urban than that in the East—or perhaps that New York’s urbanity was only one model of city life. Her 1930s experience showed the centrality of the rural experience to the mid-century United States; by putting farmworkers at the center of Depression history, her photography exposes a major failure of the New Deal. Her experience of the diversity of the West Coast population made her photography particularly insightful about American race and racism. Her own life sensitized her to the inaccuracy of conventional ideals of womanhood. In these and other ways, Dorothea Lange’s story forces us to rewrite a bit the history of twentieth-century America.

  Lange confronted problems that still hound us today. She faced a conflict common to many women, between personal ambition and public responsibility on the one hand and commitment to children and to family life on the other. She dreamed of a democratic art, accessible to all, and for a brief, intense time, this dream seemed a possibility, because the federal government supported artists as a way of beating back the Depression; that support soon evaporated, however, and art became once again largely a luxury commodity. She endured several timeless personal hardships: disability, a disappearing father, an irresponsible husband, a delinquent son, a criminal brother. She suffered injustices—such as being fired from a beloved photography project although she produced, arguably, its greatest work; and experiencing the suppression of some of her most impassioned photography of protest, unpublished until forty years after her death. She coped with these and other problems in the way that most people do—with impatience, with ambivalence and compromises, with mistakes, with stoicism and irritability, and with resilience.

  If Dorothea Lange is a hero, she was, like all real heroes, flawed. She made hard choices, at significant cost to herself and also to others. She behaved at times imperiously. As a mother, she made some dubious decisions. She flirted and maneuvered to promote her work. This is not a biography intended to sanctify her; perfect people belong in fables or hagiography, not in historical biography. My interest is in understanding and explaining, as best I can, the life of a woman embedded in the historical events of her time.12 This does not mean that I lack interest in Lange as an individual; to the contrary, I find myself often moved by her bravery and capacity for hard work, angry when she hurt others, pained when she was hurt, and awed by her talent, intelligence, and commitment.

  The story I tell is limited not only by the areas of my expertise but also by the available source material. Lange did not document her own life. Until she was in her fifties, she did not save letters or keep a diary. Almost nothing that she wrote before 1935 has been preserved, so information about her life before that comes from recorded interviews with her carried out two or three decades later. Once she became a documentary photographer, of course, she created a great deal of evidence, in her field notebooks, correspondence, photographs, and captions. Like any other personal product, the photographs offer information not only about their subjects but also about their maker.

  The lack of written evidence about Lange’s early life gives her unusual power over its interpretation by a biographer. Forced to rely primarily on her recollections as an older woman, the biographer receives accounts of her youthful experiences only as digested, interpreted, and rearranged by her memory—a notoriously unreliable source—and by her decisions about what to reveal. Like most people, she was an unreliable narrator of her life. I compensate for the fallibility of such recollections with devices well known to historians: noting contradictions in her testimony, comparing her recollections to those of others and to external evidence, reading between the lines, and noticing what she did not talk about. When she did speak, however, Lange’s voice, in words as in images, was a strong one. As a result, I may at times accept her account of herself, however unconsciously, when I should not. This fact does not make the biography more celebratory, though, because she is hard on herself in the areas she speaks about most passionately—her photographic achievement. The risk comes from her silences. I try to fill them with what I have learned from those who knew her, but mysteries will remain.

  FOR LANGE, AS for most photographers, the most powerful tool was her eye. She learned to use it from her mother and grandmother, her early photographer employers, and from two master artistic observers, her husband, Maynard Dixon, and her close friend, photographer Imogen Cunningham. Cunningham made exquisite close-ups of flowers in which we can see every filament and anther on every stamen. Dixon’s prowess as a draftsman was one of the artistic wonders of West Coast art: He could look at a tree briefly and then, from memory, draw not just any tree but that tree; he could see the muscular movement on a horse in motion.

  All good photography requires visual discipline and imagination, of course. Lange’s particular visual intelligence focused on people. In some of her portraits, she seems to have telepathically connected with her subjects’ emotions, perhaps because they trusted her enough to reveal something of themselves. That trust was repaid in one valuable currency: Lange’s subjects are always good-looking. This was the bread and butter of her studio photography business, of course, but it also became central to her documentary photography. Lange made her documentary subjects handsome not through flattery so much as respect, and when her subjects were farmworkers long deprived of education, health, rest, and nutrition, her respect for them became a political statement. Its effectiveness was doubled because the looks of her subjects drew viewers to her photography
, allowed them to take pleasure in it even as it documented misery and injustice. Her photographs delivered both beauty and a call for empathy.

  The photographer’s eye is a skill, not a physiological organ. Lange loved quotations pointing out that we see with our brains—and have to be taught. She copied out “Seeing is more than a physiological phenomenon. . . . We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is. The artist is a professional see-er.”13 Her assistants, her family, her friends—all agreed that she taught them, or tried to teach them, how to see. She believed that sight, like most art, consists of 99 percent hard work. The work never ends: The photographer is “continually training his power of vision,” she said, “so that he actually knows if the telegraph pole has two cross beams and how many glass cups . . . the things we don’t look at anymore.”14

  The worst enemy of seeing is conventionalization, Lange knew, and overcoming it requires vigilance. The more we see the ordinary, the less we notice, because our expectation of what we will see overpowers actual observation, and because we hurry. Skilled seeing requires emptying the mind of false and clichéd responses, responses that the human brain always creates. One neuropsychologist estimates that visual perception is 90 percent memory, less than 10 percent sensory. Perception is thus mostly inference,15 and a great photographer wants observers not to infer, but to see anew. Lange struggled against conventionalizing in her studio portraiture no less than in her documentary. She criticized one of her own photographs by saying, “That’s a passing glance. I know I didn’t see it.”16 Lange disdained a photograph that failed to bust through commonsense expectations.

  Her commitment to seeing derived not only from artistic openness but also from refusal to pass by uninvolved. The effort of sight fused, for her, with a sense of responsibility to understand and act on the world. Visual imagery can, of course, serve to inflame the worst nationalistic, xenophobic, racist, and misogynist passions. But Lange also believed that pictures can imbue respect and open-mindedness, qualities necessary for democracy. She believed that an imagery of democracy could contribute to building political democracy and that visual education could contribute to an active democratic citizenship.

  The responsibility she felt was not to provide solutions to problems, however; she told her students that documentary photographs should ask questions, not provide answers. It is the questioning aspect of Lange’s photographs that remains animated today. Many documentary photographs denounce injustice and suffering. The very best are also wondering. They suggest that the photographer does not understand everything going on in them. There remains a mystery, and this may be their most respectful and challenging message.

  Part I

  HOBOKEN AND SAN FRANCISCO

  1895–1931

  LANGE’S FOOT, 1959

  SCENE 1

  In 1957, when Dorothea Lange was teaching photography at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, she gave students one of her favorite assignments. Every week, students were to bring in photographs that answered the question “Where do I live?” By this, she did not mean the student’s house or apartment, but something deeper. She told them she wanted to see an intimate relation between the photographer and the subject of her or his photography. She pointed out that they could use nonhuman objects to reveal the human, or fragmentary images to refer to wholes. One group of students challenged her to do the assignment herself. What she brought to the class, the only self-portraits she ever made, were several studies of her polio-twisted foot. This is where she lived, she felt—imprisoned in this imperfect body.

  She explained the assignment this way: “. . . by the time we have looked at them all, we ought to feel that our own homes and hearts, by the view we have been given of the homes and the hearts of others, are not just what they were when we began.”1

  1

  Child of Iron, Wounded

  Two childhood traumas made Dorothea Lange who she became, or so she believed. The first was polio. She contracted the disease in 1902, when she was seven, before it became epidemic, at a time when physicians had no treatment to offer. She was lucky to escape with her life and her mobility, but she was left with a permanently twisted foot and stiff lower leg. She always limped, and dragged her right foot when she was tired. She applied a powerful will to the project of passing for normal, and succeeded remarkably for many years. The second trauma was her parents’ separation five years later. So strong was her anger at her father—a deserting father, as she saw him—that when she moved to San Francisco she took on her mother’s maiden name, Lange. So strong even that she never mentioned or saw her father again. These two were the traumas she named. It seems likely that there was a third, so upsetting to her that she never even hinted at it: the suspicion that her father was a crook.

  The historian must consider these traumas both as she felt and remembered them and as they “really” happened. But of traumas there is no one reality, no objective way to understand what happened, since what happened takes place partly in the psyche. Parental desertion is one of a child’s nightmares, and these anxieties probably never entirely disappear. Any experience is what you make of it, and the adolescent Dorothea felt deserted by her father. Even as an intensely independent adult, separations or rejections could make her feel orphaned. (It is worth noting that the word orphan did not mean in her youth what it means today: in her time, most children labeled orphans still had mothers but lacked fathers.) But it turns out that her father did not “abandon us,” as Dorothea repeatedly said. Her parents separated apparently amicably, continued to see each other and share money, and the family never lost its solidly middle-class status.

  The polio trauma differs, for it left a visible, debilitating injury. Yet it resembled her parents’ separation in creating an invisible emotional wound, one easy to disregard for those of us who have lived in a country now free of polio for fifty years. What’s more, it returned to attack her body in middle age.

  Dorothea Lange said, “I think it [polio] was the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me.”1 No other polio victim of the time would have found this surprising. Polio survivors once had a shorthand that demonstrates this total, permanent impact of the disease: they called themselves “polios.” This is not medical shorthand, as when a physician on rounds might say, “Let’s look at the broken arm in room three.” Polio survivors labeled themselves; far from expressing shame, they used the term as a badge of membership in an exclusive club. I have been through the wars, it said. And it indicated a solidarity, one that Dorothea lacked, because polio was still so rare when she was afflicted.

  Lange’s words about polio’s impact on her come from the 1960s, when she was weakened by years of bleeding ulcers and postpolio syndrome and dying of cancer of the esophagus. During her active years, she seemed to have the stamina of a workhorse and at least normal strength, and she hid her disability from others as she tried to deny it to herself. If she was right that polio shaped who she became, it did that jointly with her resilience, her drive, her particular strategies of coping. She saw herself as disabled, by her father’s departure as well as by polio, but her response was shaped by a supportive, if sometimes quarrelsome, family and by a character that was anything but disabled. Some children would fade at least a bit under similar stresses. Dorothea became steadily more vivid. She became a charismatic personality, an artistically and intellectually ambitious photographer, a successful businesswoman, a powerful, temperamental, even intimidating presence, and at the same time a human being of unusual sensitivity to others. She developed a keen receptivity to others’ emotions, as well as a social conscience and sense of social responsibility. Her gifts, her energy, and her commitments came at a cost. A child thrown into relative independence to an unusual extent and unusually early, she lived with high stress and overwork and she became an adult with a powerful need for control over her environment. To the degree her environment
included others, she sometimes needed to control them, too.

  DOROTHEA’S LINEAGE WAS homogeneous: all German American. Both her parents were born in New Jersey, of parents who had emigrated from Germany and become middle-class and prosperous.2 In 1894, her father, Heinrich Nutzhorn,3 married Johanna Lange, who had Americanized her name to Joan; they probably met at their church, St. Matthew’s Lutheran, where she was a soloist in the choir. Their first child, Dorothea, was born at home on May 26, 1895. Heinrich soon became Henry, and, like his father, seemed a go-getter. He spent some time at Northwestern College in Watertown, Wisconsin, formerly a Lutheran seminary, then returned to Hoboken to apprentice in a law firm. In 1891 he passed the New Jersey bar and opened a practice with a partner. Four years later he moved his family from Hoboken to Weehawken, an affluent northern suburb. Weehawken began as a vacation site for New York’s rich, a spot where the Palisades above the Hudson River provided cooling breezes and dramatic vistas. (A series of wagon lifts, stairs, and even an elevator designed by Gustave Eiffel, at the time the world’s largest, carried residents and visitors from the river to the top of the Palisades.) The Nutzhorns’ neighbors were professionals, white-collar workers, the occasional skilled workers (machinists, upholsterers, butchers), and businessmen. As was the norm in their class, Joan Nutzhorn was not employed and housework was done by a maid.