Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  The two years at PS 62 altered Dorothea’s self-image. She drew back from school learning; if she had ever imagined herself as a teacher like Aunt Caroline, for example, that goal no longer seemed promising. But later she came to believe that her Jewish classmates and their families had imbued in her their strong ethical standards about what she called the “sacredness of personal relationships” and “greatness in emotions.” She took in particularly the Jewish girls’ personalities, a new feminine style for Dorothea, for they were often as academically ambitious as the boys.5

  When she recalled her school days, she never mentioned disability as a factor in her experience. This was always her approach: She experienced her lameness as formative, and reported that it made her feel different from everyone else, but never discussed it—no mention of pain or feeling weak or being stigmatized or taunted.

  Increasingly, she dawdled on the way to the library to meet her mother and roamed the streets. In the seventh grade, this precocious child inaugurated her New York persona: walker in the city.6 She walked long distances, her damaged foot hindering her speed but not her stamina. There was much to see, because in this densely inhabited neighborhood much of life took place on the stoops and the streets—not just buying and selling but also fixing, cleaning, playing, arguing, eating, even sleeping—a way of living outlandish and also exotic to a girl used to middle-class privacy. Her strolls could be grimy, smelly, and occasionally frightening. Returning home alone two nights a week when her mother worked late, she learned to walk carefully around filth, step over drunks, avoid street toughs. Horses and their droppings filled the streets. Thousands died of cholera, typhoid, smallpox, typhus, and diphtheria. Every year, 100,000 were arrested, and 500 children were abandoned. (Her 1950s travels in Asia would remind her of this Lower East Side squalor, and its attractions.)

  When she raised her eyes to the buildings, she took in another visual feast. The neighborhood’s 170 synagogues were mostly just storefronts, but a few had been built as houses of worship—from Beth Hamedrash Hagadol on Norfolk Street, its architectural simplicity appearing almost modernist, to the ornate Moorish and Romanesque Eldridge Street Synagogue, K’hal Adath Jeshurun. She passed through the remnants of Kleindeutschland, the German district around Tompkins Square Park, the Deutsche Klinik, now Stuyvesant Polyclinic, the Freie Bibliothek, now the Ottendorfer public library branch, and the shooting club, Deutsch-Amerikanische Schützen Gesellschaft, all with elaborately decorative facades in the German Rundbogenstil (round-arched, neo-Romanesque). Turning west to the Hudson, she crossed the “Jewish Rialto,” as the strip of Yiddish theaters along Second Avenue was called. Or she might walk up the Bowery, darkened by the overhead tracks of the Third Avenue Elevated, lined with pawnshops, bars, pool halls, and missions. The names of the single-room-occupancy cheap lodging houses and hotels told of their former eminence: the Gotham, the Majestic, the Windsor, and the Whitehouse. Turning west again, she passed the Federal-style town houses of the West Village, originally built for workers and artisans by carpenters using pattern books, now beginning to be reclaimed by bohemians, and she glimpsed some of those unconventional folk on the street.

  She would later say that she learned to see on these walks. She exercised the eye that her grandmother had appreciated, the eye that would become her most powerful muscle. The child psychiatrist and documentary-photography critic Robert Coles argued that these experiences both formed and revealed “distinctive elements of her later working style: a willingness to inquire relentlessly, to move with ease from neighborhood to neighborhood; an interest in the ability of extremely hard-pressed families nevertheless to make do; . . . a defiantly rebellious insistence that her own aesthetic and moral interests be affirmed . . . and, particularly, a continual attentiveness. . . .”7

  Coles is exaggerating slightly, as these abilities took years more to develop. But he is right to see the contribution of the Lower East Side experience to Dorothea’s future. It supported her inclination, both innate and family-influenced, toward independence and self-reliance. It confirmed her grandmother’s instruction that looking with concentration could reveal beauty. It taught her that what seemed threatening might prove benign, that a young woman alone in bad neighborhoods might nevertheless be safe. It demonstrated that those who lived in poverty might possess potential equal to that of those who lived in prosperity. And it confirmed a pleasure in being alone. She referred to herself in those days as “a solitary.”8

  Dorothea believed that it was in the Lower East Side that she learned to don her “cloak of invisibility.” The cloak enabled her to see without being disruptive or unsafe. This metaphor felt quite exact to her, because she repeated it throughout her life. It would become important to her understanding of her photographic method, and it resounds on several frequencies. Imagining herself as invisible calls to mind her mother telling her to work harder at hiding her limp and distorted foot. It suggests a child’s strategy for staying out of Sophie’s way. It expresses her sense that her father could not see her, had forgotten her. The cloak, like that of a flaneur, an observer, claims for herself an active position unusual for a lone young woman. When Baudelaire first used the term, a flaneur was a gentleman and could not be otherwise. No one of the lower classes would have the leisure to stroll and observe, or, allegedly, the detachment required by the Olympian gaze Baudelaire honored. No woman could be safe or respectable trying it. Dorothea Lange was by no means the first to defy that Victorian constraint, but she did so at a remarkably vulnerable age and in an urban tumult.

  A lifelong trait becomes clear now: Dorothea loved looking. Her Lower East Side wanderings and her PS 62 failings were introducing her to a new identity as arty. Her grandmother Sophie had said once—in German, but Dorothea had understood—“ ‘that girl has line in her head,’ ” which meant that she could see design and composition.9 Once, looking out at the Hackensack Meadows and seeing wash lines against the sky, she said to her companion, “To me, that’s beautiful,” and her companion responded, “To you, everything is beautiful.” This comment brought her another bit of self-knowledge that she had not previously had.10 Perhaps she associated it with her pleasure in looking at her uncles’ lithography stones.

  AFTER GRADUATING FROM PS 62, Dorothea enrolled in Wadleigh High School for Girls. One of only three public high schools in Manhattan and the Bronx—most were private or parochial schools, and only a small minority of schoolchildren went to high school in those days anyway—Wadleigh was located uptown on 114th and 115th streets at Seventh Avenue, surrounded by the new apartment buildings of the upwardly mobile, including some of the Jewish immigrants who had once lived on the Lower East Side. At Wadleigh, Jews were in the minority, Dorothea a member of the WASP majority. But her heart was not in school and she did not become an ace student here either. She studied Latin, which she barely passed, as well as algebra and geometry, biology, botany, and physics, and English, drawing, and music.11 Despite some progressive influences—feminist Henrietta Rodman taught there and there was a students’ league for woman suffrage—Wadleigh had few of the progressive accoutrements of PS 62. It enforced strict dress and behavior codes, offered little in the arts, and prepared girls for only two wage-earning careers: teaching and clerical work. Dorothea just barely passed her courses. She had the rebellious adolescent’s way of considering herself superior even as she earned poor grades. Later, she regretted her educational loss and blamed the pedagogy of the time: “. . . what important years those are and what could have been done for me—because I loved books and I could get things fast—that wasn’t done,” she mused.12

  A few teachers captured her attention: one who loved Yeats, a physics teacher with “a good, clean-cut brain,” and, above all, Martha Bensley Bruere. Member of a high-society family active in progressive social reform, sister of prominent Progressive Republican Henry Bruere (“his name was in the paper every day,” Dorothea recalled), she drew Dorothea to her like a magnet and returned her student’s admiration.
Dorothea impressed her so much that this straitlaced, serious woman actually cheated for her: “completely undermining her principles . . . she upgraded a paper . . . because I had done so dreadfully . . . which would have meant my failing that course. . . .”13

  During her four years at Wadleigh, Dorothea became a persistent truant. She spent days on the streets, carrying her books, looking and wandering. Apparently the school never reported her, because her mother never knew, but Dorothea’s memory may have exaggerated the extent of her absences. Perhaps she forged excuses.14 Looking back, she thought that she got away with this because her mother was neglectful, and she thanked God for it. She knew, perhaps subconsciously, that her truancy was not unproductive. She learned the city, and lost her fear of cities. The city she got to know now was far larger than it had been, extending from Harlem to the bottom of Manhattan, and in 1913, the city’s subways carried 810 million passengers. Dorothea sometimes walked that whole distance. She saw from the bottom those buildings she had once seen only as part of the skyline as the ferry approached. She saw how differently the rich, the middle class, and the poor lived.

  In fact, metropolitan modernity was beginning to blur the cultural lines between classes and ethnicities, by growing a commercial public culture. You could see upscale fashion at Henri Bendel on Fifth Avenue and plebeian styles at Klein’s on Fourteenth Street, and an adventuresome teenager could walk through both of them. Electricity was making nighttime itself a spectacle. The Hippodrome, a vaudeville and circus palace built in 1905, sported glittering globes outlined in electric lights, while inside, the dome was circled by bands of light. The new Theater District near Times Square featured more than four hundred entertainment events a year. New York’s male “sporting life” continued to expand, featuring gambling, cockfights, saloons, strip clubs, and prostitution. In large areas of the city, women were not safe alone on the streets. But in pockets of this nightlife world, male-accompanied women were as comfortable as men.15

  Dorothea found a sister in truancy, Fronsie (née Florence) Ahlstrom, also from Hoboken, also using a false address to attend Wadleigh. Dorothea had few friends—in her later musing, she attributed this to a drive that made her different from other girls. She and Fronsie had compatibly rebellious temperaments—and became lifelong friends. Their interests developed jointly as their wanderings became increasingly oriented toward high culture. Between the 1870s and the 1890s, New York had grown from an inelegant, grungy commercial hub to a grand metropolis of culture. As the well-to-do migrated farther north in Manhattan, galleries and museums followed. Central Park, the museums, the public statuary, and the Beaux-Arts architecture could match the attractions of Berlin, if not Paris. The Art Students League enrolled hundreds. The display of nudes was eroding Victorian prudery. Dorothea and Fronsie could visit the Metropolitan Museum, the American Fine Arts Society, the Museum of Natural History, and the many private galleries on Fifty-seventh Street. The Met still clung to a conservative art canon, so the girls would not have encountered Impressionism or Art Nouveau or Edvard Munch there, but they might well have taken in shows of Japanese prints, of Corot and Rousseau, or of the moderns John Singer Sargent and Winslow Homer. The great mansions of the millionaire district—those of the Carnegie, Warburg, Whitney, Harkness, Frick, Pulitzer, Duke, Pinchot, deKoven, Astor, Sloane, and Vanderbilt families—offered pedestrians a catalog of ornate luxury as one walked south on Fifth or Park or Madison avenues. Dorothea had seen first the human hardship created by New York’s growth; now she saw the sublime pleasures of upscale New York.

  On these walks Dorothea began to see modern art photography. In early twentieth-century New York, the impresario turning photography into an art was her fellow Hoboken native Alfred Stieglitz. Thirty years Lange’s senior, Stieglitz came from a different community of Hoboken Germans, the wealthy Jewish Germans, but he shared some of her German culture, albeit of a more elite status. Educated in Germany in the 1880s, he returned to New York in 1890 and worked as a photoengraver, like Lange’s uncles. A walker, like Lange, he took his camera outside and photographed lovingly the urban landscape, physical and spiritual. He raised the technical standards of photography, achieving subtleties of texture, tonality, and composition to create stirring images. He expanded the acceptable range of photographic subjects. He developed a style of photography that came to dominate both studio and art photography for several decades. Most importantly, Stieglitz became an impresario who helped get this new style marked as art. Labeled “pictorialism,” the technique involved elegantly balanced composition, soft focus, and a small range of tones. The soft focus eliminated unwanted details. It was created with special lenses and, sometimes, by smearing a lens with oil or Vaseline. The low tonality created an aura of mystery or spirituality. After producing negatives, many pictorialists then scratched or painted them to create new effects, disdaining photographs without such handwork as merely a technical product—that is, not art. The style sought to deny the camera, to override its greatest technical capacity—the ability to make sharp images—and instead to make photographs seem painterly. Pictorialism attracted paying clients and audience through picturesque and sentimental themes.

  A man of inherited wealth, Stieglitz was also a first-rate entrepreneur. Rejecting the straitjacket of establishment arts preferences, represented at the top by the National Academy of Design, he made three moves that would revolutionize American art—and influence Lange’s future development. In 1902 he organized a photographers’ group called the Photo-Secession. The name derived from the move by a group of German and Austrian photographers to secede from the academy, a rejection replicated in New York when photographers resigned from the New York Camera Club. Through this group, Stieglitz promoted his pictorialist visual discipline. Members were admitted only by invitation. The privileged included Edward Steichen, then the favorite, Clarence White, and Alvin Langdon Coburn. Two women won this laurel: Gertrude Käsebier and Anne Brigman. Photo-Secession work was to be aesthetically charming, emotionally expressive, and painterly. Next, after editing several older photography magazines, Stieglitz started his own, Camera Work, in 1903, the most influential—and beautiful—publication in the field until its demise in 1917.

  In 1905 Stieglitz opened a gallery at 291 Fifth Avenue, where he showed modern painting, sculpture, and photography. He brought to New York the work of Rodin, Cézanne, Brancusi, Rousseau, Matisse, and Picasso, as well as African sculpture. He nurtured an important group of American modernist painters who gathered around his gallery. Within a few years, the rebellion begun by Stieglitz generated the Exhibition of Independent Artists, a 1910 show which, for the first time, evaded the National Academy’s veto power. It was not a gated community, with judges determining entry, but an open show in which any artist could participate. One hundred and three of them did, making it a major cultural event. Two thousand attended its opening, and a waiting line of over five hundred gathered outside.16 In 1911 the rebellion grew more overtly oppositional, with a show that required its exhibitors to boycott the Academy’s exhibitions. An even greater impact came from the Armory Show of 1913, designed to challenge the Academy openly. It displayed thirteen hundred works by three hundred artists, including all the European modernist greats. The critical attack on this work—that it was formless, immoral, lunatic, anarchic, et cetera—increased the attendance. The show transformed the art world permanently.

  Modernism was blooming in all the arts. Dorothea would likely have seen some vaudeville, the dominant entertainment form for at least half a century, possibly at the Union Square Theatre, where one could get a gallery ticket for twenty-five cents. But of much greater interest were the three modernist “little theater” groups that sprouted in New York in 1915: the Washington Square Players, the Provincetown Players, and the Neighborhood Playhouse. Here one could see work by Edna St. Vincent Millay, Floyd Dell, and Djuna Barnes. Lange would have seen modernist art also in new radical publications such as The Masses, an arty, socialist monthly. Eve
n if she saw it only on newsstands, she would have noticed its dramatic modernist covers by such painters as John Sloan, Stuart Davis, Maurice Becker, and George Bellows. She might have run into one of the theatrically costumed woman-suffrage parades. Artistic and political modernist streams flowed into the same reservoir of radical ideas.

  Dorothea was most stirred, however, not by the art and theater she saw but by Isadora Duncan, who swept into New York like the Greek goddess of her costumes. Duncan’s work derived in part from the same source as modernism in the visual arts. Both modern dancers and modern artists were refugees from Victorianism, scholasticism, and Beaux-Arts snobbery, and both experienced the rigid technical standards of their parents’ art forms as confining, even suffocating. This is only a partial resemblance, because Armory Show modern art is as appreciated today as ever, while Duncan’s dancing is likely to leave today’s audiences bored or even annoyed. Dorothea’s passion for Duncan makes sense only in its context. And that context includes the fact that Duncan was dancing for women, expressing women’s frustrations and aspirations.

  Duncan performed in New York in 1908, 1909, and 1911. First a Broadway producer brought her as a novelty, based on her hot European reputation as the “barefoot classic dancer.” Her success was such that she then danced, at the invitation of conductor Walter Damrosch, with the New York Symphony Orchestra to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony at the Metropolitan Opera House. This is where Dorothea first saw her; afterward, she tried to see her every performance. “I had never been taken into the upper reaches of human existence before . . . to me it was the greatest thing that ever happened. I still live with that, not as a theatrical performance, but as an extension of human possibility.”17 Duncan literally changed the identity of this teenager still engaged in constructing herself.18