Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Another who opened with fireworks and then faded was Weston’s previous model and girlfriend, Margrethe Mather. Lange found her fascinating too. When Weston and Mather met, in 1912, he was a conventional middle-class studio photographer making sentimental portraits of children and landscapes. Mather introduced him to radical ideas—political, sexual, and aesthetic. Her abstracted, close-up details of nude bodies predate and prefigure his, and they made several photographs together, both signing them, something Weston never did again.36 Mather photographed arts-world celebrities such as Charlie Chaplin, Lillian Gish, Vaclav Nijinsky, and Leon Bakst. In 1930 she became the first photographer to exhibit at the new de Young Museum in San Francisco, an impressive credit for a woman. Yet her photographic career and her stability ended by the mid-1930s, while Weston went on to become one of the great art photographers.37 Mather’s primary sexual and romantic attraction was to women, and she lived with several female lovers during much of her time with Weston. Same-sex love was not at all uncommon among these bohemian artists, and Weston, in turn, had some male lovers. To call this homosexuality would be ahistorical, since this counterculture did not divide people into gay or straight as mutually exclusive identities. Under whatever label, Dorothea was entirely comfortable with same sex–attracted people, and early on hired as an assistant the gay Roger Sturtevant, who went on to become a fine photographer.

  Another talented, if less dramatic, photography dropout in Lange’s circle was Alma Lavenson. Like her friend Kanaga, she came to photography with economic and educational privilege but despite parental repression. When her wealthy father prohibited her from taking a job after she graduated from Berkeley, she taught herself photography. Her family connections with art dealer and collector Albert Bender got her entrée to the San Francisco photographers’ circle; her amazing talent brought her one-person shows at the de Young Museum and at the Brooklyn Museum in 1933—way ahead of Lange in career trajectory. But that year, she married a prosperous attorney, gave birth to two children, and devoted herself exclusively to family, from then on photographing only as a hobby.38

  Louise Dahl was one of very few women photographers around Lange who made a lasting and prestigious career. She came to documentary photography through friendship with Kanaga. Like Lange, she married an artist and did not consider herself in his league. But by following him to New York, ironically, she became the world-famous fashion photographer for Harper’s Bazaar, Louise Dahl-Wolfe. Dahl-Wolfe was, besides Lange, the only one of the San Francisco group who worked professionally in photography as a married woman. To do that, one had to have a supportive husband and a strong will.

  LANGE’S FRIENDSHIPS WITH clients reveal yet more about who attracted her, about the political influences on her, and about how other married women managed to construct lives outside their families. None of this group of friends was employed, all supported by husbands or family wealth, which gave them leisure—a leisure they spent in political, artistic, charitable, and community endeavors. Their characteristics were not so different from those of the photographers and artists Dorothea knew: love for the arts, cosmopolitan tastes, freedom in moving about the city, liberal sexual standards, appreciation of foreign cultures, and, frequently, leftist politics. They did not garner the renown of Lange, Cunningham, and some of the other photographers, but they were serious and active women. Powerful personality that she was, Dorothea had equally forceful friends.

  These friendships grew out of Lange’s studio method, its leisurely and conversational pace, and, in turn, these relationships built her business. This is not to say that her friendships were instrumental. She did not need to chase clients—the same ones came back repeatedly, some commissioning family pictures every year, and new clients came when they saw Lange portraits on their friends’ grand pianos. It was her friends’ culture more than their wealth that attracted Dorothea. Moreover, they chose Dorothea as much as she chose them. What is remarkable here is that this young businesswoman created entirely equal relationships with her elite and culturally sophisticated customers.

  Her client friends can be divided into two groups: the urban and the rural. Both groups were high-culture lovers and held liberal attitudes toward everything from elections to child raising. Some of them became, as would Dorothea, advocates of progressive reform under the impact of the Depression. The city women, however, found independence more easily than Lange’s photographer friends: Household servants left them free to invest time in “causes” even when their children were young.

  Lange’s city friends were almost all Jews of German ancestry. Wealthy and powerful, secular and urban, the “Our Crowd” of San Francisco, their ancestors had immigrated in the mid-nineteenth century and built mercantile fortunes.39 Northern California was open to these immigrants, who counted as white before that status was confirmed for them in New York.40 They stuck together—they may have been white, but they knew that Christians knew the difference. A widespread “parlor anti-Semitism” excluded them, for example, from the gentlemen’s clubs and the high-status women’s clubs. Segregation was residential as well. The Gentile aristocracy lived on the three big hills—Nob, Telegraph, and Russian; the richest Jews built mansions in Pacific Heights with spectacular bay views.41 Their children married one another, producing a complex and encompassing web of family relationships among them. They did not frequent the Jewish neighborhood in the Fillmore District, where Eastern European Jews maintained kosher food stores, bakeries, a Yiddish theater, and political organizations such as the Workmen’s Circle.42

  Consider the interconnected Elkus, Katten, and Kahn families, from which came two of Lange’s closest friends, Elizabeth Elkus and Edythe Katten, for their histories are representative of their group. The friends were cousins, because in the 1880s businessmen Albert Elkus and Simon Katten had married two Kahn sisters, daughters of the owner of the leading Oakland department store. All three families parlayed retail stores or garment factories—typical Jewish entrepreneurial beginnings—into prominent businesses and all three produced cultured and politically committed offspring. Albert’s father, Louis Elkus, had married Cordelia de Young, sister of the owner of the San Francisco Chronicle and founder of San Francisco’s de Young Museum, in 1895. Albert, oldest of their eleven children, became a reform mayor of Sacramento in 1921. Another son, Charles de Young Elkus, became an attorney and, with his wife, Ruth, a collector of Native American art. He helped the Pueblo Indians regain control over lands and water that were being usurped by white squatters, and subsidized Indian health care; he became close to John Collier, New Deal head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and worked with him to produce the Roosevelt administration’s “Indian New Deal” of the 1930s. Through their love for Indians and the West, Ruth and Charles became patrons of Maynard Dixon’s art. Albert Elkus, Jr., from the next generation, husband of Dorothea’s friend Elizabeth, became a professional musician, composer, professor of music at UCB, and ultimately president of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

  When Dorothea met Elizabeth and Edythe, both were young, cultured, and well educated, active in charitable and community projects. Although Dorothea never shared their class position, her personality and her artiness made her seem to be one of them. These friendships endured: Decades later, when Edythe was in a hospital having radiation treatment for cancer, Dorothea visited her every night to kiss her good night. When Dorrie, as they called her, was hospitalized, Edythe did the same.43 When Dorothea was laid up in a New York hospital, she wrote Elizabeth, “I just feel like seeing you and being with you and telling you all my troubles and how disaster overtook me in New York. . . . Get on your slippers.”44 “Slippers” referred to the “slipper club” they formed along with another friend, Minna Blum Neustadt, wife of a prominent New Dealer. The slippers had been gifts from Dorothea. When in town, they met weekly, alternating houses, discussing art, gardening, and politics. Dorothea became so identified with this German Jewish community that several believed she was herself Jewish. />
  The women’s friendships drew in their families. Dorothea’s sons Dan and John often played with Ken and Andy Katten and attended the same nursery school. They shared many holiday meals, including Christmas, since these Jews were not at all observant. Edythe’s son and daughter-in-law Ken and Jan Katten both sensed the particular intimacy and intensity between Edythe and Dorrie: Jan thinks that there was sexual attraction between them, but no affair, while Ken thinks that his father was jealous of the women’s relationship.45 In Lange’s portraits of Edythe, we see a dramatic, austere beauty with large features and a sharp-edged, sculpted hairdo. One set of portraits, made in 1933, shows her bare-shouldered, with a deep décolletage.

  The slipper club supported progressive causes. Before her marriage, Edythe Selling had graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in labor economics. In the 1920s, when Lange’s photographer and artist friends were generally apolitical, these women influenced her with their confident, principled commitments. An ardent British Labourite, Elizabeth Elkus taught handicapped children and spoke out on child-welfare issues. Edythe Katten and her husband were active in San Francisco’s Socialist party, voting for Norman Thomas rather than FDR in 1932, though they quickly became New Deal supporters.

  Dorothea’s country friends also came from wealth, and in abjuring city life, they also set an example she admired. Dorothea’s young assistant Roger Sturtevant thought of them as back-to-the-earth bohemians who loved the “Isadora Age of sexual freedom. . . .” He exaggerated, but they did go in for skinny-dipping and other “advanced things.”46 The closest to Dorothea, Mary Ann Wilson, was as bohemian as Californians got, and Dorothea and her family visited the Wilsons’ Marin County home in Mill Valley so often that a cabin on the property was known as Dorothea’s.47 Mary Ann wore home-sewn, earthy clothing and furnished her rustic house in a spare style—burnished wood tables, oak chairs—that Dorothea emulated. The families shared a love of the natural, which was expressed in allowing the children to swim and play unclothed, their eating and cooking outdoors, and their early-days concern for the environment. Another politically liberal close friend, Gertrude Clausen, migrated through marriage to a ranch in northern California, but her desire for Lange photographs took her to San Francisco at least yearly. She first sat for Dorothea in 1919, when her eldest daughter was born, and whenever a child was born thereafter (there were four more). Gertrude kept the photographs in a brocade album on the piano and told her daughters that in case of fire, that album should be the only thing they tried to save.48 Gert’s daughter Christina became Dorrie’s assistant for several years during World War II and her family continued to socialize with Dorothea’s children after her death. Dorothea and family also often visited Louise Lovett’s parents’ farm on Soquel Creek, just east of Santa Cruz. They would camp in a grove of cottonwoods near a stream. Dorothea made beautiful photographs of all the children, especially playing naked in the water, in a fusion of snapshot and pictorialist modes.

  3.1. EDYTHE KATTEN, 1933

  CONSCIOUSLY OR NOT, Lange used her studio to strengthen a strategic alliance between the bohemian arts crowd and San Francisco’s elite. She sensed that a sector of the wealthy not only respected those who worked to create beauty but also longed to know them, to be accepted by them, to be affected by them. As a class, they were disproportionately responsible for building San Francisco’s high-culture institutions: the symphony orchestra, the opera, the ballet, the de Young Legion of Honor.49 “They gave string quartets in their living rooms or in their drawing rooms, and they educated talent: Yehudi Menuhin . . . Isaac Stern . . .” Dorothea recalled, and she could have added Ernest Bloch, Pierre Monteux, and Joseph Szigeti.50 Lange made her studio into a site where artists and the liberal rich interacted. The alliance benefited Lange economically and artistically: it built her business and her reputation and allowed her to experiment with a portraiture that was slightly unconventional. Lange’s part in building the alliance also helped others, particularly once the Depression deprived so many artists of an income.

  Artists have almost always depended on such alliances. Once, artists painted to order, on commission from patrons. In the last few centuries, artists and craftspeople have been able to earn a living at their art only if the wealthy buy their work. Unless they become so famous that their names themselves sell, they have to create what rich people like or can quickly learn to like. This unspoken compact was fundamental to the development of all the arts, not only the visual but also, importantly, music and theater, in San Francisco, as everywhere else.

  Lange furthered her connections by agreeing to travel occasionally to photograph people in their homes, a practice not uncommon at the time. Lugging heavy equipment, she went as far as Seattle to photograph the Weyerhaeuser family two or three times. The trips paid off, because she would stay in the homes of her clients, cementing relationships, picking up new clients, receiving the occasional dinner invitation.

  Willingness to travel signified Lange’s primary orientation: to please her clients. Portrait photography is always client-centered work and success depends on one’s ability to sense what the clients will like. “I don’t mean pandering to their vanity,” she said, but “my personal interpretation was second to the need of the other fellow.” Lange’s wizardry was that she could often induce them to like what she liked. She stretched their tastes a bit, showed them something unexpected, and she believed that in doing so she was showing them something about themselves that they had not seen before. “I really and seriously tried, with every person I photographed, to reveal them as closely as I could.”51

  Portraits serve both domestic and social aspirations. They signify but also construct family. They provide images that confirm the stability, care, and belonging people desire, and they communicate respectability and dignity to visitors in their homes. They present ideal families and thereby sustain these ideals, often disguising what actual families were like. They give children roots—who does not like to see her own baby pictures? What parent does not wish to be reminded of her children’s childhood? In a modern culture with a certain disdain for the old, images of our more beautiful youthful selves shore up the self-esteem of the elderly. At the same time, portraits declare status: military honor, womanly virtue, manly command, and class above all. Thorsten Veblen called the portrait a display of “conspicuous leisure.”52

  Portraits helped people of all social strata demand social respect, but portrait style was often differentiated by class. Photography historian John Tagg has pointed out, for example, that a three-quarter view was typical of portraits made for high-status clients, while straight frontal images characterized those of lower status.53 Few of Lange’s portraits are frontal. Studio photographers in the pictorialist era often used painted backdrops and Beaux-Arts statuary, typically pastoral or garden scenes that betokened access to leisure and beauty, to elevate the status of poorer clients. The nineteenth-century upscale portraitist Nadar began photographing his elite clients, by contrast, against an “unarticulated space” so that they could “disport themselves without script.”54 So did Lange. Her style appeared to her clients as a modern, unconservative kind of elegance. The artistic modernism she had imbibed in New York expressed itself in a taste for simplicity and a rejection of conventional finery. She never draped people and she discouraged formal poses. She did not ask her subjects to smile and she preferred them not to wear suits or gowns, but informal clothes, best of all old clothes, in which they could be more relaxed. She wanted her pictures to be eternal, undated—a desire she would reverse ten years later—so she tried to avoid trendy clothing.55 She printed her portraits on handmade paper with a deckle edge. And she dated her prints as well as signing them; she wanted this record of her work, even as she discarded her correspondence and any journals she kept.

  The finished product was to give sitters the sense that they were representing themselves in an individually chosen manner. Lange offered her elite clientele a portraiture th
at suggested—or “revealed,” she would say—individuality and a deep inner life. She endowed her subject with “interiority,” as Allan Sekula wrote.56 As Alan Trachtenberg put it, she sought the “bodily expression of characteristic inward feeling.”57 No doubt her own not-quite-perfect body had honed her sensitivity to posture and gesture as communicative dimensions. Her slight disability, so slight as to be in no way offensive, may have strengthened her customers’ belief in her sensitivity and gentleness. Experiencing her own body as disfigured intensified a soulful quality about her that convinced clients of her power to capture their inner state of grace. They believed that she could make their education, culture, and sensitivity apparent in her images of them. Portraits signaling depth of character were particularly important to the newly rich or middle class and to those who, like Lange’s clients, cared more to be identified with high culture than with wealth. Not that they used high culture only for prestige; they were often passionate lovers of music and art. But their cultural commitments were inseparable from the social position they enjoyed.

  Culture critic Walter Benjamin argued that photography was a democratic practice because of its reproducibility; and that it abolished the “aura” of prestige surrounding the one-of-a-kind painting. (This judgment was, of course, based on a misunderstanding of how much photographs could be changed in darkrooms.) Thus it is hardly surprising that in the late nineteenth century, portrait photographers began attempting to re-create that aura of self-worth as “character,” personality.58 For the individual, the aura appears to emanate from the subject herself. But the aura also creates social status: the photograph can generate respectability and stand for cultured taste. Framed and set on a piano or a mantel, or collected in a leather or brocade album prominently displayed, it can make an entire home upscale, even prestigious.59