Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  The creative force of portraits expresses itself particularly strongly through gendered imagery. Portraits can reassure by marking a woman as appropriately feminine, men as masculine. Portrait photographers develop a sure command of these appearances: how to arrange hair and clothing, how to position their subjects, how to deal with wriggly babies and restless children, how to coax out a desired facial expression. Particularly in Lange’s time, women photographers might find these skills easier to acquire because they were consonant with feminine socialization. They decorated their studios invitingly, arranged lighting flatteringly; they seemed to have an intuitive “knack of placement” that revealed inner feelings and family love. They appeared especially gifted at capturing children, landscapes, still lifes, and genre scenes.60 Lange never defied such expectations of women, but she performed them at what seemed a more sophisticated level. In fact, plenty of male portrait photographers mastered these skills too, but it was easy, given cultural assumptions, to treat them as innate attributes of women. The pictorialist style was particularly evocative of Victorian femininity, and Lange’s portraits of women are, on average, mistier than those of men. Her female subjects were more frequently portrayed in interior spaces, in part because they were more likely to ask her to come to their homes to photograph. In this regard, the reassuring function may have been particularly desirable, as so many women in this era—particularly those with leisure time to spend—felt anxious about whether their public-sphere activities violated the domesticity that the older culture demanded of women.

  3.2. ONE OF LANGE’S PORTRAIT CUSTOMERS, MS. RAENTSCH, 1932

  So the desired photographic aura required delicate balance and was not easily achieved. To produce a likeness is easy; to “capture” an interior essence requires overcoming the typical human response to the camera, which is to stiffen, to adopt a strained smile, a formal stance, an overdressed demeanor.61 Lange engaged in a kind of gentle jostling to get subjects to break free of those rigidities. As an assistant in portrait studios in New York, she had been assigned to talk with, pose, and prepare clients. In San Francisco she developed this ability further, unintimidated by artists, intellectuals and big-business and society people, and this confidence and charm, along with her genuine interest in others, improved her product. Through conversation, Lange’s liveliness and the substance of what she said induced customers to grow interested in something beyond the camera and their appearance; to loosen up and to engage in an interaction in which, by forgetting themselves, they found themselves.

  Lange’s interactive method, dependent on the subject to participate in creating the portrait, required patience. She described this often in later interviews. “You have to wait until certain decisions are made by the subject—what he’s going to give to the camera . . . and the photographer—what he’s going to choose to take. It is a much longer inner process than putting the camera between you and the subject. . . .”62 She talked a bit of spiritualism, calling herself a “channel,” “a cipher, a person that can be used for lots of things. . . .”63 This kind of talk made her out to be somewhat passive, a trope she would use occasionally throughout her life and one consistent with Victorian conceptions of female nature. She sometimes seemed to understand her work as uniquely, naturally female. To the degree that it suggested passivity or minimized her calculated, disciplined method, the spiritual talk was a performance, even a business strategy. She made many negatives and never hesitated to work them over in the darkroom. Her results came from working long hours, not from her clients’ inner lives. She often expected repeated sittings from her clients, an expectation that might have proved annoying but that also flattered them and certified her high standards.

  Feminine or not, her portraits could be called intimate. They would not do as publicity photos for movie stars—although glamour photography, using strong lighting, heavy makeup, and elaborate hairdos, got its start in Hollywood just as she opened her studio. She photographed some highbrow celebrities—for example, this photograph of Ernest Bloch—but the images did not sing out star. They were designed instead to signal depth of character, uniqueness of personality. Lange could do this even with teenagers, as in her brooding portrait of an adolescent on a horse. (See plate 2.) Displaying yet another feminine skill, Lange grew particularly adept at portraying relationships, most commonly in mother-child or sibling groups, with family members draped over one another informally, but also in other familial couplings, such as this exquisite photograph of a boy and his grandfather.

  3.3. ERNEST BLOCH, 1927

  3.4. KATTEN GRANDFATHER AND GRANDSON, 1934

  However sophisticated, Lange saw herself as a “tradesman,” to use her word. This identity, typical among studio photographers, combined the manual labor and social position of artisan and small entrepreneur.64 Neither her approach nor her aspiration was that of an artist in the modern sense of that word, although in the past—for example, in the tradition of her lithographer uncles—there was little distinction between artisan and artist. “It never occurred to me,” she said, to do any uncommissioned work—that is, to set her own photographic agenda. That was Imogen’s territory.65 Lange’s modest aspirations, exemplified by her choosing not to imagine her work as art, had advantages. It insulated her from the demands and competition of the art market and from the imperatives of establishment art authorities. This insulation was a matter of degree, not an absolute, of course. She studied photography magazines and went to exhibits; she took in what a wide range of other photographers were doing. But for many years she did feel constricted by the obligation to please customers. An art photographer might have rebelled: Walker Evans, for example, thought studio work intolerable because of the “horrors of vanity” of the subjects.66 By contrast, Lange saw her photography as a service for customers. Although she guided and cajoled, in the end her clients decided what to present of themselves, she believed, and her job was to capture that. They had a right to flattering photographs. What began as a client-centered service, however, would become a powerful documentary technique a decade later.

  REMARKABLY, BY 1921 San Francisco’s most upscale portrait photographer, most in demand among the rich arty set, was twenty-six-year-old Dorothea Lange. This helps explain how it came about that one of San Francisco’s leading artists, and its most dramatic art personality, romanced and married a small young photographic businesswoman, new in the city, who walked with a limp.

  4

  Maynard Dixon, Bohemian Artist

  Maynard Dixon, the artist whose sharp steps Dorothea heard above her darkroom, would not only become her lover and husband but would also influence her artistically and culturally. He brought her into the vibrant sociability among San Francisco’s bohemian artists and into the natural beauty of California and the southwestern desert. Dixon lived in two clashing worlds—the city and the wilderness. Ultimately, the wilderness won, and he became steadily more bitter as commercialization and suburbanization threatened to devour it; his bitterness would eventually destroy their marriage. But at first, Dorothea’s attraction to him vibrated at a pitch she had never before felt. Thus to understand her, we need to understand him.

  Dixon came by his cowboy persona legitimately. He was born in frontier-town Fresno in 1875, when it was ranching country.1 (Later, the town’s transformation into the commercial hub of the West’s major agricultural district, the San Joaquin Valley, would cause the adult Maynard great distress.) As a boy, he was fascinated by Indians. Fresno was established on Indian land, of course, and Maynard’s grandfather had been an Indian fighter. The 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre of the Lakota Sioux mesmerized Maynard, and throughout his life he would study Indian culture, paint Indians, write poetry and stories about Indians, pride himself on friendships with Indians, and venerate the spiritual closeness to nature that he believed abided in Indian blood.2 He smoked the Indian herb kinnikinnick, in cigarettes that he could roll with one hand.3 The allure of Indians for Maynard coexisted, as for so many other whites of his
time, with racist assumptions about them and other nonwhites.4 Maynard’s Indians were noble savages, their demise part of the inevitable tragedy of advancing civilization. He often painted them among rocks, quite still, as part of nature, reinforcing their stability and distance from the modern. As a grown man, Dixon imagined that he would be more comfortable living with the Indians, because he felt himself unfit for industrial urban capitalism.5

  4.1. MAYNARD DIXON, 1895, by Isabel Porter Collins

  Although Maynard grew to love nothing more than camping out alone for weeks, he was by no means a hardy or adventurous child. From his earliest years asthma attacks hounded him, foreshadowing the emphysema that would cripple him at the end of his life. He learned to prefer solitary, sedentary activity, which led to the discovery of his extraordinary talent. Somewhere around the age of five, he began to draw, and his draftsmanship was nothing short of amazing. In 1891 he or his parents sent some of his drawings to Frederic Remington, the premier illustrator of western themes, who responded that Dixon’s work was better than his own at that age. Decades later, Maynard would entertain his children by drawing, upon request, and from memory, anything they demanded—horses, Indians, trees, fences, faces, whole rodeos.

  Like Dorothea, he was an indifferent student. He dropped out of high school and then out of the California School of Design. But while at that art school he met a group of young artists who introduced him to San Francisco and formed his community for the rest of his life. They included Jimmy Swinnerton, Homer Davenport, Gottardo Piazzoni, and his particular chum, the Mexican Xavier “Marty” Martinez, just returned from studying art in Paris.6 Dixon benefited from an expanding market for illustrations of the Wild West and became an extremely successful illustrator by age twenty. Before long, he got a job as illustrator for the San Francisco Morning Call, and from this base his reputation spread. Soon he was illustrating the work of Jack London and other writers. Gaining in social confidence, he designed a brand for himself—he called it “thunderbird”—with which he marked all his work, and began dressing as a cowboy, replete with boots and a ten-gallon hat.

  Dixon’s social life in San Francisco’s bohemia swirled around wine and cheap food with other artists and writers at working-class dives, a variety of girlfriends, and morning-after hangovers. Marty Martinez took some of the group to Mexico, where Dixon discovered marijuana, to his delight.7 Compared with what he’d eaten and drunk in Fresno, the fare in San Francisco was a smorgasbord of world food—Chinese, Mexican, Italian. Coppa’s restaurant on Montgomery Street, an Italian fishermen’s and peddlers’ eatery, became this group’s hangout, in part because “Papa” Giuseppe Coppa would extend credit to the impecunious artists. They treated their girls with disrespect: when one of them brought along a new woman, the guys would take an under-table vote on her. (Apparently, writer Mary Austin got a negative vote and she wasn’t asked again.) A center oval table became reserved for them, and their boisterous presence attracted new customers—well-to-do art lovers, the “slummers,” also known as the Nob Hill crowd—who drove out the fishermen. Coppa’s bright red walls became literally papered with the overlapping paintings with which the artists paid for their meals. Eventually, in 1905, the artists painted a collective mural on all four walls. The canny Coppa sold as souvenirs the sketches and poems the artists scribbled on the menus and paper tablecloths.8

  Although most of these young artists made few sales, as the wealthy favored less adventurous work, Dixon’s illustration commissions continued and his earnings rose when he was appointed art director of the San Francisco Examiner Sunday Magazine in 1899. He was labeled the coming rival of Remington. One of Dixon’s early patrons became a father figure: Charles Lummis, editor of Land of Sunshine, a California booster publication. He supported Maynard in his break with the family expectation that he would enter ranching and politics. He also helped Maynard to overcome his childhood identity as physically delicate and to construct a manly identity in an occupation—art—with undertones of effeminacy.

  In 1900 Dixon, seeking wilderness to paint, found his spiritual home and his trademark subject: the Arizona/New Mexico desert. There, two years later, he would acquire another father figure—the famed John Lorenzo Hubbell, whose trading post at Ganado, Arizona, did so much to make Navajo and Hopi crafts into art commodities. Dixon addressed him as “Querido patrón.” Hubbell’s openness and feeling for art made his home/store a gathering place for artists and intellectuals fascinated with the southwest, and soon he was selling Dixon’s paintings, along with blankets and baskets. Before this trip Dixon had associated painting with the Beaux-Arts academic painting that dominated the San Francisco art scene, a style he detested. But he felt increasingly that drawing could not capture the spiritual quality of the desert, so he began to paint. When he returned to San Francisco, he and his friends determined to challenge the conservative artistic canon by establishing a competing organization, the California Society of Artists.9

  These dissident artists gravitated to a neighborhood—North Beach, and to a particular building—716 Montgomery Street, affectionately known as “the Monkey Block.” Dating from 1853, this massive brick and granite four-story building with a central courtyard, originally a lodging house, became an art colony—“a sort of aviary for the strange, nocturnal birds of the city’s artistic element”—that marked San Francisco forever. Writers began using it first—Mark Twain in the 1860s, and later Ambrose Bierce, Mary Austin, Ina Coolbrith, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Then painters discovered its spacious second- and third-floor windows.10 The studios they established became almost collective property, passed on from friend to friend. Dixon became a feature there, almost a totem of the building. A history of the building described him as “a lean, sardonic man with pendulous, thin mustaches, in cowboy boots and flopping hat. He seemed always to have been a child of the Block.”11 The city’s many chroniclers delighted in these memories. “You saw them . . . with canvases under their arms, wearing corduroy jackets, paint smeared . . . hurrying along swinging a demijohn of red wine in one hand, a hunk of unwrapped salami or a loaf of French bread in the other.”12

  A Monkey Block residence became, as one observer put it, “the equivalent of a membership card in the poor man’s Bohemian Club.”13 Signaling his increasing prominence, Dixon was soon invited to join the rich man’s Bohemian Club. The club had been established in 1872 by a group of journalists, artists, and writers who sought company in their irreverent western embrace of modernism. Its early members included Frank Norris, Ambrose Bierce, Jack London, Henry George, and John Muir. By the turn of the century the club increasingly attracted wealthy San Francisco–based businessmen.14 Taking control of the club, they bought a camp on the Russian River, now called Bohemian Grove, while keeping the “bohemians”—the artists and musicians—to entertain and to add to the cachet of the club. A rowdy western version of an elite men’s club, the Bohemians featured camping out, raucous pageantry, cross-dressing burlesque, heavy drinking, and bawdy, often homoerotic escapades. The stunts and elaborate rituals displayed—and still display—college fraternity taste. Nevertheless, the club gave artists direct connections with patrons, and Dixon got his first one-man show there in 1905. Though still relying on illustration for a living, he had begun by 1905 to sell oil paintings to prominent collectors. He was becoming “the darling of the San Francisco cultural circles.”15

  THE EARTHQUAKE OF 1906 destroyed this community—physically, economically, and emotionally. Most artists, museums, and private collectors lost the work of a lifetime. Dixon lost everything except a single armload of drawings. The disaster exiled San Franciscans with centrifugal force. It gave rise to artists’ colonies in Carmel, Marin County, Santa Rosa, and Berkeley. And yet, as if delivering a message, the Monkey Block stood. (Only a giant corporation could take it down: It was razed in 1959 and the Transamerica Pyramid, San Francisco’s tallest skyscraper, was erected in its place.)

  For the next six years, Dixon was part of the diaspora. As
Arnold Genthe would do later, he went to New York in 1907, stayed for five years, and quickly duplicated his San Francisco success as an illustrator. His years there were troubled, however, by an unhappy marriage, begun in 1905 in California, to Lillian West Tobey, also a San Francisco painter of significant talent.16 Lillian designed and sewed costumes for the theater, worked with metal and leather, and dressed beautifully, but her work and reputation have almost disappeared. Soon after marrying, she became depressed and irritable, began drinking too much, and suffered what was then called a nervous breakdown. Thinking to calm her, Maynard moved them to quieter Yonkers—a typical prescription at the time—which was more likely counterproductive than curative. Dixon was not a nurturing partner. He made several long trips back to the desert to paint, leaving Lillian alone, beginning almost immediately after their marriage, and he seems to have done so again in 1910, right after the birth of their daughter, who was named Constance for his mother.

  In New York Maynard dived into an intoxicating affair with playwright Sophie Treadwell, eventually the author of nearly forty plays, including the expressionist Machinal. Treadwell was also married, and a radical both socially and politically: a women’s rights advocate and a journalist who covered the Mexican Revolution. She may well have rejected monogamy ideologically, as Dixon did in practice. Drawn to talented and achieving women, he was besotted with Treadwell and composed poetry to and about her. When she finally ended their relationship in 1917, he wrote in his abbreviated autobiographical notes, “Sophie—real love—desperation . . .”17