Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Even Maynard warmed to Rivera. After completing the Stock Exchange mural, Rivera was reinvited to do the School of Fine Arts mural. In one part of it, he depicted himself and his assistants working on the mural—painting himself from behind, with his extra-large bottom hanging over a scaffold. To Dixon’s enjoyment, this gesture demonstrated Rivera’s own distaste for sycophants—it was just the type of joke Dixon might have made. In the long run, Rivera’s residency helped Maynard. It increased the local demand for murals and thus provided Dixon with more commissions. It brought into greater influence several new collectors and patrons allied with Bender—Gerstle and Pflueger—who were more open to new art than the old guard, such as Fleishhacker, Spreckels, Hearst, and de Young. These new patrons would help rescue several artists as the Depression deepened.57

  MEANWHILE, THE DEPRESSION hit Dorothea and Maynard hard. Maynard sold no paintings. Dorothea’s clientele shrank, and anxiety escalated their irritation and quarreling. Dorothea, aware that their best times occurred in the countryside, suggested a family escape—from the city, from the Depression—to the Southwest. Consie had lost her newspaper job in a Depression staff reduction, so John Collier, Jr., invited her to go along with him to Taos and helped her get work as a waitress and typist for Mabel Dodge Luhan. Consie’s upbeat letters induced Maynard and Dorothea to try Taos, where life was less expensive. Mabel Dodge Luhan, a wealthy heiress about Maynard’s age, had created a whirlpool of arty people around her, as husbands, lovers both male and female, and hangers-on; she had married Tony Luhan, from the Taos Pueblo, which attracted Maynard. She offered to lend him a studio from among her many properties. “Queen of the Southwest,” Dorothea sardonically labeled her.

  The Taos plan required investment of money and time. They had to buy a car, their first, and learn to drive it. They had to find a place to live, also accomplished through Mabel Dodge Luhan, who arranged for them to have an adobe house in Ranchos de Taos owned by one of the many who orbited around her, Joe Foster, a writer who had come to New Mexico in search of D. H. Lawrence. Then just as they set out for Taos, novice driver Maynard had a serious accident. In the Santa Cruz Mountains, the car skidded and flipped over. Dorothea and the children were unhurt but he suffered a broken jaw and badly sprained arm. After his brief hospitalization, Dorothea drove the rest of the way. Maynard had to spend his first two months in Taos recuperating, and during that period they spent most of their time as a family. Consie seemed happy in her job, with just the right distance from her family to ease her relations with Dorothea. The boys flourished. They bought six-year-old Dan a pony, but Maynard was frustrated that Dan did not seem to take to riding as naturally as Consie had—it was important to him that his sons become competent outdoorsmen.

  After Maynard recovered, socializing began, though it was often only Maynard who indulged. During their earlier trips to the Southwest, Dorothea had made many fine photographs, but now she photographed mainly her family, as she had to stay home with the boys, neither one of whom was in school. Maynard connected with artists who had settled there, many of whom shared Dodge Luhan’s and Georgia O’Keeffe’s primitivist view of the area as somehow outside modernity. He bonded with Tony Luhan and another Indian from the Taos Pueblo, Antonio Mirabal, whose portrait he had previously painted. Maynard and Dorothea both met the extravagantly costumed Dorothy Brett, an upper-class British artist, friend of the Bloomsbury group and of Frieda and D.H. Lawrence, who had settled in Taos in 1924.58 Maynard felt artistically stimulated; he marveled at the penitentes (“lugubrious walking corpses,” he wrote, echoing Daniel’s terror at the sight) and watched dances at the nearby pueblos. Predictably, he hated the rush of summer tourists, actually modest by today’s standards, and was “not much impressed with Santa Fe—too arty.”

  Every day, Dorothea drove Maynard to and from the studio Mabel had lent him. Yet even here Maynard felt the need to get farther away from his family. With his old friend Joe Sinel, a San Francisco industrial designer, he took a trip up the Chama River to Abiquiu, Coyote, and “red country”—an extraordinary expedition through a fifteen-hundred-foot-deep multicolored sandstone canyon. Once more, Dorothea and the boys stayed behind. Her housework and child care were arduous: Joe Foster’s house had turned out to be an adobe cabin with no running water or toilet; Maynard and the boys loved roughing it, but she did the work.

  They stayed in Taos seven or eight months. Maynard was always happier out of the city, and living without modern comforts did not bother him at all. He completed forty paintings, though few sold. But Dorothea did not bond with anyone in the Taos crowd. In San Francisco her life was filled with people day and night, and she had a handful of close friends, while here she was lonely.

  AFTERWARD DOROTHEA FREQUENTLY repeated a story about something that did not happen to her in Taos: Only later did she realize that she had come close to meeting the master photographer Paul Strand. She had first encountered his pictorialist work in Stieglitz’s gallery, then saw in the 1920s his abstract close-ups and powerful photographs of people on the streets. Strand did the latter surreptitiously, without the consent of his subjects. Attaching a false lens at right angles to his functioning lens, he could face away from his subjects so they did not know they were being photographed. In her own work, Lange would reject such practices as deceptive, but Strand’s images expanded for her the possibilities of portraiture, by capturing a broader and less polite range of expression in his subjects. In Taos in 1931, Strand was photographing rocks, plants, and other elements of nature, but he was increasingly attracted by social documentary. A New Yorker, he had joined the Photo League, a left-wing cooperative dedicated to making photography lessons and darkroom access widely available for little cost, and to encouraging socially relevant photography.

  As if Strand were a prophet come to reveal the future to someone not yet able to imagine it, Dorothea saw him as a mysterious figure. Someone drove by in a Ford every day at the same time, alone, and returned at the same time, and she assumed he was an artist—by which she meant painter. She did not try to introduce herself. She considered him, she said, “a serious man.” This impression reveals her restlessness and self-critical evaluation: she sensed that he was committed to his work, unlike her.59

  The feeling that she could not be “serious” signaled that she was already imagining a new photography she wanted to do, something more challenging, something transcendent in relation to what she had already done. She blamed herself for not doing it, denying that what held her back was lack of time. Self-censure was a regular Lange refrain, one that became more frequent, ironically, as her achievement grew. In describing her Taos period, this self-blaming reflected her reluctance to challenge being a wife. Thirty years later she understood that wifely condition more fully: “. . . that thing that Paul Strand was able to do, I wasn’t able to do. Women rarely can, unless they’re not living a woman’s life.” And she was living a woman’s life, of the only sort she knew.

  AS WINTER CAME, life in Taos grew harder. Their money was running out.60 Heavy snow made it hard to drive, so they moved into the hamlet of Taos itself, but they still had no running water, no toilet, no telephone, no heat except for a woodstove. Maynard was wearing three layers of clothes and two pair of gloves in order to paint. Then they were completely snowbound. The boys, now six and a half and three and a half, were restless, and keeping them entertained was a full-time occupation. Dorothea’s domestic labor expanded; she was not only cooking and cleaning but keeping the house warm, heating water to wash clothes, keeping the children occupied, shoveling snow, putting on and taking off hats, gloves, galoshes, wet clothes. But she reaffirmed her duty: “I could be of help to Maynard mostly by keeping everything smooth and being happy and making it an enjoyable time and taking care of the children.” There was no sign yet of a determination to relinquish that imperative. Her discontent remained an underground stream.

  Maynard did not sense her discontent. In his recollection of that 1931 Christmas we feel his
pleasure: “Stockings by fireplace; few presents; snug and warm; true Christmas feeling. Hospitality of our neighbors—Miss Kessel invites our boys.—Deer Dance—most ancient ceremony—impressive—sombre. Tony Mirabal in buckskin and buffalo robe. Kiva poles in starlight.”

  Dorothea began agitating to return to San Francisco. Like most Americans, she had assumed that in a year, or two at most, the economy would improve. Now she recognized that they had not escaped the Depression and would have to reenter it. Maynard resisted until it became too cold for him to paint regardless of how much clothing he wore. They left in January, while the snow was still deep, and trail-blazed the seventy-five-mile downhill road to Santa Fe, driving at the edge of steep canyons, Dorothea terrified but also eager to keep moving. After that, they took their time, driving a southern route through Arizona and Los Angeles. They enjoyed being back in warm country, and Maynard noted the boys “revel[ed] in grass and grapefruit.” But soon the sights were ominous: bindlestiffs on the road, in ragged coats, their unshaved faces making them look older than they probably were; many hitchhikers; whole families camped beside their cars, just off the road.61 As they drove into San Francisco, they saw little boys begging on the streets, some not much older than Dan, a previously unimaginable sight. What they saw, of course, were but the smallest wisps of smoke from the economic disaster, but they were plentiful enough that, as they approached home, their happiness to be there rested on a reservoir of anxiety.

  Part II

  DEPRESSION AND RENEWAL

  1932–1935

  WHITE ANGEL BREADLINE, SAN FRANCISCO, 1932

  SCENE 2

  In the spring of 1932 San Francisco portrait photographer Dorothea Lange looked down from her second-floor studio window and saw the Depression. It’s not that she had been oblivious for the previous three years—she could not have been, since her portrait business and her artist husband’s sales had suffered mightily. But for such a visual-minded person, the images from her window disturbed her. “The discrepancy between what I was working on . . . and what was going on up the street was more than I could assimilate.” Discrepancy was an understatement. Her walls held portraits of the Levi-Straus family, the Freudenthals, the Fleishhackers, the Haases, the de Youngs. The streets below displayed images of unemployed men loitering on corners or standing in breadlines, homeless men huddled around fires or hiding in their bedrolls. They were not only bums in ragged clothes and workingmen’s caps but also men in suits and fedoras. She was at the window on this particularly sunny day, making solar proofs of some new portraits. “You know, with those proofs while the image deepens and darkens you have a moment’s respite. So I looked out the window. . . .”1

  Luckily, Dorothea’s younger brother Martin was in town, himself broke and unemployed. She wanted to take her camera into the streets but she was unaccustomed to wandering the Depression city as a woman alone, “to jostling about in groups of tormented, depressed and angry men . . .”—not to mention bums—and she worried about damage to her camera.2 Martin Lange, although rarely purposeful or ambitious, provided just the right company now, being not only a man a but a big and cheerful one, the beloved “Unca’ Mucky” to the children. He was willing to walk with her for hours, occasionally carrying “Snappie,” her big, heavy Graflex, or her tripod.3 She worried not only about being hassled in the streets but also about photographing people who had not hired her to do it, who might not even want it. She sensed that these new subjects might be embarrassed or humiliated to be photographed in breadlines, no doubt because she herself saw it as stigmatizing. She could not hide what she was doing, because her camera was large and her setup took some minutes to accomplish. “It makes you very conspicuous,” she recalled later.4 She could not then have imagined spending the rest of her life as a “street photographer.”

  Accompanied by Martin, she noticed the White Angel soup kitchen. Somehow what she saw made her think, “I’d better make this happen.”5 So she took three shots; “then I got out of there.”6 No one in her immediate community thought much of the photographs. When she put a print on the wall of her studio, her clients either ignored it or said, “ ‘What are you going to do with this kind of thing?’ ”7

  6

  Leaving the Children, Leaving the Studio

  Dorothea Lange turned onto a new path in 1932, walking in step with her country. Acutely dissatisfied with her marriage and her studio, she sought to expand her photography, but did not dare give up her studio income. Americans were, in general, equally dissatisfied with President Hoover’s fundamentalist faith that the market would correct the Depression, but they also saw no way out of it.

  Within three years, Lange would close her studio permanently and become a documentary photographer. She would, in fact, re-create what documentary photography meant. She would leave her marriage, having fallen in love with an extraordinary man who was thrilled by the very ambition that caused her guilt and paralysis—a man who, as luck would have it, helped her find a new way to support her children. Her “luck” took place also on a grander scale, created by the whole country’s giant forward stride: President Roosevelt’s New Deal. It would offer her a wage, a photographic challenge, and a chance to feel part of a movement for social justice. Her new love, Paul Taylor, was a dynamic part of that movement, and their camaraderie ignited and fueled their personal chemistry.

  None of this happened easily or smoothly, and in 1932 Lange could not have predicted it; much of that year, she felt that change was impossible. It was as if her shoes had begun to rub and irritate, worsening until she had to take them off. The new shoes were to carry her far, enable her to sprint as never before. But what she gave up for this run was substantial, and painful.

  LANGE LATER RECALLED the Taos stay as “a good time for us as people, for the little boys, for me, and for Maynard.”1 This was a false memory, as she had chafed at being housebound and careerless. Neither did the Taos stay solidify her relationship with Maynard. Their return brought the beginning of the end of their marriage—not consciously, and by no means decisively, because Dorothea hung on for three more years.

  When they returned to San Francisco, the economic situation was much worse than when they had left. They found their friends “shocked and panicky.”2 The heart of the California economy had almost stopped beating. Agricultural revenue dropped from $750 million in 1929 to $317 million in 1932. Demand for California’s oil declined so sharply that the industry was producing 200,000 barrels a day over what it could sell. In the Sacramento area, the payroll of manufacturing industries shrank to one-third of its pre-Depression level. California unemployment surged to 28 percent. Building permits issued in 1933 represented just 11 percent of those issued in 1925. All this despite the fact that California suffered less than the rest of the country. Like many others, Lange came to understand that the Depression was unlikely to disappear soon without drastic government action.

  The market for art had evaporated. Galleries were closing, including the Galerie de Beaux Arts, Maynard’s main outlet. His friend Serge Sherbakov, during his one-man show at the Legion of Honor, was cleaning toilets as a state relief worker.3 Artists were trying to stay alive by selling directly to the public through outdoor art shows, setting up cooperative galleries, and bartering—one potter traded ceramics for four bushels of apples, an artist gave an oil painting to an obstetrician in return for the doctor’s attending his wife.4 Maynard sold few paintings and had trouble collecting what was owed him from previous sales. Of one hundred easel paintings he had made since the start of the Depression, he had sold twelve.5 “Work and worry . . . no sales—a dark period,” noted Maynard, adding “Kindliness of Jewish friends,” referring to purchases of his paintings—a comment suggesting his complicated mixture of need and resentment toward Jews and the rich.6

  Dorothea’s business also declined, despite her wealthy clientele. In 1930 she had earned $1,770; in 1932, she took in only $602. To photograph the Clausens, for which she charged fifty dollars, she went al
l the way to Humboldt County, more than two hundred miles to the north, paying her own expenses, something she would have done only for an extremely lucrative job previously. (Imogen’s son Rondal remembers Dorothea discussing how long she made that fifty dollars last.)7 The Clausens noticed her stress. When she arrived at their house, she asked to rest, then lay in bed smoking cigarettes for a long time before beginning work.

  Shortly after Dorothea and Maynard returned from Taos, a San Francisco lifestyle journalist produced a puff piece about Dorothea for the San Francisco News. It featured a large and attractive photograph of her with her camera, with some of Dixon’s drawings of their Taos life collaged around the photo. Dorothea looked “lithe, firm, tanned as a gypsy,” dressed in her “blue working jeans and beret,” Anna Sommer wrote, fixing Dorothea as a bohemian.8 At another time such an article—on the front page of the second section—would have produced a flurry of new jobs, a lovely welcome-home gift.

  The journalist drew from Dorothea some rather self-righteous—and in hindsight, dubious—pronouncements on wifely duty and successful motherhood. “In local bohemian circles the marriage of Dorothea Lange and Maynard Dixon, noted painter, stands as a shining exception to the proverbial ‘tug of war’ [that develops when] one artist marries another,” Sommer wrote. Since their marriage had lasted, Dorothea became thereby a domestic-relations expert. Asked how it was done, she replied, “Simple . . . an artist’s wife accepts the fact that she has to contend with many things that other wives do not. . . . As Maynard’s wife, it is my chief job to see that his life does not become too involved—that he has a clear field . . . he needs a certain amount of freedom . . . from the petty, personal things of life.” Dorothea was talking about how she thought she ought to behave. In an equally but inversely false claim, she said that she and Maynard lived together “on equal terms.” Her ambivalence was making her contradict herself. She knew that providing Maynard with “freedom” burdened her with a double working day, and the journalist knew it, too: “Returning at night to the house on Russian Hill she would shut the door on her work, get dinner and devote the evening to her children. . . . Her distinguished husband, it appeared, divided his evenings with the children and more work.”