Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  The federal arts programs exerted a multidirectional force on artists. They allowed many talented people to make art instead of sewing mattresses or building bridges. At the same time, government employment mitigated the disdain with which established artists often regarded the less skilled, the amateurs and beginners. The government also brought art to new populations. Poet and Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish said that New Deal arts projects worked “a sort of cultural revolution in America. They brought the American audience and the American artist face to face. . . .”37 Because the arts projects were often collaborative, they fostered camaraderie, mutual influence, and collective hopes for long-term public support for the arts. In other words, government support for artists was not only a response to agitation for relief but also a cause of activism, nudging recipients to a more democratic perspective on art. This mood surrounded Lange.

  However, with public money came constraints, which Lange would soon experience. The ban on Red propaganda was not the only censorship. In most of the country—New York was occasionally an exception—there was to be no abstract art, no Surrealism, no collage, no Expressionism.38 These strictures both promoted accessibility and soothed conservative politicians. Ironically, these constraints were identical to those in the fascist countries and the Soviet Union, where the Stalin government tolerated only patriotic, socialist-realist art. Still, along with constraints came freedoms, because government arts projects temporarily reduced the power of the market to force artists to produce only what was immediately salable.

  WHILE ARTISTS PAINTED murals, Lange roamed San Francisco’s poor and public areas, now as comfortable as she had been on the Lower East Side. If, as she believed, a camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera, she was teaching herself to see anew. She was learning about society through her camera.

  The converse is also true: Her photographic vigor and depth gained from her exploration of the social. White Angel Breadline was not a fluke. From 1933 there is a warm close-up of a woman on a food distribution line; from 1934, lyrical, dark images of homeless men sleeping and the unemployed leaning dejectedly against a wall.39 In 1934, she made one of her most emotional images, a man sitting on a box, head bowed into his hands, next to a perfect symbol of the Depression—an upside-down wheelbarrow. (See plate 4.) She quickly mastered natural light, although she had no light meter (first marketed in 1931; a camera that could synchronize flash and exposure—without which a photographer working alone would be unable to use a flash—was first produced in Germany in 1935). She was finding a new vocabulary of imagery by following her fascination with gesture and body language. Her studio photographs often portrayed temperament and mood through her subjects’ bodies, their faces turned aside or in shadow. Now many of her best street photographs showed only bodies. When asked, decades later, to choose the few photographs that best represented her work, she always included one of these early street pictures.

  She began to get closer to her new subjects. She made a series of photographs of a homeless man’s shaving ritual outside Union Station. He is clean and charming and resourceful in setting up his outdoor toilette. She lugged two cameras, a Rolleiflex using two-and-a-quarter-by-two-and-a-quarter-inch film, and her studio Graflex with glass plates. She hoped to rely on the lighter Rolleiflex in her street photography, but she still found its smaller size frustrating. If she could have managed it, she said, she would have taken an eight-by-ten camera. (Later, when she had a car and an assistant, she preferred to carry three cameras.)

  She participated in one fleeting attempt at a collective project. In October 1933 a group of photographers came together to produce activist photography in an organized fashion. Calling themselves the PhotoCommontors (there is no record of what they meant by this term, but I translate it as photographic commentators), they included Lange, Consuelo Kanaga, Willard Van Dyke, Otto Hagel and Hansel Mieth, and Maynard Dixon, who occasionally did some photography. They organized an exhibit of socially relevant photography, but the show closed after just one day, due to American Legion pressure.40

  AS LANGE WAS tuning in to politics, the intensity of California activism increased exponentially. The turmoil had a spiraling relation to the New Deal: grassroots social movements were responding not only to Depression hardship but also to increased aspirations produced by Roosevelt and his administration, even as these movements sharply challenged the Roosevelt administration. The New Deal benefited California little in comparison to other parts of the country, largely because California remained so agricultural. Through their congressmen and senators, California’s big growers, as well as southern plantation owners, got farmworkers excluded from most New Deal legislation, such as the National Labor Relations Act, which protected workers’ rights to unionize in industry but not in agriculture. Outside of emergency relief, federal programs in California mainly had the effect of shoring up employers, while doing nothing to get them to share federal aid with workers or the unemployed.

  Two statewide political campaigns encouraged political participation. In 1934 Dr. Francis Townsend of Los Angeles led a campaign for federal old-age pensions of two hundred dollars a month for retired people; the plan would benefit everyone, because mandatory retirement would open jobs for younger people, and the requirement that recipients had to spend the entire two hundred dollars each month would stimulate the economy. Townsend’s tens of millions of followers constituted a major force in bringing about passage of the Social Security Act. At the same time, the novelist Upton Sinclair inspired the End Poverty in California (EPIC) plan, similar in impetus but more complex and realistic. EPIC would have cut taxes for the poor and middle class and raised them for the rich, acquired unused farms and factories and put the unemployed to work in them, and offered pensions of fifty dollars a month for the elderly, the disabled, and widows with children. Sinclair came close to being elected governor in 1934, supported by most of Dorothea’s friends but defeated by a major corporate offensive and one of the most negative, dirtiest campaigns in American history up until that time. Still, Sinclair’s near miss added to the sense of possibility that imbued California’s atmosphere.

  Affected by all this, Lange grew bolder yet, although in these years she still thought that this impulse was something she had to “get out of her system.” Instead of wandering she headed for the increasingly frequent and noisy organized protests. Large demonstrations became regular events for her. On May Day 1933, she set herself a specific challenge: “. . . go down there . . . photograph this thing . . . see if I can just grab a hunk of lightning.”41 She set herself a time limit—she would spend no more than twenty-four hours, including time for developing and printing. She had to photograph in a driving rain. The demonstrators demanded freedom for labor leader Tom Mooney, in prison since 1916 for allegedly blowing up a high-voltage tower in support of a streetcar workers’ strike. In a campaign reminiscent of that for Sacco and Vanzetti, notables throughout the world—Samuel Gompers, George Bernard Shaw, John Dewey, and Carl Sandburg, to name a very few—called for freeing Mooney. Most left-to-liberal San Franciscans believed he had been framed. (In 1920, a San Francisco police officer had confessed to the mayor that he had helped frame Mooney, but California’s Republican governors refused Mooney a pardon.) Lange went to San Quentin to photograph him, portraying him polemically behind the bars of his cell, and one of these photographs appeared on a large poster published by the Tom Mooney Defense Committee.42

  Did she catch the “hunk of lightning” she was after? Not yet. One photograph has been reproduced often, a police officer in front of demonstrators, his arms across his somewhat thick midriff, looking back disdainfully at the extremely well-dressed crowd carrying signs.43 She made other pejorative images of policemen, often making fun of their corpulence; this was a left-wing cliché, not particularly thoughtful or illuminating.

  Fifty-six of the photographs that Lange took on May Day 1934 have survived. None was of large crowds; she turned back to what she knew, por
traits, or tried to make group portraits. But she could not individualize the demonstrators as she did her studio clients. The images at rallies sometimes exhibited striking, modernist composition: a man speaking at microphones, shot from below, almost silhouetted against a light sky; a speaker’s head shown next to a star-shaped microphone almost as big as his head; a female speaker whose head is bisected by a mike. When we compare these to her thousands of pictures of the rural poor, they seem both less revealing and less flattering. The faces can appear grimacing, strident. Even when the crowd is cheering, the faces seem histrionic, unattractive. Lange’s sympathy for the crowd appears mainly in images of listeners who are quiet and thoughtful, and they include black and Chinese men, children and teenagers. Sometimes she lets us see the signs they carry: DEMAND CASH RELIEF, DOWN WITH SALES TAX, TAX THE RICH FOR UNEMPLOYMENT INSURANCE. These are experimental, uncertain photographs, as she knew.

  Soon a mass strike affected Lange deeply, at first by providing a photo opportunity and then by acquainting her with workers’ grievances and California’s corporate power structure. San Francisco was a port city, dominated by shipping. Even during the Depression, its eighty-two docks handled 250 vessels a day.44 Beginning in the late 1880s, shipowners’ associations had established hiring halls as a device for breaking union power among longshoremen. Every day longshoremen had to show up (“shape up”) in the very early morning, in hopes they would be picked for a day’s work. The picking was arbitrary and unregulated, so bribery and favoritism ruled. Longshoremen sometimes worked twenty-four to thirty-six hours consecutively, then went days or weeks without work. They had hoped that the New Deal’s National Recovery Act, which set minimum standards for various industries, would help them, but it excluded the waterfront as well as agriculture. So the longshoremen struck, asking for nondiscriminatory hiring under union control, safer working conditions, and a raise from seventy-five cents to one dollar an hour, with $1.50 for overtime hours, as a way of spreading the work and checking overlong hours.

  The silence of the docks—an eight-mile stretch—seemed to still the whole city. Soon the silence spread several thousand miles, as longshoremen closed down all West Coast ports from Seattle to San Diego from May through July 1934. When the companies hired strikebreakers, truck drivers and warehousemen supported the dockworkers by refusing to move freight to or from the docks. By July, the companies had convinced the mayor to send police to protect strikebreakers. Violence erupted, and on July 5, “Bloody Thursday,” two strikers were killed and hundreds injured. The governor then sent the National Guard to occupy the waterfront. The strikers responded by calling a general strike of all San Francisco’s workers. For a short time, the strike was so effective that it created a dual-power situation—that is, the unions’ strike committee assumed some of the powers of the state, and many citizens recognized it as legitimate authority. The strike committee decided which service and emergency vehicles could move about. Union permits authorized certain businesses and institutions to remain open, in return for honoring union coupons given out to picketers entitling them to food, meals, and other necessities. There was a holiday mood: few streetcars or cars were in the streets, so pedestrians walked and crossed at will; the parks were crowded. The city was on vacation.

  Strike opponents built hysteria by charging that Reds were taking over, and leaked the fabricated story that farmworkers were planning to strike in support of the dockers. Although there was no such rural-urban solidarity at the bottom, there was at the top, as growers joined San Francisco capitalists in organizing armed vigilante committees to attack strike supporters and intimidate the public.45 The general strike petered out, and the dock strike went to arbitration, resulting in substantial union victory. The longshoremen got ninety-five cents an hour and $1.40 for overtime hours, as well as joint union/employer control of the hiring halls, with the union selecting the job dispatcher, who had the final word.

  The strike strengthened San Francisco’s progressives, and Dorothea’s arts community was 100 percent pro-union. Maynard and Dorothea drove and walked around the waterfront, he with sketch pad and she with cameras.46 The down-and-out, despondent men in his paintings were replaced now by dogged picketers, sidewalk orators, and strikers whispering plans, beating scabs, and struggling with cops. But Lange’s photographs of the strike are inert and marginal to the events. The dockers she photographed could have been anywhere anytime. Much of the action was so fast-moving and so violent that slow-moving Lange could not or would not get close. This was the territory of the new breed of adventurous photojournalists. She would never be able to make photographs of people in action that rivaled her photographs of people in contemplation. By now, her physical limitations were embedded in her photographic style, which was slow, contemplative, conversing rather than shouting, quiet rather than loud. Other limitations may be inherent in still photography. Chanting and yelling often render individual faces as distorted; historian Nicholas Natanson wrote (of another photographer), “an angry camera becomes a demeaning camera.”47

  The relative weakness of these activism photographs may also prefigure a political characteristic of Lange’s documentary photography that would become apparent in the next years: sympathetic to progressive causes, Lange was nevertheless uncomfortable with social conflict or organized activism. Drawn to the inner complexity of individuals and the discipline of rendering it visible, she was also politically an individualist. Enraged by social injustice and admiring resistance to it, she conceived of resistance and the heroic primarily in individual terms. Without yet knowing each other, she and Paul Taylor, who would become her second husband and life partner, had a similar reaction to the longshore strike—supportive of the strikers’ demands but eager for a settlement negotiated by impartial outsiders.

  At the same time, the strike showed Lange something that would be reinforced by Taylor in later years: that prevention of conflict required alleviating the extreme inequality that was increasingly dividing Californians.

  THERE WAS SOME family time in the midst of all this, but it was fragmented. Early in the summer of 1933, the Dixons all traveled to Utah. The boys were boarded out on weekdays with a Mormon family in Toquerville—it was as if Maynard and Dorothea were growing accustomed to being together without the kids, even when there was no pressing need to send them away. They told themselves once again that being without them would help to revive their intimacy.

  On weekends, the parents picked up the boys and they camped in a grove of cottonwoods in Zion National Park, a short walk from the river that cut through the canyon. The boys loved every bit of these weekends—hiking, swimming, fetching wood, cooking out, sleeping under the stars, learning bits of campcraft from their dad, watching him paint. (Maynard and the boys would return there in 1939, four years after the divorce—one last trip with dad.) Maynard painted even at night, fascinated by moonlight. Dan recalls being awakened one night by Maynard, who hissed, “Don’t move,” because a dozen or so rattlesnakes surrounded them, drawn to the campfire by which Maynard was painting. “We lay there, unmoving, heads covered, until the sun came up.” (John Dixon suspects that over the years Dan’s memory swelled the number of rattlers.)48 Dorothea and Maynard visited the Boulder Dam construction site, where Dorothea’s brother Martin had found construction work.49 Dorothea made only a few photographs. Natural beauty no longer called out to her to be photographed.

  The trip may have served its purpose—because thanks to Maynard’s earnings at Boulder Dam, in early 1934 they rented a house again, at 2515 Gough Street at Vallejo, a fine Victorian house in the Cow Hollow district, a few blocks north of Lafayette Park, and brought the boys home. They were overjoyed. John recalled the family gathering in the evenings and listening to music on an old-fashioned Victrola with a crank. To Beethoven’s “Turkish March,” the boys would “prance and cavort around the room in our pajamas.”50 Now the Dixons economized differently: Dorothea gave up her studio and made the second floor of the house into a work space. Sh
e was trying to save her marriage and she thought Maynard couldn’t survive without his separate studio, while she could. Later she would be somewhat critical of this and a series of other decisions like it—critical not because she had been suppressing her own work drive but because she thought her sacrifices had not been good for Maynard. “Perhaps the reason that I was never able to give Maynard an uncomfortable time, which he should have had, at some junctures, was that I never felt courageous enough. . . . I wasn’t brave enough.”51

  Lack of bravery was not one of Lange’s qualities. Her self-criticism indicates, rather, how hard she was on herself, and others, and what marriage meant to a woman at the time. Few women of the time would have felt anything but dread about a marital separation, let alone divorce, particularly when two children were involved. The problem for her was not just the financial and physical burden of single motherhood. It was also the stigma of divorce that prevailed at this time, a stigma that would have extended to the children. It was also guilt, a violation of her sense of virtue and responsibility. Then there was the fear of being an unmarried woman. Being Maynard Dixon’s partner was part of the condition of her adulthood and her social standing. As her street photography developed, she became more aware of her ambition, and this made the fear worse, because being ambitious felt unwomanly. Being married confirmed her womanliness—her lovability. Thus, ironically, a professional, economically self-sufficient woman might experience a particularly intense reluctance to become unmarried.

  Consciously or not, she feared becoming her mother. Joan’s story could have been reassuring: She had found good jobs and had remarried well, to a pleasant man with money. But Dorothea’s emotional memory of her parents’ separation was that of an adolescent—a memory of desertion.