Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  The educational process flowed through discussions and critiques of particular photographs, meetings with scholars and with those writing the WPA guides to individual states,42 and Stryker’s lectures. Carl Mydans remembered being assigned to go south and “ ‘do cotton.’ . . . I put my camera together and drew my film and got an itinerary and I came in to say to Roy that I was on my way. He greeted me goodbye, wished me luck, and then . . . said, ‘By the way, what do you know about cotton?’ . . . I said ‘Not very much.’ ” Stryker told his secretary to cancel Mydans’s travel reservations and talked to him about cotton through both lunch and dinner and well into the night—“. . . about cotton as an agricultural product, cotton as a commercial product, the history of cotton in the South, what cotton did to the politics and the history of the United States, and how it affected areas outside the U.S.A.”43 City-bred Arthur Rothstein was assigned to do ranching country, but not before “he had lived cattle with me, because it was in my blood,” Stryker said.44 Only Walker Evans insisted that Stryker never influenced his work in any way. Located in California, Lange received less of Stryker’s tutelage, but she had Taylor’s.

  Stryker gave his photographers “shooting scripts”—“My God, I used to drive you mad with those outlines,” he recalled—and they were at first strictly agricultural. For example,

  I. Production of foods . . .

  a. Packaging and processing of above

  b. Picking, hauling, sorting, preparing, drying, canning, packaging, loading for shipping

  c. Field operations—planting; cultivation; spraying

  d. Dramatic pictures of fields, show “pattern” of the country; get feeling of the productive earth, boundless acres.

  e. Warehouses filled with food, raw and processed, cans, boxes, bags, etc. . . .45

  This changed after a meeting with sociologist Robert Lynd in 1936, who urged them to investigate sociological questions. The meeting produced a research protocol, such as might be prepared for a dissertation proposal. Lynd suggested they ask, “Where can people meet? . . . Well-to-do . . .? Poor . . .?” He advised them to look at garages, filling stations, stores, lodges, cafés, country clubs, railroad and bus stations, and the streets. “Do women have as many meeting places as men?” What is the “relationship between time and the job?” and “How many people do you know?”46

  Stryker’s scripts were not commands, however. His grace and genius lay in educating but then trusting his photographers. They soon learned not to fill specific orders if good pictures would not result. Whatever Stryker’s directions, John Collier recalled, they all photographed 90 percent “between the lines.”47 They wrote Stryker long letters, and occasionally telephoned, to explain new tacks they were taking. As Stryker explained, the photographer is “the man on the ground in the end, and we used his judgment because all those photographers I got to know I could trust their judgment.”48 As Lange put it, they used the camera in exploratory way and did not function as illustrators of something they already knew.49

  Despite the academic-style homework, FSA taste in photography was deliberately vernacular and anti-elitist. Stryker called himself “an illiterate humanist.”50 This might have created problems for a portrait photographer to the arty elite like Lange, but she adapted quickly, having already learned to photograph outdoors without access to controlled lighting and neutral backgrounds. Besides, Stryker’s condemnation of arty photographs was mainly a political tactic. He banned the word composition from the shop, and he called photographs he liked “swell,” but this folksiness was aimed at heading off right-wing charges of elitism. At the same time, he sought art-establishment support against conservatives who labeled his project an FDR propaganda agency. He tried and failed to get a Museum of Modern Art exhibit for FSA photography. (Walker Evans did get a one-man exhibit there, through his friend and promoter Lincoln Kirstein, but this event brought little benefit to the Stryker family, because Evans would not credit the FSA, even on the photographs he made on its nickel.)51

  Gradually, FSA photography began to attract critical notice. In 1936, U.S. Camera, an influential photography magazine, published two FSA pictures, by Lange and Rothstein, as well as exhibiting them in its annual salon in Rockefeller Center.52 Several dozen exhibits, including those at the prestigious College Art Association convention and several big-city art museums, featured FSA photographs.53

  Individual FSA photographers were not usually identified in publications or exhibits. In this respect, the FSA photography threw its weight against modernism, against the historical trajectory of art toward focus on an individual artist. This attempt to make individual auteurs disappear also arose from the anti-elitist orientation of the project and its participation, despite its odd location in the Department of Agriculture, in the widespread public democratic arts activity of the New Deal. Collective attribution of authorship seemed appropriate in photography because of its association with mechanical reproduction—although the similarity among FSA photographs by different people is not always greater than the similarity in New Deal painted images. Despite the camaraderie of the photographers, however, they chafed at being deprived of individual recognition, and every one of them who continued to work in photography moved toward building individual bodies of work. It was as if photography with a collective auteur could not be art.

  There also remained the debate about whether documentary photography could be art. There had been numerous historical challenges to the museums and galleries that decided what was art, and in the 1930s documentary photography was forcing its way in. Rarified definitions of art, and the distinctions between art and persuasion, were losing traction. The “straight” photography of Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams was being acclaimed—and if a photograph of mountains could be art, why not a photograph of agricultural fields or Hopi Indians? Even Stieglitz had photographed some plebeian subjects. Inversely, Romana Javitz, curator of photography for the New York Public Library, was arguing that every work of art is a document, an idea commonplace today among cultural-studies critics but one that was strange at the time to all but historians and archivists.54

  The ambiguous position of documentary photography, however, created political problems for Stryker. He could not justify his budget if the funds went to creating art, and he could not justify the documentary function if the pictures were not factually correct. The expectation that a camera, and its operator, were reproducing objective reality led to recurrent heckling of photographers who arranged their subjects, as a painter would arrange a still life, chose unexpected angles and foci, cropped photographs, or corrected mistakes. Tugwell dismissed the issue, saying that whether the photographs were art is “incidental to our purpose,”55 but Stryker knew the matter was not so simple. To repel political attacks, he had to ban “artifice” in the making of photographs, although artifice is central to art, both as a word and as a cultural phenomenon. And he had to make the images free to popular publications, a practice that detracted from their art status in an economy that already featured a luxury art market. He had to require his photographers to produce many overtly propagandistic and evidentiary images—of FSA houses, cabins, settlements, and fields, of the pressure cookers FSA gave out and their grateful recipients. And he ultimately fired Walker Evans because he would not make these. Much as he appreciated fine photography, and was often awed by what his photographers could produce at their best, Stryker was quite prepared to serve his employers at the expense of photographic integrity or artistic sensibility.

  STRYKER’S TEACHERLY IMPULSES and fatherly style helped the staff to bond—not as a democratic unit but as a family, with Stryker as father. He was a good father, praising and admonishing his children, protecting them from outside attack, fighting for their wages and the ever-newer equipment they demanded, protecting their freedom of artistic and political expression when he could, reining them in when necessary to keep the FSA afloat. When the budget shrank, Stryker tried to find work for his kids, not only within the g
overnment but in the new photography magazines.56

  Stryker was a quick study in the bureaucratic fight for survival. He insisted that users of his photographs credit the FSA, standing up to a major news and photo agency and to other government agencies to establish this principle—a policy that also built the esprit and solidarity of his photographers.57 He repeatedly fended off budget cuts and other threats to his operation. He described one in his usual comic but completely serious fashion: “Had a bad attack of budgetitis a couple of days ago. Fischer [his immediate boss] had a terrible fever, short breath. Hope to hell it doesn’t become chronic next year.”58 As his project gained recognition, he would threaten to move it to another part of the administration when his superiors tried to cut his budget.59 “I have never had to back down on a fight”—an extraordinary record for a federal employee, which he explained by adding that he also knew when to keep his mouth shut. He survived losing his protector, Rexford Tugwell, who had “held an umbrella over him.”60 His staff thought he loved to have the phone ring with a “fight on the other end of the line.” He denied this but took pride in his street-fighting skills. “I have been cornered a couple of times and . . . I showed my fangs.”61 But he added, proudly, “I never kicked the guy below me, never!”62

  The bonds among the staff were those of a social movement. Interviewed in the 1960s, the photographers all remembered the FSA as the best period of their lives.63 As John Collier, Jr., put it, “It was not a job. It was a devotion. . . .”64 When Lange said the group was held together by loyalty, John Vachon responded, “Loyalty! It was practically a cult. . . .”65 Dorothea said it was like joining an order.66 But it was not a hermitic order—they floated in a bigger sea. “All Washington was in a state of wonderful excitement,” Lange recalled on one of her visits there.67 Ben Shahn described it as feeling “completely in harmony with the times . . . a total commitment. . . . It was pure.”68

  The photographers also loved the FSA work because it developed their photographic proficiency. As Lange put it, “. . . you had people who expected something of you behind you, and you had to develop. . . . You have to produce, not that anyone was going to be rough on you if you didn’t, but it was a real obligation.” It helped that Stryker praised them. Even his criticism was charitable: “He would say, so and so is tired, I can see it in the pictures . . . staying out too long, working too hard.”69

  These comments came decades later, when nostalgia had shaped memory. They never again had such fun with their work, so naturally they remembered it as more perfect than it was. You can hear them in their interviews, minimizing and explaining away grievances and conflict. It is allegedly a healthy practice to remember positive more vividly than negative experience, but not permissible for the historian.

  Several photographers, notably Shahn and Evans, experienced Stryker’s fathering as dictatorial and authoritarian. Stryker had a gruff style, bawling out his photographers in an avuncular voice disguised as humorous. When Delano wired Stryker asking for a day off to get married, Stryker replied, “No.” This was a joke.70 He was often sarcastic. He wrote to Rothstein, “Why not cut this out of the letter and paste it on your hat so that I won’t have to write it in every letter?”71 To Lee, he wrote, “If TX is no better than you make it out, I don’t know why the hell you want to stay down there. Will you please get the hell into the next state.”72 Stryker was not afraid to make “hard” decisions, as in firing Carter and Jung.

  More disturbingly coldhearted was Stryker’s refusal to hire Lewis Hine, who was, more than any other individual, the father of American photography of the poor. His extraordinary contribution to early twentieth-century progressive reform would be hard to overestimate, yet by 1938, at age sixty-four, he was broke, unemployed, and on relief. His son was hospitalized after an accident and his wife’s untreatable asthma was getting worse. Hine wrote Stryker repeatedly asking for work at the FSA, a logical place to turn since the whole project rested on Hine’s legacy, but Stryker always refused.73

  Photographers were angriest about how Stryker killed photographs—sometimes because they had objectionable subject matter, as when Rothstein photographed in a whorehouse or Shahn captured police brutality on film, but mostly because Stryker considered them of poor quality. At first he would clip the corners of negatives he judged weak or flawed, then later punched holes in them; some have estimated—wildly, I think—that he killed as many as 100,000.74 Stryker defended this triage as essential because making prints was the lab’s most time-consuming work, but the photographers failed to understand why he could not put the inferior negatives aside without ruining them. Gordon Parks considered Stryker’s hole punching “barbaric,” “because there is no way of telling, no way, what photograph would come alive when.”75 It took years of pressure from the photographers to get him to quit this practice,76 and the fact that Parks, who didn’t arrive until 1942, complained suggests that Stryker may never have quit entirely (although it is possible that Parks knew about the practice from seeing old negatives).

  In these gripes we can hear artists’ desire for control over their work. Despite their social-movement consciousness, they also wanted to control their photography. Most of them would have preferred to do their own developing and printing, and Lange in particular tried to wangle a way to do this. She complained bitterly about not being able to see prints soon after they were made, so that she lost the opportunity to appraise what she had done and to make improvements immediately. She hated the decontextualization of her work, notably the fact that her captions were never published or exhibited. It galled them all to have their work purged; Stryker’s censorship alienated their labor, they felt, and stole from them some of the satisfaction of working for social justice.

  The very nature of the photography project discriminated against women. Many kinds of obligations made it difficult for women to be on the road for months at a time. Men could have wives taking care of homes and children. Men could also have wives, or their functional equivalent, as assistants on the road. It was such standard procedure for wives and girlfriends to travel as assistants to the male photographers that Mrs. Vachon once said in surprise to Lange, “You mean you didn’t have a writer with you?”77 Jack Delano’s wife Irene, Edwin Rosskam’s wife Louise, and Russell Lee’s wife Jean, traveled with and assisted their husbands; Grace Falke Tugwell worked in the FSA as an assistant to her husband. The female partners helped with captioning, while Lange was always both photographer and caption writer; Louise Rosskam, for example, would stand next to Ed, taking notes as he photographed.78 All the wives interviewed said “we” when referring to the photography project.79 Lange took along an assistant when her husband was not with her on the road, but this was a photographic helper, not an assistant who would wash clothes, write captions, send letters to relatives, shop for food, and make sandwiches. Of the photographers, only Lange had children, only Lange was disabled; yet when Paul could not accompany her, she paid for her help from her own wages.

  Only four female photographers ever worked for the FSA, most in later years, and most for very short times: in addition to Lange, there was Marion Post Wolcott, hired in 1938; Marjory Collins, hired in 1942; and Esther Bubley, hired in 1942. Louise Rosskam, a first-class photographer, was never on the payroll, although Stryker “gathered in” and distributed many of her photographs. Most of Bubley’s work in the FSA file was done on her own as she tried to convince Stryker to take her on as a photographer.80 In other words, the FSA got good photography from several women without having to pay them wages. Marion Post Wolcott, a rich and beautiful young woman of twenty-eight, was treated in a teasing and protective manner. She traveled alone and, as a result, encountered overt discrimination: local officials and regional FSA staff, especially in the South, would refuse to do the advance work she needed, such as helping her figure out where to go.81 Stryker and the other photographers joked about these problems. She “suffered from being a very attractive girl,” Stryker said, and Rosskam commented that he
could recognize Marion’s pictures “because the men are always leering at the camera.”82 Stryker called Lange, by contrast, a “matriarch,” showing his lack of nonclichéd categories by which to understand and describe an assertive woman. (He also called other women around the office matriarchs, such as secretary Helen Wool.)83 Despite her skill, despite her geographical distance from Washington, Lange could not shed the burden of womanness that structured both work and home relationships, as would become clear over the next years. Yet despite the considerable burdens, Lange was embarking on the great adventure of her life.

  12

  On the Road: California

  From 1935 to 1941, Lange was almost constantly on the road, photographing agricultural labor. These were the years when she established without ambiguity that documentary photography could be art and that she was an artist.

  She did this by fusing documentary photography with rural sociology, becoming a visual sociologist. She had a private tutor—Paul Taylor, a master teacher who trained a large handful of rigorous and empathic social scientists.1 He also made her an historian of rural labor and inspired her to another achievement—creating visual narrative. She began in California, where farming was heavily industrialized, then traveled to the southern plains, where remaining smallholders and tenant farmers were facing ruin, and from there into the southeastern states, where agriculture remained most primitive.2

  She also invented a way to put words and images together by quoting her photographic subjects. When she copied their words, she often arranged them on the pages of her notebook like free verse.3