Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Seems funny to me we got

  so much of everything,

  including good men with

  good bodies, and we can’t

  make a living. Its an

  unfair deal. I can’t figger what

  its all about

  She was writing found poetry.

  DURING THE SCHOOL years, she and Paul tried to return home daily, or after a few days away, whenever possible, so as to see their children frequently. Even so, Lange was responsible for all of California, an immense state, 770 miles long. For every hour of photographing, she spent several hours in a car—cars being the only way to get to small towns and rural areas while carrying heavy equipment. The freeways had not yet been built, so the roads were often slow and narrow; the cars were not air-conditioned and the scorching dust flew in through the open windows.

  The heat usually structured her daily schedule. She had to get out in the fields very early, because it was cooler then, because that’s when farmworkers started, and because of the light. “The hours to knock off are 10:30 to 3:30,” Lange said. But she wanted to show wilted plants, and if she waited until late afternoon, they would have perked up again.4 So she also tried to photograph the heat: “This here is a blast of light . . . This is a town and nobody is out, it’s too hot but this one little figure, and it shows the way he walks with his head and his hat down . . . touching that heat.”

  The photographers stayed in cheap auto courts where the windows usually had no screens to keep out mosquitoes, chiggers, and flies. They often did not sleep well. They used the telephone to stay in touch with home infrequently, because long-distance calls were expensive and they had to account for every call on their expense sheets. (The mail service was faster than it is today, however.) Russell Lee believed that being on the road cost him his first marriage.5 They sought motels that advertised “ ‘ice-cold running water’ ” and looked for bathrooms that could be transformed into darkrooms.6 Irene Delano said that being on the road was not so hard because they were young,7 but Dorothea wasn’t. She was forty when she set out, the oldest of the FSA group.

  She was chronically tired. She made mistakes because she was so tired at night: “I load up the films and transfer the exposed ones to the boxes at night. Last night made a slip and got the holders mixed.” There “weren’t any Saturdays and Sundays . . . nobody thought anything of working all day and traveling most of the night and working the next day. . . . You had to write up your notes at night . . . pack up your film . . . write letters to Roy . . . be at the next town to get a wire from him.”8 You had to keep track of which caption matched which exposure, but sometimes your days were so busy that you wrote the captions only weeks or months later, after the proof prints arrived back from Washington.9

  She had to develop new skills for work on the road. Some were physical and relational—carrying heavy equipment, working faster, communicating with potential subjects. Some were intellectual and artistic—finding means to represent both individuals and their social/economic/environmental situation in the same photographs.

  She got some respite at the ranch of a new friend. Taylor had connected with Sam Hamburg, an unusual Left-leaning grower who supported farmworkers, allowing them to camp on his land during strikes and providing food and water. After the federal camp project fizzled, he built his own decent housing for his workers. Even his children were not sure how he got away with what he did, particularly because he was a noncitizen immigrant Jew. The Hamburg place in Los Baños, northwest of Fresno, was the only place in the whole valley where Lange and Taylor could stay, welcomed and safe. A man with an outgoing, warm personality, Sam gave his friends nicknames: Paul was “doc,” Dorothea was “queenie.”10 The deepest bond became that between Dorothea and Sam, who made an instant affective connection. Within minutes of their introduction, “they were talking like soulmates,” his daughters recollected. The two shared an ability “to see the whole arc of things . . . talking in a language of visionaries.” (He dreamed of founding a cooperative cotton farm in Israel.)11 Dorothea made several portraits of him, and this is a connection that, I sense, could have become a romantic one under the right circumstances, though there is no evidence that it did. Sam’s radical thinking intensified her sympathy for farmworkers.

  She carried three different cameras: a Graflex that used film packs that could be exposed in rapid succession by pulling paper tabs, a Zeiss Juwell fitted to take twelve sheets of film at a time, and a Rolleiflex that used roll film with twelve exposures. The Juwell and Graflex produced negatives of 3.25 by 4.25 and 4 by 5, respectively, two to three times the size of the Rolleiflex negatives of 2.25 inches square. (She occasionally worked with a 35-mm camera later, for the sake of speed and because she was weaker and could not carry the heavy ones, but she often considered it a nuisance because you had to hold it up to your eye, making it hard to talk to people.) She wanted all three cameras loaded with film, ready to grab a fleeting shot. So she learned to take along an assistant when possible.

  Paul served as assistant when he could, but soon she recruited a paid one, Rondal Partridge, the teenage son of her best friend, Imogen Cunningham. She had known him since he was a year old. When Imogen and Roi divorced in 1934, the families became even closer. They celebrated every Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter jointly. Rondal, his twin, Padraic, and their older brother, Gryffyd, were like cousins to the Dixon and Taylor children, and Rondal was another son to Dorothea; she loved him, and he loved her, to the end of her life.12

  Rondal was already interested in photography, had already worked as Ansel Adams’s assistant, and went on to become a master photographer. She paid him one dollar a day, plus all expenses, which she took out of her allowance of four dollars; she was abstemious and he liked the romance of life on the road.13 They bought groceries instead of eating in cafés. At the auto courts where they spent nights, he frequently slept outside in his sleeping bag, preferring the cool to a mattress. He remembers being lulled to sleep by the roar and bang of the Southern Pacific. When they registered, the managers sometimes looked skeptically at this couple, the forty-year-old woman and twenty-year-old guy, and she once registered as “Dorothea Lange and fancy man.”14

  Rondal describes his job as “mainly driving, being enthusiastic, and accepting anything.”15 Driving was a constant, because she wanted to be free to look out the windows. She would nag him to slow down, which he hated, and ask for sudden stops when she saw something interesting. They would get out of the car, approach slowly, set up her tripod—although she also carried her Rolleiflex around her neck—and this activity often attracted children. They would beg to have their pictures taken, then run to tell their parents, and she would follow and “palaver,” as Rondal put it, with the adults.

  Like everyone who worked with her, he was awed by an interviewing technique that combined her natural charm with what she learned from Paul. She did not begin with “union” questions about the provision of water and toilets, or wages; these would alarm workers fearful of retaliation. She would inquire instead about the routes they traveled, how their cars held up, children’s ages. She might complain of the heat, ask for a drink of water, and then take a long time to drink it. She might be seized upon by the talkative ones, but she reminded herself to focus equally on those who withdrew, because, she said, “Sometimes in a hostile situation you stick around, because hostility itself is important.” In fact, Rondal recalled, she would not stop to photograph if she hadn’t the time for interviewing, often passing up promising sites if she knew she could not proceed at a leisurely pace.

  Then she would ask if she could “take their pictures” and they almost never refused. She would explain that she worked for President Roosevelt and that the photographs aimed to increase support for public aid and jobs. Most subjects understood perfectly, and many specifically asked her to send the photographs to the president. At first they would pose, but she would take so long—deliberately, I feel sure—walking around to calculate the right angl
e and distance, that they would go back to what they had been doing. She would move her setup several times, often ending up as close as three or four feet from her subjects. As Ron came to understand, “her presence was the most important thing” about her work. He considered her a magician with people.

  Every so often, she would return to the car and hurriedly write down what people had said. “She just locked it into her head and got it down in the right order,” always matching the quotation to the right subject, Ron recalled.

  A human being has a right to stand

  like a tree has a right to stand.

  ALWAYS A PORTRAIT PHOTOGRAPHER, Lange turned toward the poor the same eye, the same flattering angles and easy-to-read composition she had previously directed toward the rich. Her most famous pictures—a tiny proportion of her photography—were composed by massing simple forms—triangles, ovals—and fell comfortably inside conventional, vernacular, Christian visual culture. Many of her photographs, by contrast, display considerably more complexity of composition.16 But not even the simpler photographs reduce tensions or smooth contradictions. (See plates 6–11.) Her attraction to human personality and complexity did not subside when her subjects were poor. Where she once catered to the rich by traveling to their homes to photograph, now she went to lean-tos and shacks.

  The point of this photography, however, was to show people in their contexts, unlike the void backgrounds of her studio portraiture. She produced, of course, the establishing shots, showing the scale of the agriculture. She used the rhythm of the plowed ruts and ridges and the rows of plants to increase visually the size of the fields. She included tiny farmworkers, mules, and tractors in these field shots not only as a gauge by which to measure size but also to show the impersonality of these enterprises where workers never met the boss and did not know many of their coworkers. Her disapproval of this agricultural system is unmistakable when you hold these photographs next to the romantic, even saccharine images she occasionally made of family farmers.

  12.1. MELOLAND, IMPERIAL VALLEY, 1939

  12.2. FILIPINOS CUTTING LETTUCE, SALINAS, CALIFORNIA, 1935

  The farmworkers’ context had two sites, fields and camps, corresponding to labor and living conditions. She photographed systematically from one crop to another: 177 photographs of cotton, 171 of peas, 54 of carrots, 32 of potatoes, 41 of lettuce—and these are underestimates.17 Much of the work she illustrated was stoop labor. People are bent over picking cotton, pulling carrots, digging potatoes, thinning lettuce, cutting cabbage and cauliflower. Their bodies are part of the earth, their faces hidden from view by their focus on the ground and the hats they wear to ward off some of the sun and heat. She had become an ethnographer: “. . . the hat is more than a covering against sun and wind. It is a badge of service . . . linking past and present.”18 In many of these photographs, the composition represents, symbolically as well as empirically, the relation of the worker to the earth—for example, in the upside-down U’s of the pickers in the endless rows of plants silhouetted against the immense sky. In images of carrying, workers drag cotton sacks, or lug bushel baskets, wooden crates, armloads of tied carrots; their bodies lean off center to manage the weight.

  Then the visual narrative she constructed takes us to the moment at which the class conflict becomes most visible: weighing the produce. The workers want the highest possible weight for what they’ve picked, the managers the lowest. All parties are watching each other and the scale intensely. Sometimes the workers as well as the weigh masters are writing—the former on much-used scraps of paper, the latter in account books.

  Other photographs call into question who is working. Lange documented children and old people doing heavy work. Her captions label some subjects as grandmothers, lest there be any ambiguity about their ages. (See plate 20.)These pictures produced furious letters of denial, as when one county probation officer claimed that Lange’s photograph—of a child with a cotton sack waiting to go to work at 7:00 A.M.—could not have been made during the school term.19

  The farmworkers’ biggest problem was not overwork but underwork, lack of waged hours. Growers preferred four hundred pickers working for five days to one hundred working for twenty days. So Lange documented people waiting hours and days for work to begin. She photographed mechanization and other forms of rationalization, seeking visual metaphors for the economic integration big growers were introducing—for example, packing vegetables and fruits in the fields rather than carting them to packing houses or sheds. Her attitude toward these changes was critical. In the Soviet Union at this time, photographers and artists were making glorified images of heroic peasants, female as well as male, driving tractors and combines. In Lange’s pictures, the machines that dwarf the drivers—tractors—are part of the problem, not the solution. This dismal orientation clashed with the more positive approach the FSA wanted, since, after all, the machines had been paid for by the Department of Agriculture.20

  12.3. COACHELLA VALLEY, CALIFORNIA, 1937

  12.4. SOUTH TEXAS, 1936

  Many California photographs focused on farmworkers’ appalling living conditions. Lange squeezed in as much detail as possible, considering her images to be political ammunition: “This camp site belongs to one of the large growers of Kern Co. who is strongly opposed to the Camp program. For this reason these negatives will be valuable here,” she wrote Stryker.21 Frequently, one needs a magnifying glass to extract fully the information out of her photographs, and it would require pages to write down everything that Lange made visible. (See figures 9.4 and 9.6.) The photographs show the garbage next to the lean-tos where people sleep, the cast-off materials of which the thin and fragile shelters were constructed, the metal tubs used for bathing and cooking, the dangerous methods of providing heat, the families in the open, with no shelter at all. The best grower-owned camps featured one-room wooden cabins, which never included plumbing or electricity, typically had no windows, and often contained a woodstove. When it rained, the ground was puddled and muddy, and sometimes the entire camp would be flooded. She photographed privies—typically crooked wooden shacks with doors that didn’t close—often very near the water supply. One ironic photograph shows a privy on the outskirts of Bakersfield, constructed of gas station signs, one of which reads, OF ITS KIND . . . UNSURPASSED ALWAYS.

  Lange showed with particular detail the migrant women’s endless struggle to create cleanliness and order: wash hanging on a line, a washtub leaning against the outside of the hut, bedding draped on the roof to air out, a garbage dump neatly dug at a fifty-yard distance. They were defending not just civility but civilization itself. (See plates 12 and 13.) They did this work not only as individuals and families but as a larger community of travelers. Mutual aid spread not only within encampments but also among groups traveling in tandem. They shared tools, utensils, water, food, sociability. In the Imperial Valley in June 1935, Lange copied this down:

  Hooverville 2 yrs, wintered here,

  If they’s ever been a cross word

  I haven’t heard it. When one has

  they all has. I can’t explain—

  Each and every one has sympathy

  for the other cause they’ve all been

  the same.

  The children worried her particularly, and put her anxiety and guilt about her own children in a new perspective. Most of the migrant children were not in school: some were rejected because their health was too poor; Mexican children were discouraged from attending or even formally excluded. Those who were in school frequently arrived hungry and sometimes seriously malnourished. “Children dressed in rags, their hands incrusted [sic] with dirt, complexions pasty white, their teeth quite rotted. . . .” Lange recorded in her field notes. Polluted water, taken from irrigation ditches and wells next to privies, sickened children especially, and there was typhoid and meningitis.22 Pellagra was not uncommon, nor was it due to ignorance: One mother in Kern County told Lange, “ ‘I’m not on the diet agin it, cause I have to eat what I can g
et.’ ” Field-working children were lucky to have an eight-hour workday—in beets, the hours were frequently ten to fifteen hours a day.

  Lange’s photographs began to lure reporters into the great agricultural valleys, and their words echoed her pictures: “loathsome,” “unimaginable filth,” “festering sores.”23 But images of squalor alone are too wretched and too inanimate—or the people in them too distant—to create the outrage and the “do something” response she and Taylor wanted. Lange learned that images of individuals did that more effectively, and that the individuals could not be too beaten down. For example, many viewers react with particular distress to her image of a toddler covered with flies. It is as if the visual desecration of a child’s satiny skin, shot close up, works as a symbol more forcefully than group misery. Lange returned to her portrait specialty because it was what she loved most and did best, but also because she sensed its persuasive power. Her portraits performed political work that the more impersonal shots of terrible living conditions could not. Her portraits showed people who were somehow better than their conditions. They were accustomed to better: “ ‘I never lived this way before . . . But I do now and I can’t help it.’ ” And they deserved better. As one farmworker told her, “ ‘Average man wants to live a little bit decent.’ ” And sometimes they were angry. “ ‘We are not here because we like it. This place is the result of conditions.’ ”

  12.5. IMPERIAL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA. 1935

  LANGE’S APPROACH WAS not only a method but also a democratic way of seeing. Like all documentary photographers of her time, she shared the popular-front aesthetic known as social realism. Celebrating the “common man,” she represented the people who worked the land as model citizens. The most wretched sharecroppers and homeless migrants were salt-of-the-earth citizens. They worked hard, deserved respect, and merited the rights and power of a citizen in a democracy. Moreover, these common folk had complexity and gravitas equal to that of the rich and the educated. In Arthur Miller’s words of this era, “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were.”24