Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  The muted reception of An American Exodus proved harder for Paul than for Dorothea. As is often the case for artists, the process provided enough pleasure for her. Dorothea knew that she had advanced a new genre. Her characterization of what they had done—“on the way to true documentary technique,” she wrote to Stryker—is all about development.29 Taylor, his eye on policy, saw the book’s lack of notice as one more failure—along with his attempts to get decent housing for migrant farmworkers, Social Security benefits for farmworkers, or agricultural cooperatives; in the future, he would fail to stop the theft of water by the big growers. A few years later, they both understood that the book’s rapid disappearance was a sign not only of the New Deal’s decline but, more specifically, of the defeat of the FSA’s goal—a democratic agricultural policy.

  17

  Dorothea and Roy

  From 1935 through 1941, Lange’s relationship with Roy Stryker was as intense as any excepting those with her family. Two strong personalities, they loved and respected each other but frequently clashed. Historians of the project, along with its staff and intimates, apportion the blame differently.

  To Roy Stryker and his supporters, Lange was a superb photographer, but came with a high maintenance cost. She often demanded special treatment. She tried several times to go over Stryker’s head when she couldn’t get her way with him. She treated the office staff so peremptorily that some of them dreaded her appearance in Washington. Her technical skills were by no means the equal of her mesmerizing vision; her negatives were often defective and, worse, she denied the problems and resisted questions intended to help her solve them. She promoted herself, egged on by an interfering husband who believed she could do no wrong.

  To Lange’s defenders, Stryker’s insistence on centralized control over all photographic activity and distribution made no sense given the politics and problems of the West. Lange worked harder than any other FSA photographer. Her photography contributed disproportionately to the influence of the project, but she did not get the deserved recognition, remaining a virtual unknown (outside of the photographic community) up until her death. Stryker resisted and may have even resented her ideas for deepening the photographic critique of injustice.

  To this author, the charges leveled against her seem accurate, but her assertiveness was misunderstood, often due to sex discrimination, and not only regarding her salary. In a double bind, she was stereotyped as a sentimental woman but also blamed for not behaving like a woman should. Much of the relationship would have been better had she been around the FSA office more. Yet she herself expressed no bitterness, not at the time, not even later. She knew that what she gained from this job far outweighed her aggravation.

  Still, her four off-and-on years working for Stryker displayed the ups and downs of a clumsy love affair. Filled with arguments about schedule, reimbursement, assignments, and proposals, their letters ripple with hurts, frustrations, and affection, thinly disguised on both sides—by Stryker’s banter and Lange’s flirtation. Their relationship was neither sexual nor romantic, but its intensity was nevertheless palpable. Both were passionate in their commitments and their mutual admiration. Besides, Stryker was her entrance ticket to the most exciting gig imaginable for a documentary photographer.

  CONFLICTS THAT HAD nothing to do with Lange surrounded the FSA photography project. Stryker fought life-or-death struggles to defend the project, against both anti–New Deal congressmen and his Department of Agriculture superiors. Then there was the normal office stress: layoffs, hirings, supply shortages, urgent requests, high-pressure darkroom work, and the herculean task, which grew ever larger, of filing photographs with a system that allowed them to be found again. Only the office staff could grasp the whole array of problems, because all the photographers were on the road most of the time. No one, however, was as removed as Lange, who visited the Washington office only five brief times while on the payroll.1 She asked to be brought to Washington more, but Stryker did not accommodate her.

  Had Dorothea not been connected to Taylor, whose expertise created his own agendas, had she not been so accustomed to being her own boss, and had she been socialized into the culture of the Washington FSA office, she would no doubt have dealt with Stryker differently—as an employee. Instead, their fervent mutual commitment to the work created clashes. These skirmishes never eroded their mutual appreciation. Their many long letters make it clear how much they esteemed each other. They also communicated through photographs. Stryker remembered his elation whenever a box of film came in from one of his field photographers, particularly Lange.

  Conflicts caused by distance began almost immediately. In her first letter to Stryker, she asked for money for a darkroom and tried to set her own schedule and itinerary for travel. Stryker responded negatively to both.2 He experienced her requests as presumptuous from the beginning, and these requests never let up. But she had good reasons for many of them, and another professional in her position might have been equally demanding, if perhaps more tactful.

  Consider her grievances about control of photographs: It was difficult, if not impossible, to see what she produced, to learn from her mistakes, if she could not see prints promptly, and so she repeatedly asked to develop her own film and make one set of prints before sending the negatives on. Ansel Adams, not directly involved but speaking for several of the FSA photographers, pleaded with Stryker to change his policy, but Stryker continued to insist that all prints be made and all negatives stored in Washington.3 So Lange had to wait weeks, sometimes months, to see prints, delays caused by bottlenecks in the office. She sent negative numbers to Stryker to request copies, but she could not be sure the numbers were right, so she either had to rely on his judgement—“choose the best of these,” she instructed—or try to describe what she thought the image corresponding with a negative number should be.4

  Sometimes Lange’s mail to Washington got lost, usually in the office. Once Stryker sent her a batch of prints to be captioned, but she had already done that work, hours and hours of it, and sent the captions with the negatives. Occasionally a negative precious to Lange could never be found in Washington.5 Publishers asked her for photographs, but she had to tell them to wait for prints from Washington. She sometimes proposed using the same negatives for multiple purposes—a magazine, an exhibit, a government report—but Stryker vetoed that because each party usually insisted on a unique photograph.6 When the editor of an important academic press asked to use some of her photographs, she dutifully told him to contact Stryker; when he did that, Stryker sent mostly photographs by others.7 Lacking ownership of her own work was personally frustrating. “I have nothing at all to show for my 3 years of government work in the way of prints,” she complained, exaggeratedly, to Roy.8 She knew her mastery was growing but couldn’t document it.

  She was often squeezed between the San Francisco and Washington FSA offices, for those in San Francisco were no happier than she was with Washington’s control over pictures made in the western region. When Frederick Soule, head of information for the FSA’s California region, arranged to go with Dorothea to cover a cotton strike, she felt it necessary to reassure Stryker that she would “go through all the necessary motions of working with him. . . . But I won’t let it get to the place where he writes my program.”9 To Stryker’s consternation, the regional office requested at one point to hire its own photographer; and his resistance only intensified when he discovered that the photographer in question was Mary Jeanette Edwards, Willard Van Dyke’s girlfriend and Lange’s former assistant.10

  Lange missed out on much headquarters camaraderie. As she missed Stryker’s briefings, so she missed debriefing and critique sessions.11 As the staff expanded and contracted because of budgetary changes, she was not there to welcome newcomers and say good-bye to those leaving. Despite the flux, the photographers bonded tightly when they intersected. They sometimes paired up and traveled together—Evans and Shahn, Rothstein and Lee, Rosskam and Delano, for example—an opportunity L
ange did not have, although she extended hospitality and the use of her darkroom to any photographer who came to California.

  The Lange-Stryker relationship was constructed primarily through correspondence, and her peremptory and superefficient style, a voice common to overstressed women trying to be all things, evoked resentment. She wrote to one of the secretaries, “Enclosed a list of things I need. Please push it through with no delay, all you can, Yours, Lange.” Multiply that by the many things she requested—a developing tank, developing chemicals, lenses, flashgun, paper, an assistant, contribution to home darkroom expenses, reimbursement for local purchases, permission to keep negatives, getting proof prints quicker, paying Ansel Adams to print for her, a raise to $2,600—and irritation grew. They perceived her as a diva.12 In face-to-face discussions, she would have been able to make her requests more softly, to listen to and sympathize with budget problems, to charm her coworkers, and Stryker might have been better able to explain his constraints. Her efforts at a light tone could not disguise her intensity: “Miss Slackman said in her letter that you were making the prints for me. Please mister that idea is no good. This show is the most important photographic show we have. . . . I couldn’t afford to show prints, unsigned, which I have not even seen.” Enthusiastic and hard-driving, she proposed photographic subjects more often than any other photographer, and began to do so almost immediately after being hired. “We have a chance to score and I’m anxious to make use of it,” she wrote Stryker.13

  She did not accept defeat easily, so she found it hard to respect bureaucratic hierarchy. She sent pictures out occasionally without authorization. When she was laid off in October 1936, she went over Stryker’s head to write the FSA’s director of information, M. E. Gilfond, “There is a job . . . which should be done right away. I need the time and the authorization from you to do it . . . a democratic experience of unusual social interest and national significance.” (Gilfond, of course, sent this letter over to Stryker.) She sent another suggestion to Walter Packard (who sent the letter to Grace Falke Tugwell, who sent it to Gilfond, who sent it to Stryker).14 These were not only the aggressive and ill-considered moves of someone unaccustomed to bureaucratic channels, but the impatience of someone accustomed to being an entrepreneur, without a boss. Lange apologized and promised not to do this again. But she could not stop making suggestions, even though aware of her possible insubordination: “Is this all out of my province? Excuse,” she scribbled on the margin of a letter to Stryker packed with ideas for projects. Yet she executed boring assignments without a murmur of complaint because, as she put it, it was the American public that set her these chores—in her mind, they were like military service.15 “Have a date with a farmer late this afternoon . . . to photograph spreading of grasshopper bait”—and this was by no means unusual.16 She put up with being graded on report cards (on which her ratings were by no means stellar)17 and holdups in getting her wages and travel expenses.

  She was self-promoting, but not inordinately so. She sent Stryker a copy of a request from Edward Filene, the Boston department store owner, philanthropist, and New Deal supporter, who wanted a Lange photograph for his desk. (Who wouldn’t show her boss something like that?) She nagged Stryker repeatedly about a raise and once again went over his head, arguing for the raise by telling Gilfond she had an outside job offer.18 She was galled that less skilled male photographers made more money than she did. She let Stryker know about the many direct requests she received for pictures. But she made no demands to be recognized by name in the many publications that printed her work. And she was by no means as self-promoting as Walker Evans, who refused to do assignments that did not advance his art and reputation.

  A double standard appears in Stryker’s dealings with Walker Evans and Lange. Stryker cherished talking with Evans, admired his personal elegance, and thought his photography extraordinary beautiful. But Evans could not work in a bureaucracy. As one historian put it, “Evans’ way was to disappear for months at a time, keep no clear records of where he had been or was going, and finally to reappear with a small number of the finest photographs ever taken.”19 In a passive-aggressive manner, he would not argue with Stryker; he simply did not do his assignments, refusing altogether to write captions. Stryker nagged him constantly about his low productivity.20 Other FSA photographers resented Evans’s bigger paycheck despite this lower productivity and refusal of assignments that they executed obediently. Ultimately, Stryker found Evans’s arrogance insupportable. “I had grown up considerably,” Stryker said, implying that his infatuation with Evans had been immature; “He treated Arthur [Rothstein] very snottily, very nasty to him, and Arthur . . . you see, he wasn’t his kind”—a reference to Evans’s anti-Semitism.21 Even Ben Shahn, Evans’s close friend, recognized his snobbery: When Evans was broke, he went to his sister to borrow money; when Shahn was broke, he got a job drawing pots and pans and bicycles for department store ads, and when Evans heard about this, he “looked upon me disdainfully,” Shahn recalled.22

  Lange’s interactive mode, by contrast, was direct. She argued and pestered, while Evans just ignored his boss. But she never refused an assignment.

  Grievances about equipment also rankled. At headquarters, numerous cameras, lenses, even the newly invented light meters were shared by the photographers. Excluded from this pool of equipment, Lange sometimes made specific requests—for a Goerz Dagor III short-focal-length lens, a Schneider wide-angle lens, and other devices—which she either did not get or did not get quickly. She was resentful when she learned that Walker Evans got an expensive new lens for his camera.23 Lange could not buy her own supplies of paper, chemicals, et cetera, but had to ask Washington to buy and send them to her, which created delays that other photographers did not experience. And she sometimes complained about the quality of what she got: the paper had defective emulsion; the developer was inferior. If she ran out of something while traveling, her only alternative was to buy materials at her own expense—she could not be reimbursed. She had difficulties getting her payroll status straight, problems that would have been more easily solved had she been in Washington.24

  Stryker recognized that some of Lange’s requests were legitimate and tried to accommodate her. After first assuming that Taylor could get her continuing access to a university darkroom, he then agreed to budget twenty-five dollars a month for the expenses of a darkroom in her house, to cover water and electricity, insurance on her cameras, a small fraction of the rent, and a bit for depreciation. Once he sent her a personal check for some extra-large paper for which she could not be reimbursed.25 He put up with her reluctance to shift technology: In late 1938, she was still using large-plate film, resisting his requests to get her camera refitted for three-and-a-quarter- by four-and-a-quarter-inch film, making it hard to get supplies for her. He bit his tongue in letters to Lange even more than he did with his male photographers, whom he sometimes bawled out roundly, albeit usually with a bit of humor.

  Complaints from Washington about the clarity of her film are more difficult to evaluate. The Washington staff charged that her negatives sometimes arrived streaked, muddy, gray, stained, grainy, or any combination of these. Lange believed that they were damaged by the heat and humidity. Stryker responded that other photographers working under similar conditions did not have that problem.26 Ansel Adams, who did some developing for Lange when she was on the road, supported her explanation. He said he could smell the marshes and the mildew when he opened the film, “all fogged up with humidity and mold. . . . Films will take heat but they won’t take humidity.” A master of photographic technology, Adams called Lange “an excellent craftsman . . . a profound respect for her work.”27 The tension worsened when lab workers complained that Lange blamed them for her poor negatives. (Yet when Adams’s assistant Seema Weatherwax ruined some of Lange’s negatives, she reported that Dorothea was understanding and reassuring.)28 No one can adjudicate this dispute now. Lange may well have been erratic, turning out both excellent and flawed wo
rk. In her studio photography, she could filter out whatever was less than excellent. In many ways, she was a perfectionist. Her tremendous volume of photographs resulted from long hours of work, not quickness. Stryker criticized her for making too many exposures of the same image and instructed her at least to weed them out before sending them in (something she could have done more easily if she had been allowed to make her own prints).29 “One thing is certain,” Stryker wrote Russell Lee in 1939 about an impending Lange visit, “she cannot work in the laboratory. If she does, I shall have to hire a whole new laboratory force.”30

  TO SOME OF the FSA staff, Lange seemed larger than life; she took up a great deal of the air and space when she was around, and seemed to command that people defer to her. But some of this reaction would have been different had she been male. Jonathan Garst wrote Stryker about her, “. . . . dealing with fighting cocks, race horses, and lady artists, you will have to make arrangements that they win once in a while.”31 The shift in the gender of the metaphors, from cocks through racehorses to ladies, speaks eloquently of their mixed feelings about Lange: egotistic, powerful, high-strung. Even her virtue intimidated the men. Rosskam remarked that she was a “saint . . . [who] over-awed me a little bit,” because of her passion for helping the needy.32