Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  With all this happening just outside her door, Lange felt her OWI work to be trivial. “I was working on the wrong thing. . . . In this war booming world . . . the vast upheavals of peoples, and the radical and profound changes . . . I had to go in the country and do apricot and prunes and do simple living under the grape arbors for the Spanish.”17

  She wanted to be at the heart of world events. In another life, would she have been attracted by photojournalism, even battle photography? Probably not, because that would have required giving up some of her core technique and turning to faster cameras, faster film, and fleeting glimpses. For Fortune, Adams and Lange proposed to document twenty-four hours in the life of shipyard workers (although their photography was actually a composite of many days’ work), and she soon realized that this was at the heart of world events. These workers were servicemen and women just like those at Anzio or Guam.

  20.2. OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, 1942

  The shipyard workers Lange photographed are positively heroic. She saw their pride in the work. She made some classic “Rosie the Riveter” photographs; now the culture shared her taste for powerful, even tough female figures, as the defense industries’ need for labor stimulated propaganda lauding women’s strength, stamina, and patriotism. Fortune published her pithy captions, unlike the FSA or OWI, and she could comment on the diversity and strange juxtapositions created by the war: “Son of an Oklahoma Indian chief, now a Kaiser machinist.” A Chinese woman “hasn’t missed a day’s work in two years.” An elderly Okie woman “has a son in France, works as a common laborer.”18

  Never one to avoid contradictions, however, Lange complicated the story of the “good war.”19 For the new workers, prosperity and difficulty coexisted. Workers now had money to spend. Local merchants prospered, especially bar owners and landlords. Despite discrimination, blacks found Richmond and Oakland far better than Texas or Arkansas, and none wanted to leave afterward. As to women defense workers, “Hitler got us out of the kitchen,” said one of them.20 Benefiting from male-level wages and working conditions, working-class women had more spending power, and this, along with the experience of living without husbands, made women less deferential and tractable. Class markers faded as working-class women bought stylish clothes.

  20.3. RICHMOND, CALIFORNIA, 1942

  20.4. OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA, 1942

  But these hardworking patriots lived in barracks on the mud flats next to the Bay. Families reeled, pushed off balance by missing men, round-the-clock shift work, lack of privacy, lack of housekeeping resources, and women doing the “double day”—paid work for one shift, unpaid housework for another shift. All this made children anxious and, with schools operating on shifts, disruptive. Overloaded sewers backed up and paved streets cracked under heavy traffic. A small polio epidemic broke out in 1943.21

  The photographs signal her mixed feelings. She worried about leisure time spent shopping rather than conversing, singing, or building things. “Can life be ‘abundant’ without being ‘good’?” she asked. She captured with exquisite sensitivity the personal tensions arising from the radical disruption of family life and family balance of power. (See plate 36.) Couples argue and friends bicker.22 Like her photograph of the plantation owner and his croppers, this “argument in a trailer court” photograph made visual composition represent social relations. She fretted about anomie among the tens of thousands of workers pulled abruptly out of their communities. “The New Californians, they have no roots, but they take over,” she wrote.23 “Oakland. It was a HOME TOWN, once.” “NO ROOTS NO ROOTS . . . the new and raw frontier—its barrenness its meanness its homelessness its blight.” Lange was a worrier. Just as her need for control arose from personal anxiety, so this anxious vision derived as much from her and Paul’s romance with small-town community as from the defense workers’ own concerns. She captioned several pictures of workers leaving a plant, “Notice how these people are entirely unrelated to each other. This is the story of these times and the shipyard.”24 But this is an overreaction. To me, the people in this famous photograph look tired and eager to get home but not particularly alienated from one another. As in the 1920s she had absorbed Maynard’s mourning for the loss of wilderness, as in the 1930s she had absorbed Paul’s mourning for lost family farming, now in the 1940s she mourned the loss of the more intimate, homogeneous Bay Area she loved so much. She may have projected these concerns onto the defense workers.

  20.5. RICHMOND, CALIFORNIA, 1942

  Returning to the city streets, a subject she had not touched for almost a decade, Lange developed a new photographic exercise, a method that practically invited projecting her feelings onto subjects: She stood on the street without a camera, watched passersby, and speculated about their relationships and feelings. “A young couple having a quarrel, a grudge kind of a quarrel. He’s ready to talk it over but she won’t.” “I think her hands are in fists in those pockets.” “Hostile reaction to hatred. The good thing about it is that she stands up to it, which I like about it.” These projections could be far-fetched, and faintly similar to Bourke-White’s captions, in which she expressed what she thought her subjects meant. But Lange never published her projections; for her they were rehearsals for deepening the photographs themselves.

  Moreover, she intended her photographs to raise questions, not provide answers. Drawn to images that transgressed gender and race codes, she sometimes made slyly humorous photographs. A blonde with a stylish pageboy is a mail carrier—with a flower tucked into her post-office cap. A well-dressed young white woman with perfectly coifed hair and a black man in work clothes and a railroad cap emerge from the same market, carrying loaded grocery bags.25 Shopping is no longer exclusively women’s work. A woman, a black man, a white man, all in hard hats, window-shop at a Richmond department store. At an Oakland newsstand, men in business suits browse next to men in overalls with lunch pails.26 Several dozen men sleep in an all-night movie house.27 One photograph conveys the absolute absurdity of a Kaiser auto dealer who elevated automobiles on his roof, as icons for worship.

  TWO PHOTOGRAPHERS COULD hardly be more different than Lange and Ansel Adams.28 They would drive to Richmond in Ansel’s car, and Christina Page, who was again assisting, recalled that Dorothea kept saying, “Don’t drive so fast.” Dorothea liked to go ten miles an hour so she wouldn’t miss a photo op, while Adams was interested in distance views. Dorothea kept pushing in his car lighter to light her cigarette and it refused to heat up. He pushed it gently once and it popped out red-hot. Chris and Dorothea made eye contact, recognizing this as Ansel’s rapport with the inanimate: all machines worked perfectly for him, while Dorothea never felt the master of her equipment. His station wagon was loaded with equipment and it took him quite some time to unload and set it up; he was accustomed to photographing things that did not move. Dorothea carried only a Rolleiflex, an extra film bag, and a notebook, and began shooting the minute she was out of the car, losing herself in the crowd immediately. “She had a peculiar facility,” Chris remembered, “for just melting away and for not seeming to be photographing at the same time that she was sticking a camera in somebody’s face.” As Dorothea put it, “I have this gray coat that I put on and I just disappear. . . .”29 Ansel waited for the right light before photographing, for light was in some ways the subject as well as the means of his pictures; Dorothea would photograph anytime there was enough light to make an exposure. While Adams captured “the grandiose aspects of a great shipyard,” she got “the intricate aspects of workers’ lives.”30 Dismayed at how she continually ventured beyond Fortune’s assignment, he nevertheless appreciated her ability to cut through red tape and “was glad to go along on her coattails.”31 They had one thing in common: every day, as soon as they returned, both went straight down to their darkrooms to see what they had got, a freedom Lange had had to do without for years.

  Adams and Lange quarreled all their lives. Rondal Partridge thought they were like feuding stand-up comics or the bickering partners on cop s
hows. Both were a bit intolerant of others’ approaches to photography.32 On matters of politics, the disagreements were fundamental. Lange could be very judgmental and Ansel provoked her, sometimes mischievously, by asserting his imperviousness to matters of social justice. She once responded, “Are you still worshipping the same Gods of Beauty and Truth?”33 His devotion to the Sierras communicated an outdoorsy quality, which led to his friends’ surprise when they became aware of his high standard of living and social connections. He had a knack for creating alliances with the very rich, such as Albert Bender and arts patron David McAlpin, a banker member of the Rockefeller family and the Museum of Modern Art board. In a moment of Imogen-like sharpness, Dorothea asked him, when she first saw the spectacular lot he bought in Carmel, “Do you feel you deserve it?”34 Her competitiveness often showed particularly vividly in her relationship with Ansel. After Ansel described a plush party he’d attended in New York, she said to him, “You really like rich people, don’t you?’ ” Adams understood perfectly: “What she meant was that I gravitated towards luxury. There was something to that. . . .” By contrast, he found her taste unnecessarily austere.35

  Adams entirely misunderstood Lange’s politics and background. He once described her as coming from a ghetto or near-ghetto background. It was her social commitments that most alienated him. He told an interviewer that “. . . all the people she knew were . . . very party line. . . .” He was unsure whether she “leaned to Leninism or Trotskyism . . .” but knew that she had “a very strong dedication to the party ideal . . . like an orthodox priest, you know, orthodoxy.” Backing down a bit, he acknowledged that she was not “an actual member of the Commie Party,” but her sympathies were socialistic, always favoring the “underdog. The underprivileged. The breadline people, which is no personal criticism of the people. . . . But also there are a lot of people getting welfare for the privilege of loafing, and that just drives me nuts.”36 Adams experienced the Left as unpatriotic: “I am so goddam mad over what people from the left tier think America is. Stinks, social and otherwise, are a poor excuse and imitation of the real beauty and power of the land and the real people inhabiting it.”37 Adams liked his emotions and his photographs unmixed, critic Sally Stein points out; he did not like irony or conflicting desires.38 When Rondal Partridge made a series of photographs of Yosemite in the 1960s, contrasting the park’s grandeur to the automobile and commercial inroads that threatened it, Adams disapproved. Lange, like Partridge, found rich material precisely in such contradictory stories.

  Given these differences, it is striking that Adams’s slurs against Lange coexisted—or alternated—with appreciation and respect. Adams deeply respected, championed, and promoted her photography.39 He was one of the first to publish her work—as an example in one of his textbooks. He defended her against FSA accusations of shoddy technique. He tried to persuade Stryker to let her make and keep prints in California. He promoted her: His biographer Mary Street Alinder found that he mentioned “her name at every opportunity in print as well as in person.” He brought her work to the attention of Beaumont Newhall, a scholar and patron of photography also in the Rockefeller and Museum of Modern Art sphere. He and his assistants did darkroom work for her. Despite railing against social-justice advocacy, he registered Lange’s total commitment to exploring the possibilities of visual communication.

  A SIGN THAT the New Deal was dead, its beloved community scattered, was that Paul could no longer regularly travel with Dorothea. With gas and tires rationed, neither of them traveled as much, but he took occasional trips to Washington, and while gone he still wrote love letters. His memories put her by his side, he wrote from the train, “but I would prefer it if the upper berth were more crowded.” He sent droll greetings to the children—“Tell Dan to bathe Blazes [their dog], and John to read Stuhldreyer’s letter after the Wis-Yale game”—and he reported on family work that Dorothea had assigned him. On a trip to New York, he saw a lot of her mother, whose second husband had recently died. One day, Joan and her sister Minette met him in Princeton “and had a big day of it.” He reported having worked out a financial plan with his daughter Kathy, mediating between her desires and Dorothea’s controlling directives. He would give Kathy seven hundred dollars for her last year at Swarthmore (“I added $100 ‘because it was the last year.’ Is that OK?”), plus something unspecified when school ended, while she tried to get a “theatre job,” plus half the cost of her trip west and a twenty-dollar gift.40

  The letters also testify to what Lange had taught him. In Washington, friends took him to breakfast in Rock Creek Park—“open fireplace and leaves on the ground, and floating from the trees like snow in the wind, and drifting downstream, thick on the surface of Rock Creek.” Another time, he wrote, “The sunlight has that rich golden tinge, and you are perhaps hoeing in the garden, and sprinkling the lawn.”41

  Part V

  INDEPENDENT PHOTOGRAPHER

  1945–1965

  LANGE-TAYLOR FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH

  SCENE 5

  In 1957, the Lange-Taylor extended family began to rent a cabin on the coast of Marin County. Located one mile south of Stinson Beach on a rocky point protruding into the Pacific, the area was called Steep Ravine by locals. On the point were ten rustic cabins, built in the 1930s as a getaway for the family of local congressman and landowner William Kent.1 Dan and his wife, Mia, had visited one and described it enthusiastically. Dorothea fell in love with it on her first visit. It was rough: only cold water, a woodstove, no radio, a single room with a small sleeping loft.

  She and Paul drove up on many weekends, accompanied by various combinations of children, grandchildren, in-laws, and close friends like Imogen Cunningham, Rondal Partridge, and their families. She always took a camera, of course, and when not around her neck, it hung from a nail just by the door. She photographed the rocks and the ocean but mainly the people in their relation to the rocks and the ocean. She thought of these photographs as snapshots and private at first, but by 1964, the Steep Ravine cabin had become the site for an ambitious new photo essay. It was published only posthumously, so we have only a partial understanding of how Lange would have shaped it. She spoke about it in 1964 and 1965 to an interviewer.

  INTERVIEWER: Let’s talk about families and the untellable. I read a sentence of yours that people don’t photograph families.

  DOROTHEA: Yes. That’s a kind of sore place, a hurt place because I, who realize the great potential that there is in photographing your family, I haven’t done it either. I have had a lot of photographs of family groups on Christmas cards, an emptier form of telling you about the family I don’t know. Communication, zero. The things that are very near to you are very difficult. To photograph your family is a very unfamiliar road, there is no road.

  But she insisted that the project “didn’t have the subject ‘the family.’ ” Her family would stand in for a universal. She read aloud a quotation that she had copied out, without identifying its author. “ ‘We cannot all love our fellow men except in the most abstract way, but we can . . . always try to connect. . . . The sense of connection is like a muscle. Unused it withers, exercised it grows.’ ”2

  The subject of this photography project was “freedom, the circumstances under which people, children and their parents and their friends feel unlocked and free. What brings that about. It wouldn’t necessarily have to be just my family, it was planned to be kept to my family because it’s simpler to make a small book revolving around a few people. I tried to show something of the growth process . . . I’m not making it so that anyone who looks at this show will be acquainted with Helen or John or say how cute is Lisa . . . it’s the growth process, in this light, in this air, under these trees, which is the main thing, and life is the obligato that flows, comes in and out.”3

  21

  Surviving in the Cold

  As the hopefulness of the New Deal and the massive war effort dissolved into McCarthyist repression, Lange seemed to embody—literally, take into he
r body—the country’s political decline. Severe and occasionally bleeding ulcers and esophageal constriction kept her in great physical pain for long stretches of time and made it so hard to eat that she several times lost a dangerous amount of weight.1 Pain and fatigue produced a depression she had not experienced before. In July 1954, she wrote to Edward Steichen in a despairing, self-pitying vein:

  The time has come when I must face the sickening fact that I have not made the photographs in all my long years of struggle to do it that claim place in the Family of Man. . . .

  I always operated on the basis that my good working years were always ahead of me. Everything I ever did was always (in my mind) just preliminary. A bad mistake. . . .

  So I write you confessing that I am a bum, unreliable and inconstant.2

  Of course she was wrong about what she had already accomplished, and she was wrong about the standards of the “Family of Man,” but she was not exaggerating her physical weakness. She would never again be an entirely well woman.

  Lange’s documentary photography had both expressed and shaped 1930s political culture, in which working for social justice was not only urgent but a thrilling adventure as well. Only a decade later, she was out of harmony with the rising political trends and her photography was less circulated and less appreciated. Like Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, she assumed that the New Deal agenda would resume after the war, that the country would move toward racial equality, fair treatment of farmworkers, health insurance, even a guaranteed standard of living for all. Instead, the postwar decade brought a backlash against progressive policies. The Cold War and a hurricane-force resurgence of anticommunism brought with it a culture of fearful conformism. An intolerant patriotism defined all dissent as disloyal. This repression seized hold of the national body and squeezed the life out of a few and the courage out of many. Organized opposition became mainly local and tentative, because those who resisted publicly were often punished severely. The political chill seemed to drain Lange of bodily force.