Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  When they began photographing in 1953, Adams was “tremendously pleased with the way the Mormon project is shaping up. In spite of the difficulties of working with Dorothea in the field—due to her extreme intensity . . . she has a great and important concept, and I am very glad to be a part of it.” But he disliked her “sociological cerebration,” while she found his “idealistic individualism” irresponsible.8 Then a gaffe by Taylor and Lange made Ansel furious. Taylor had sought permission to photograph from a Mormon bishop and thought he had received it; but the elders’ approval had not reached the potential subjects and, worse, Taylor had said the photographs were for an exhibition and had not mentioned publication in Life.9 Without doubt, he misled their subjects. He and Lange were accustomed to government field work, in which they never got formal permissions for photographs or quotations, never discussed publication plans, and never experienced resentment. Tension arose again because Adams wanted his close friend Nancy Newhall to write the Life piece. Lange vetoed this. She was not fond of Nancy, intimidated by her upper-class, girls-school confidence and competitive with the Newhalls’ acclaim by elite patrons.10 More important, Lange strongly wanted—in fact, needed—the job for Dan because she hoped it would boost him into the writing career he sought.

  Acceding but annoyed, Adams withdrew entirely after the photographs were printed, leaving everything else to Lange. Out of a staggering 1,100 images they made, she delivered 135 to Life. When the feature appeared in December 1954, only a quarter of those were included, of which more than three-quarters were hers,11 adding to his irritation. Life staffers wrote mawkish captions that, along with the photos used, stereotyped the villages. For Toquerville, there was an empty house, a sagging fence, and an explanation that “the Mormons kept themselves apart from the changing world, believing that they are God’s Chosen People.” In Gunlock, children played and danced, women bore canned goods and flowers, the whole town gathered at the church.12 The headline st. george has taken up worldly ways hardly pleased the Mormons.13 (The headline turned out, ironically, quite fitting, for St. George was the closest town to a thirty-two-kiloton bomb tested at Yucca Flats, Nevada, later in 1953, the fallout resulting in marked increases in cancer and other radiation-caused diseases.)

  Life voided Lange’s vision of the complexity of social change. Sympathetic to the Mormons, she saw them not, as many do today, as a conservative, autocratic society, but as a minority church rejecting corporate commercialism and dedicated to simpler living and strong community, “an enduring embodiment of the frontier spirit.”14 The best of the Utah photographs document in pairs Lange’s unease about commercialism and a consumerist reconstruction of women’s domesticity. A gaggle of girls riding a horse contrasts with the containment of a mother and daughter in their kitchen. A compact real cowboy squats, tired but graceful, while a huge neon cowboy advertises a truck stop.

  Dorothea had antagonized Ansel about Nancy Newhall for naught, because only a bit of Dan’s language was included in the captions, and he got no credit. Still, the Utah project marked the beginning of a turnaround for Dan. Modern Photography soon paid him five hundred dollars for an article including some of his mother’s photographs and he became his mother’s collaborator on several further projects. He felt that from this point on “she partnered him to climbing out of the mess.”15

  The quarrel with Ansel was painful for Dorothea, who loved him despite her inability to refrain from needling him. They never worked together again. Yet despite their impatience with each other’s politics, technique, and method, they remained good friends to the end. Adams, always genial and generous, continued to praise Lange and her work. They were always in touch and he was attentive during her health crises. When he was hospitalized in 1962, she wrote, “ ‘It is my turn to tell you that I wish for you the very best under all circumstances and also that I have loved you right or wrong.’ ”16 He felt the same.

  LIFE TOOK UP another Lange proposal, a profile of Ireland’s County Clare.17 Feeling stronger, she went there with Dan only—Paul came for a short visit toward the end of their stay—arriving at the beginning of September 1954 and staying six weeks, mainly in Ennis, population seven thousand.18 She made 2,400 photographs, seeming not to need to rest. Dorothea took a malfunctioning camera for repair and thereby met a young photographer, Dennis Wylde, who drove for her when Dan was not available. He said that he learned more about photography from her than from any other source. He was particularly impressed by how tenaciously she would pursue a shot she wanted, climbing on her car or any available elevation and returning repeatedly to a spot day after day. (He even said she had climbed a tree, hard for me to imagine.)19 Dan’s lack of discipline appeared again; he “gathered impressions,” without formal interviews or taking notes. Dorothea was not pleased that much of his gathering of information was done through “roistering” with the locals in the pubs (there were sixty-five of them in tiny Ennis).20

  Lange sought in Ireland what she had sought among the Mormons: the community created by village life and family farming. As in Utah, she read, then studied the area first without a camera and listed images symbolic, descriptive, and analytic: “the milk cow is the center around which this economy thrives/the bicycle and the raincoat/ the farmer and the milk can/ the farmer and his tools, spade, flail and scythe/ the fire and the pot/.” She made categories: “emigration; congregations; the temperament and the weather . . .” and categories within the categories: “congregations: the church, the creamers, the fair.” And she established perspectives: “what one sees from the door; the four walls of a room; what one sees as work goes on; work in the hayyard.”21 The photographs celebrate labor—a man pulls a hay cart, women cook on hearth fires of dried turf, buskers sing at the country market, farmers fight the foxes that eat the lambs, a shoemaker and a priest serve people’s needs—everyone works, young and old. Lange was implicitly comparing the rooted poverty of Irish peasants with the uprooted poverty of migrant farmworkers: She saw Irish peasants as stable and happy, even as their children went barefoot to school and women carried water in pails. Her captions become more lyrical. Less rushed, she developed more personal relationships with subjects, as she had done in her San Francisco studio. She was enjoying herself.

  22.1. COUNTY CLARE, IRELAND, 1954

  Nothing roughed up her misty, romanticized take, not the arduous labor, the poverty, or the emigration of so many of County Clare’s young to the United States. There is no hint of inequality among social classes.22 Lange’s decision to focus on an area relatively isolated from economic development left the Ireland photo-essay without the sense of historical change that provided the narrative tension of the Mormon story. Yet no place in Europe had been immune from global economic change, and a skilled sociological interviewer would have seen its impact, however subtle or unapparent. Lange had those skills but did not use them. She settled for a pastoral romance: “. . . no hurry . . . no sense of want, or wanting, or urge to buy more and more, [or] bombardment of new goods and advertising. . . .”23 In fact, the sparkling consumer goods of modern metropolises came in regularly, by mail or as gifts from the millions in the Irish diaspora.

  22.2. COUNTY CLARE, IRELAND, 1954

  22.3. COUNTY CLARE, IRELAND, 1954

  However romantic and unrealistic, Lange’s Irish peasants would never be confused with Russian or Italian peasants—or Mormons. They belonged specifically to Ireland.24 John Szarkowski told her that he felt the damp wind blowing out of one photograph. Back home, Lange hung a photograph of a Irish girl in the rain on her front door, intending that Irish rain and gloom and mud would make Berkeley sunshine more treasured. Ireland’s beauty induced her to make landscapes, but she thought only one of them good: “. . . pure Ireland . . . it’s a poor landscape but it’s the only one that I made there that gave the feeling . . . once in a while the whole earth smiles for a minute. . . .”25 The best Irish photographs were, of course, portraits. (See plate 37.)

  Life’s headings expressed Lange�
��s romance: SERENELY THEY LIVE IN AGE-OLD PATTERNS; A WILD AND RUGGED COUNTRY TESTS A MAN’S BEST; THE QUIET LIFE RICH IN FAITH AND A BIT OF FUN. Many of the impoverished Irish would call this blarney. Then a last-minute news story reduced the Ireland spread by about 50 percent. Once again, Dan’s text was not used and he got no credit line. Dorothea was furious.26

  LANGE AND TAYLOR’S nostalgia for a less corporate society may have been backward-looking in one respect, but in another it produced a vital forward-looking concern—for environmental protection. Lange was an early environmentalist, well before the movement gathered political power. She had absorbed Maynard’s love of the desert and his hatred for the soulless greed of developers, Ansel Adams’s love of the Rocky Mountains and the Sierra Nevada, Paul’s and the FSA’s concern for a democratic rural economy and sustainable agriculture, Paul’s expertise about water politics; and to these, she added her own alarm at the costs of rapid, unregulated urbanization. Expressing a point of view extremely off center in the 1950s, when dams seemed the essence of progress, she sent Life a photo-essay on the social cost of a dam. Today, this Death of a Valley photography would command widespread interest and agreement. In 1957, Life would have none of it.

  In Solano County, northeast of San Francisco, the Bureau of Reclamation acceded to demands for more water and power by proposing a dam project near the town of Monticello, thirty-some miles west of Sacramento. The commercial center of the fertile Berryessa Valley, an oasis alongside Putah Creek in an otherwise-dry area, Monticello had one store, two filling stations, a small motel, and one roadside café. Its farmlands produced pears, grapes, walnuts, alfalfa and other grains, and herds of cattle and horses. In springtime, wildflowers carpeted the valley floor and hillsides, and California poppies spilled into the town cemetery. Dam construction began in 1953, and ten years later the large valley was covered by 1.6 million acre-feet of water, creating the second-largest man-made lake in California (after Shasta Lake). The reservoir provides recreation, aqueducts send water to agribusiness in the Central Valley, and the dam generates electricity for Pacific Gas and Electric Company’s power grid.

  The dam project came to Lange’s attention not only through Paul, ever alert to what he saw as water theft, but also through her son John and brother, Martin, both of whom worked on the dam. She proposed a photo-essay on “before and after” the dam to Life and got a commission for one thousand dollars. She recruited Pirkle Jones, who had processed the Mormon film for Ansel and Dorothea, as an assistant.27 They started immediately, in order to capture the village before flooding, so she was working under pressure, against fatigue. A local photographer described her: “. . . she was tired . . . her face and her eyes were alive. She was a tiny, little thing. . . . She had a crippled leg. If you didn’t know it, you wouldn’t notice it, hardly, except when she was tired, when she sort of pulled that leg along.”28

  In 1957, Lange sent Life 175 photographs, including 13 five-by-seven color transparencies—one of the few times she ever worked with color film. The “before” images are even sweeter than the Irish photographs, her feeling for the valley mixed with personal longings. “. . . the valley held generations in its palm,” she wrote. The photographs—I speak of hers and Jones’s jointly—make the viewer want to walk in this valley and smell the alfalfa and the orchards and the manure. The contrasts between “before” and “after” are almost too simple: an old cemetery thick in wildflowers, for example, and the cemetery after it had been bulldozed and the bodies exhumed. The disruption of a culture is encapsulated in Lange’s only portrait of an animal—a terrified horse caught in a field being bulldozed. (See plate 40.) As with her greatest images of humans, she made the beautiful animal’s body the bearer of the anxieties of the whole community. Life declined to publish any of this material.29

  22.4. MONTICELLO, CALIFORNIA, 1956 (EARTH MACHINE)

  22.5. DOROTHEA LANGE AT MONTICELLO, 1956 OR 1957, by Pirkle Jones

  BETWEEN TRIPS TO the valley, Lange worked on an intensely urban photo-essay, and once more produced something that Life would not touch.30 But this venture projected the mirror image of her Utah/Ireland/“Death of a Valley” sensibility. She had been ambivalent about the “new California” even at the height of its World War II prosperity, and this anxiety had fed her idealization of traditional small communities. This very urban woman had become anxious about the callousness of the big-city environment, an anxiety escalated by her increased sensitivity to racism. Often in Oakland, she saw how the roaring defense-dollar economy had brought in tens of thousands of workers who were then spit out by the unemployment that followed from the demobilization at war’s end and the steady deindustrialization afterward. Lange saw also that the racial tolerance that war production had encouraged was too thin to support policies that could combat the racialized urban poverty resulting from so much unemployment.

  To tell this story she developed a visual profile of the work of an Oakland public defender.31 She had been musing about the legal system since Martin Lange’s arrest, and about how defendants who lacked money and know-how could get legal representation. The accused, often African Americans, contrasted sharply with the sharecroppers she had photographed in the South. Both groups were abused, she thought, but the new Oaklanders lacked supportive and disciplining family and community as they faced unfamiliar forms of race prejudice.32 The northern, urban structures of racism were also less visual, so she wanted to embody it through human interaction. The public defender series carries the anxiety and critique through its narrative dynamic, as her own worries about the social transformation of the Bay Area mixed with the high tension of courthouse events.

  She found a public defender with eight years’ experience, Martin Pulich, whose charisma, dedication, and intensity attracted her, and she followed him from morning to close of day for months.33 His motive in agreeing to become her subject was to create public understanding of the necessity for what he did, and she expected to be taught, so it was a good fit. She honored his commitment to the presumption of innocence, but she also registered the difficulty in maintaining that presumption.

  These photographs rely heavily on fragments to stand for a whole experience. Among the most well known are a nighttime close-up of the back of a Black Maria, gleaming ominously despite its dented doors; a jail guard’s waist, keys hanging from it, in front of the locked grilled door of a cell; the feet of an acquitted man, walking lively down the courthouse steps. Remarkably, she charmed a judge into letting her photograph in the courtroom. She said that after several weeks, she “set up a view camera in front of my seat with a long bulb so that I was separate from the camera, and the bulb would open and close without a sound, so it looked like someone had left the camera there.”34 In these photographs, women sit in courtrooms, holding infants, waiting for hours; a defendant glares suspiciously at Lange; others slump in holding cells. Pulich’s intensity made him a good subject for Lange, the master of posture and gesture: seen over a client’s shoulder, intent on his interrogation, as they confer in a closed room; lightly touching the back of a convicted client as he is led away; head bent over law books; intervening sharply in mid-trial. Perhaps some unconscious doubts about the legal system surfaced in her image of the judge’s face, a huge American flag behind him, representing justice but also intimidation. (See plate 38.) But this skepticism did not extend far. The photographs display a grand sympathy for the defendants, even as Pulich tells her how many lie and deceive and “thwart the believer.” But she neither interviewed nor gathered information about them. She learned, for example, that 85 percent of Pulich’s cases were settled by plea bargain. She did not ask under what pressure these defendants were induced to accept a deal in lieu of a trial and a chance to plead not guilty. Perhaps she so admired Pulich that her focus shifted to him and away from his clients; perhaps reaching out to the defendants seemed beyond her physical capability now. Whatever the reason, the message of the public defender series is more ambiguous, its critical edge duller than th
at of her FSA work.35

  22.6. OAKLAND, 1957

  AIMING AT PHOTOGRAPHS lighter and publishable, Lange tried her eye on something charming: San Francisco’s cable cars. Here, her nostalgia was mainstream: Everyone wanted to preserve this feature of San Francisco. Sold to Pageant for a tourist audience, the photos were also an homage to the city she loved. The cable cars encapsulated the city’s drama: hills so steep that newcomers feared to drive on them, shining views of the Bay and two awe-inspiring bridges, the precipitous descent to the Embarcadero. Yet the very smallness of the cable cars, their human scale, suggested the city’s intimacy. “The cable car,” Lange wrote, “is almost like an animal. . . . They hop on and off as [if it were] a little pony saddled and ready to go.”

  Pageant published thirteen photos in March 1957, with text by San Francisco columnist Herb Caen. The 946 negatives Lange made, however, were, as a whole, disappointing. “I thought this was going to be a cinch, just a lark, but it wasn’t a bit, it was hard to do.” She prepared carefully, as always: “The hills exaggerated, vertical—by Hasselblad—Graflex, try at noon.” Her list included the Bay, various nationality groups, the fog, the gloves of the gripman, bread and sausages, Sun Yat Sen, and Bop City, a landmark jazz club. She captured well the riders alighting and stepping off the moving cars, hanging on to poles from the running boards, but not the steepness or the sensation of being pulled up and down.36 A photographer like Margaret Bourke-White might have made close-ups of the cable-car machinery or figured angles that would show the awesome slopes of the streets. Lange gravitated, as always, to the people, making portraits of riders and workers, but she had little to say about them, aside from their seeming obliviousness to one another, signaling the anomie that characterized Lange’s worry about city life.