Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  But these negative comments appear only in the travel journals and in letters to family, not in her photography—on these trips, she only photographed beautiful things. Awestruck by Asian aesthetics, she made thousands of fine pictures and wrote hundreds of pages about her observations. “The landscape teems with brown people, in Korean white, sharp, distinct, slow-moving, solitaries and in groups, squatting, studded with frames loaded, the bearer buried, peering from under his load . . . the little brown boys with dragonfly nets, bright-colored nets . . . the loads the women carry on their smooth black heads . . . the conformation and ploughing design of the rice patties [sic].” She was also analyzing what she saw, ecologically: “. . . all these ways in which men move in their environment, and use it, and how it supports their life. . . .”

  As always, her photographs recognized farm labor. One of its motifs was carrying—done occasionally by pack animals but more frequently by people’s backs or heads. Grace, in movement or at rest, was an equally powerful motif, continuous in Lange’s photography since her studio days. The most published of Lange’s Asian photographs are supremely elegant—the hand of a Javanese dancer, the perfect symmetry and smoothness of a Korean child’s face. Always haunted by feet, in Asia as in the United States, she used them as metaphors for labor, endurance, and grace in Asia. (When she returned home she organized a sequence she called “conversations with feet.”) (See plates 45–48 for my attempt to replicate this.) She similarly used bodies, in Asia as in the United States, as metaphors for relationships and tenderness. Her portraits often featured children, because they were more approachable than adults. She managed to catch them in noncute moments—of reverie, anxiety, suspicion, or silliness. Both the children and the women she sought to photograph were often hiding, and she photographed that hiding, making it a central theme and part of the identity of her subjects, to the degree that hiding became a metaphor for the photographer’s position as outsider. (See plate 42.)

  When I studied the Asian photographs, I was on guard against intimations of an Orientalist take on an exotic and “backward” people, because there is so much of that in other observations by First World visitors. I did not see much of this. Lange made, of course, many photographs of unfamiliar practices—veiled women, turbaned men, women carrying heavy loads on their heads, women with nose rings, naked toddlers (she had always loved naked children), Javanese dance. Yet the images do not titillate or mystify. Lange was interested less in the exotic than in the mundane. Her camera was more often pointed at farmworkers working in fields, women chatting in groups, and the omnipresent traffic of people carrying their loads. She photographed temples and minarets but more often the homes of poor people, paying close attention to how they were constructed. She registered the many domestic tasks performed outdoors, such as cooking, car and bicycle repair, washing clothes, and marketing. Her attitude toward Asian women is similar to her take on American women: they are represented as mothers, workers, farmers, craftswomen—but their labor is heavier than that of Westerners.

  As if in compensation for the photographic limitation, Lange looked extensively at folk art. “We purchased and purchased. Paul and I certainly love to do this. . . .” Shopping also provided escape from officials, who would tell them nothing of use anyway, Paul thought. Paul was even more eager to acquire artifacts than Dorothea,23 but she was a connoisseur. In Vietnam, she got silk dresses made for all the daughters, daughters-in-law, and granddaughters (but not Consie or Becky); from Indonesia, she wrote Helen, “You will be wearing sarongs for the rest of your life.”24 For themselves they bought useful items, which Dorothea then used regularly. This flowed from principles both ethical and aesthetic. The objects she (or they) cherished were the actual furniture of people’s lives, part of their everyday culture. They were objects displaying the union of form and function, of use and art, the essence of Dorothea’s elegant simplicity of taste.

  23.4. VIETNAM, 1958

  She sometimes enjoyed the luxury extended to an American diplomat, but at other times she tolerated miserable conditions because of Paul’s determination to see the real countryside. In the big cities, they stayed in luxury hotels. In Chiang Mai, Thailand, the State Department set them up in the elegantly furnished palace of the former prince. But after staying in a rural inn in Korea, she was picking fleas off of her body. In a “Rest House” in Siwa, Egypt—a wealthy oasis and home of an honored oracle in ancient Egypt, but a deserted archaeological site in 1958—they slept on dirty sheets covered with flea powder and went entirely without food on one day.25 The soft food she could eat was often hard to get. Toilet facilities were a severe trial, especially with her recurrent intestinal problems. They took long bumpy rides in open jeeps (350 miles to Siwa from Cairo), becoming coated with dust. Dorothea endured terror as they rode with maniac taxi drivers and flew in dicey airplanes. This was far harder than the San Joaquin Valley or the dust bowl.

  Paul thrived on the work, never tired, never homesick, always eager to reach the next place. He met important men, who treated him with respect and occasionally with honorifics, and on the small planes he delighted in riding in the cockpit with the pilot. “Paul enjoys officialdom”; “he loves this life,” Dorothea wrote. On the whole, she responded with her usual resilience and criticized herself when she was irritable: “I always find something these days to complain about and use as a weapon against his devotion to work. I find it limiting and monotonous, and I’m rebelling after 23 years.” If there was rebellion, it never lasted. She wished she could skip some of the formal dinners and griped that he was so involved with his work that he wasn’t hearing what she was saying, but she never minded being alone. When included, she loved seeing him at work; recalling her first introduction to him as he interviewed research subjects, she appreciated his skill at what he did. About a lecture at the Seoul Chamber of Commerce, she wrote, “He was just as fine as could be. . . . His dignity and simplicity were moving. . . . My love for him sometimes overwhelms me.”

  BUT ILLNESS LAUNCHED surprise attacks; and increasingly, feeling good was the surprise and discomfort the norm. At the very beginning of this 1958 trip, on the flight from Honolulu to Wake Island, the burning pain from her ulcers was so great, she feared she would have to turn back. Pain never let her alone long. “My whole insides really hurt. . . . I wonder whether I will break down completely and if I can see this trip through.” “I endure pain a part of every day. This leaves exhaustion. It hurts me, it hurts me. Sometimes, if I am alone, I cry out.” Once, alone in Pakistan, she had an attack of dysentery in the night that “left me fragmentated. . . .” She was not often well nourished.

  These complaints were articulated only to her journal, not to her husband. Right next to her on that first flight, he did not know she was in pain. He should have known, because he knew that she protected him. “For one who had such physical distresses, prolonged over so many years, she never laid it on anybody else,” he commented.26 She was well aware of the expenditure of energy that this stoicism required. She wrote to Margaret Bourke-White, who suffered from Parkinson’s disease, “We are inclined . . . to crawl into our dark holes, and if we do not inflict our suffering upon others we regard our responsibilities as performed.”27 Reading her journal next to his recollections suggests Paul’s self-absorption. Nothing dampened her spirits, he recalled, their “interests dovetailed so beautifully . . . there was never any, ‘Oh, I wish that we could do something else.’ ” She thought he wasn’t hearing her.

  Despite her physical condition, she obliged Paul by agreeing to visit five more countries as tourists when he finished his work. First, they went to Moscow, where they were greeted as honored diplomatic guests and confronted with obstructionist bureacracy, the two sides of official Soviet culture. Tickets for the Bolshoi Ballet and other performances appeared daily, but Paul was not allowed to meet with other economists and economic-development experts. They then went to Germany, passing through East and West Berlin and visiting both her and his ancestral lo
cations—Stuttgart and Kaiserslautern. In Germany, a thicket of mixed feelings sprouted. Hearing the language evoked irascible Uncle Fritz, magnificent Grosmama and the sound of her sewing machine, Nettie’s “big, open plain face, the big nose, and how they clucked together when she came of an afternoon to visit Grosmama.” She found ten Vottelers, her mother’s family name, in the Stuttgart phone book, but she did not try to meet them. “Let sleeping dogs lie,” she wrote enigmatically, perhaps wanting to avoid the risk of finding Nazi sympathizers among her forebears—it was only thirteen years since the fall of the Third Reich. Nazism and the Holocaust were much on her mind. Even after hearing a concert of Bach cantatas, she wrote, “Was it 6,000,000 Jews they exterminated?”

  They bought a VW in Stuttgart and drove west through Switzerland, and had a serious argument on the way: Dorothea wanted to go to Paris, but Paul insisted on traveling instead to the location where he had been gassed in World War I, Belleau Wood. (Apparently there wasn’t time for both.) Dorothea had underestimated Paul’s desire to return there—his battle service, injury, self-sacrifice and patriotism wrapped into one very large emotion.28 He found the battle site just as he remembered it, even a wine cellar that had served his unit as a first-aid station. This threw Dorothea into a self-pitying irritability—for which she promptly criticized herself: “You imagine yourself persecuted, you attack in a rain of petty criticism, spoken and unspoken. . . . You set yourself up as a Paris-sort-of-a-person. This is not true, but it is revenge.” She never got to Paris, never saw its treasure of photography and modern art.

  Finally, they stopped in London to see Margot and her husband, Don Fanger, and then again in Chicago to see Paul’s daughter Kathy. When they arrived in San Francisco, Dorothea’s exhaustion almost dissipated at the sight of John and Helen Dixon and Ross and Onnie Taylor, with five grandchildren, who met them at the airport.

  TAYLOR DID SOME consulting trips alone but managed to get Dorothea to accompany him on two more, to Ecuador and Venezuela in the summer of 1960. Despite the evidence, Paul continued to hope that he could convince the State Department to do its foreign aid right, to make use of indigenous social strengths and support genuine democracy. Venezuela under the former leftist Betancourt encouraged peasant unions that impressed Taylor. In Ecuador, by contrast, Taylor and Lange were both extremely critical of U.S. policy.29 Guayaquil was a “city of the deprived,” Lange wrote, “. . . as ugly and terrible a city as one can experience. . . .” U.S. foreign aid to South America was a “crude deal of which we are ashamed as we walk the streets,” and the hostile stares confirmed their unease. She saw a bit of salvation when they reached peasant villages because, despite terrible poverty and filth, she saw there “a relationship of man to environment that felt good, and deep.” The peasants were so “earnest, so serious, so poor and sweated, so willing to raise their work-worn hands and arms for the communidad.” However romantic, her longing led to a most material wish: “Couldn’t there be a place in the world where [the pressure of] making money would be lifted?”30 She was growing even more skeptical that Paul’s ideals could prevail.

  23.5. ECUADOR, 1960

  Physical misery accompanied her again: riding hours through the Andes in an open jeep, dust in her eyes and mouth, and a nose itching from scabies. She was relieved to sit out one of these side trips and stay in the hotel: “. . . my drive, my spirit, have deserted me,” she wrote. “Paul is . . . relentless. There is no give.”

  In 1961 Dorothea successfully resisted a trip. “My Liege expects me to join him. . . . I want to work quietly in the darkroom with no one here to disturb (no 160 acres). . . .”31 There was a last trip, however, in 1963, and it was the hardest. It was supposed to be easier because they would stay mostly in one place—Paul had just retired from UCB and went to teach for a semester at the University of Alexandria, at a Ford Foundation–funded Institute on Land Settlement. Egypt in 1963 had been a republic for a decade, and President Gamal Abd el-Nasser, a nationalist of worldwide influence, was committed to land reform. Moreover, the vehemently anti-Communist Nasser had brought Egypt into the nonaligned movement in 1955, an effort by Third World countries to escape the Cold War between the great powers and to take an independent course. This, too, attracted Taylor.

  Having endured another spate of pain and hospitalization in 1962, Dorothea didn’t want to go, and Paul knew it. But he was committed to the trip and she could not desert him. Was he reckless and selfish? He could not turn down these invitations. She had been so vigorous in their life together, so resilient after numerous health crises, and so uncomplaining, that he did not understand her ailments as life-threatening.

  In Alexandria the university provided an apartment and a house servant, Hussein, as well a car and a driver, Aly Agua. Dorothea cooked, and shopped at the markets, a time-consuming undertaking but one she welcomed as a source of photographic opportunities. But the street crowds here were overtly hostile, a sign of developing anti-Americanism. (After Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, the United States and Israel had committed themselves to his overthrow.) Children threw pebbles at her. One bystander demanded that she photograph something beautiful, as opposed to poor people on the street. Aly told her what she must have known about poor and ragged people everywhere: “ ‘When the people see the cloth-es is all broke [translation: When the photographs show people in ragged clothes]—the blood goes upside-down.’ ”32

  With more opportunity to observe ordinary people than on the previous trips, Lange grew increasingly conscious of the status of women. “The little girls take the babies on their backs very early and from then on all their lives.” When she learned of events where women were not allowed, she took critical note but nevertheless described this lightly in a postcard sent home: “I shall not come home wearing a face-veil, but considerably chastened.”33 Lange’s ideas were challenged here: her rosy view of “traditional,” less individualistic societies collided with disturbing evidence of women’s subordination. Like many Western travelers, of course, she oversimplified the meaning and function of women’s veiling and seclusion, unable to see the rewarding women’s communities that sometimes resulted or the ways in which women, although subordinated, were not entirely powerless. Taylor’s less romantic, less ideological understanding of gender produced more accurate insights. For example, having noticed rural women’s lack of enthusiasm for mechanization of the home, such as washing machines and gas ranges, he asked questions and thereby came to understand it. What happened in homes was dependent on the mechanization of field labor, because women “found little reason to save time and labor in the home so long as the saving was to be spent in labor in the field.”34

  On this supposedly easier trip, Dorothea faced a truly terrifying health crisis. She began suffering not just painful ulcer attacks but a kind of wasting: with chronic diarrhea and the repeated closing of her esophagus, she could not nourish herself and began again to lose weight drastically. She wrote Margot that she was holding up her clothes with safety pins. In March 1963 a new symptom appeared: intermittent high fevers, which abated after a few days on antibiotics. In July, visiting Iran on their way home, Paul awoke one morning in Tabriz and found her babbling and delirious; she had to be hospitalized for five days. A week later in Teheran, another hospitalization occurred. None of these fine, often American-trained physicians could find a source of infection. The worst crisis hit August 2, while they were in Switzerland, driving west. As her fever climbed, Paul drove frantically late into the night to get her to a hospital in Interlaken.

  Here the physicians began intravenous feedings and blood transfusions, but they refused to administer antibiotics, reasoning that previous diagnoses had failed to determine the source of infection because antibiotics so quickly reduced the microorganism that was torturing her. The gamble paid off. She had malaria.35 The standard treatment began to work, but slowly, because the disease had been so long neglected and she had become so sick and depleted. On the eighth day she was still receiving IV
feedings and transfusions.

  She remained in the Interlaken hospital for three weeks. Paul would stay in her room all day, then move to a nearby hotel to sleep.36 Paul felt it was paradise. This sentiment expressed his relief that there was, finally, a strategy to make her well and doctors he trusted. He loved the crisp, sun-filled air and the view from Dorothea’s window. Equally likely, being forced to sit still, to stop activity, to find the patience that her severe illness and debilitation now demanded, had a tonic effect on him. As she gained strength, her mood got better and better.

  When she was preparing to leave, she recalled, the doctor “said to me, ‘What would you like?’ And I said ‘doctor, I would like ten years,’ and he said ‘I believe you can do it. I believe you’ll have your ten years.’ . . . They had gone over me and had discovered that of all that had been done to me . . . it was working and it was functioning, and there was no reason that, with care, it wouldn’t hold up for ten years.”37 She held on to this as if it were a promise. Now sixty-eight years old, she desperately wanted to stay alive. Feeling well for the first time in many months, she was once again imagining new photographic projects and the pleasures of home.

  Yet on her release, they still did not go straight home. Paul wanted always to see more and do more, and her elation at feeling better and at the physician’s promise made her acquiesce. Five days after leaving Interlaken, her fever spiked again, and she had to begin taking quinine once more. Even then they did not stop. In early September in the Netherlands, still on quinine, she was walking around and visiting museums. Once back in the United States, they made three stops before returning to Berkeley. Paul took off almost immediately to Chile and Iran, leaving Dorothea to enjoy her grandchildren and her darkroom.