Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  TOWARD THE END of the first Asian trip, Dorothea reviewed what she had accomplished, commenting, “. . . that very excellent photographer was not present. . . . There was a half-sick, cold and world-weary old woman, with eyes not so dull as most. . . . She could have met the possibilities she carries within her. But she did not make that movement.” In Asia, Lange had often felt visually empty. “The ‘secret treasury of my heart’ is dried up,” she wrote. One morning back in Berkeley, she destroyed ten days’ worth of her Asia photography.38

  Typically, she thought she should be able to suppress pain and fatigue with willpower and condemned herself for weakness of character. “What I shall do here,” she had written at the outset of the first trip, after her bouts of pain on the first flight, “depends upon what is in me and how courageous I am.” But that was not true—lack of courage was not the problem. Lange’s demands on herself were so unreasonable as to be warped, for in truth she had attempted the impossible.39 Even had she not been so physically drained, she was working blind in unfamiliar societies, when her skill rested on being able to understand the culture and context of her subjects. (In Ireland, at least she had been able to talk to people.) Photography curator Therese Heyman thought the foreign trips were a waste of Dorothea’s time. Dropped into a culture she did not understand, Dorothea could not know if what she was seeing was typical or unusual, so she had no choice but “to rip it off,” by which Heyman meant not literal theft but the figurative theft through representing a culture superficially.40 Looking back a few years later, Lange acknowledged the problem: “I didn’t know what I was looking at.” “Japan went over my head.”41 This understanding lay behind her warning to “look out for the picturesque. . . .”42 The cultural barriers may have been more unexpected because of her commitment to family of man–style universalism. She wanted to reach a core of human oneness beneath a surface of cultural diversity. But such common humanity—women’s care for children, children’s playfulness, family unity—is often banal. Indeed, the commonality could be superficial and the differences more profound.

  23.6. VIETNAM, 1958

  Her work abroad was further limited by the auspices under which she traveled. Had she been escorted by indigenous documentary photographers or democracy advocates instead of State Department and military men, the photography might have been different.

  There are dissenting opinions. The photography establishment, including Grace Mayer and Ansel Adams, praised the Asia photographs.43 Many of them exquisitely beautiful, their appropriation of Asian art styles addressed connoisseurs. They were immediately understandable as art, in contrast to how her photographs of American poor people appeared in the 1930s. The Third World pictures conveyed no burdensome sense of responsibility or political purpose; they did not appear documentary. But Lange stuck to her overall negative judgment. Her young assistant, Richard Conrat, told her that he thought the Asia work honest but on the whole unsuccessful, and she agreed.44

  Her judgment was far too harsh. True, her achievement might have been no less great had she never left the United States, and the trips increased her suffering and may have shortened her life. But if the Asian and Latin American photography were all she had ever done, it would be a major achievement. As it is, we inevitably compare it to her American work. And in an historical vein, the relative weakness of the Asian photographs was fitting: Lange was quintessentially American, so it should be no surprise that her greatest work was conditioned by a heroic, democratic moment in American life, her lesser work by a period more self-interested and frightened than generous.

  24

  To a Cabin

  T he historian sees Dorothea Lange in 1955 as a woman entering her last decade, but she, of course, did not. She began to think of herself as a dying woman, I suspect, only after her diagnosis with inoperable cancer of the esophagus in August 1964. Her medical crises and hospitalizations had begun in 1945, twenty years before she died, but she always rebounded. Her physical and emotional resilience, her capacity to put up with pain, and her Swiss doctor’s 1963 promise of ten more years made her expect more time than she had. By the end, however, she saw what the historian sees: that hers was a life with an extraordinary concentration of great work into a single decade, 1935–1945. You could view this as a loss—a life with its creativity cut cruelly short. Or you could view the years of ill health as a price paid for the all-out effort of that decade, a Faustian bargain. Or you could view it as, I believe, she herself did at the end, as the life trajectory of a woman who seized an extraordinary opportunity and wasted none of it.

  The historian must not, however, let the heroic achievements of Lange’s most productive period, or the bouts of ill health that began in 1945, obscure the more human-scale achievements of her later years. Her greatest intensity went into designing her one-woman show at MoMA. She made sure to stay alive until it was completed, but never saw it—it opened a few months after her death. After decades of relatively little acclaim, she understood it as a belated invitation into the exclusive club of photographers recognized by the art establishment as artists.

  Even bracketing that exhibit, her productivity in her last decade outstripped what her health would have suggested. San Francisco TV station KQED made two films about her for National Educational Television; this required submitting to many days of taping and filming in her home, sacrificing privacy and rest. She created several photo-essays from her Asian trips and started two photographic books, which were published posthumously: Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman and To a Cabin.1 Equal respect is due to efforts that did not succeed, such as her continuing campaign for an urban photography project—a gift she wanted to give to America and to younger photographers. And indeed, a group of young photographers photographing the civil rights movement reached out to her for advice and help, recognizing her photography as their inspiration, connecting her New Deal liberalism directly to a New Left just being born. The cutting short of that connection reveals what was lost with her illness and death, what might have been gained had she lived or kept her energy only a few years longer.

  24.1. BERKELEY, 1959

  Driving herself as hard as she did may have shortened her life, but she chose the path and did not regret it. This meant that in some ways she also chose how to die. One of the last things she said to Paul was, “It’s a miracle, that this comes at the right time.”2 There is an unexpected meaning to her “right time” here, because it preceded the actual MoMA exhibit. She needed to create it, but apparently did not need to see it. She was willing to die without knowing the judgment of the art-photography world. Two readings of this statement are possible: it suggests her recurring lack of confidence, now an anxiety about the critical reception of her show, her fear that she never became a great photographer; or, more likely, in my view, that she knew the value of her work and needed no ultimate sanction from an establishment.

  IN THE EARLY 1960s McCarthyism was palpably weakening. Charges of communism were losing their power to repress dissent. Several dynamics came together to advance this opening up of political possibilities, of which the most important was the civil rights movement (which then gave birth to antiwar, women’s rights and gay rights movements). From the legal battle against school segregation and the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956, it expanded to sit-ins at lunch counters in 1960, the Freedom Rides of 1961, and the voter registration drives of 1963 and 1964. Awed by the activists’ commitment to nonviolence, even in the face of violence toward them, Lange was particularly moved by her understanding that this heroic struggle came from among the very people she had interviewed and photographed, who had seemed so beaten down.3

  A Supreme Court headed by Earl Warren overturned not only segregated schools but also prayer in schools, Huac witch-hunts, literacy tests for voting, laws prohibiting mixed marriage and contraception; it guaranteed lawyers for poor defendants and required police Miranda warnings. The Twenty-fourth Amendment, banning the poll tax, which Lange had so often denounced
, was making its way through Congress and then the states. The movement begun by the children of the communities she had photographed in North Carolina, Mississippi, and Arkansas was changing America.

  Kennedy’s election in 1960 let more light into dark places, as much because of his rhetorical and personal charisma as because of his policies. The Kennedys brought in a new cultural style—chamber music and French food in the White House, among other signs of elite taste—which captivated Lange. Lyndon Johnson’s creation of a National Endowment for the Arts to provide some federal support for artists was cause for elation in someone who had experienced New Deal arts funding. So was his War on Poverty. Ironically, the new policies that appealed most to Taylor—the Peace Corps, the expansive foreign economic assistance programs, and the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty—resulted from Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, which was actively supporting independence movements in Africa and denouncing the treatment of African Americans. (The policy record was of course not homogeneous, and Taylor was critical of cutting taxes for the wealthy and surreptitiously entering a disastrous hot war in Vietnam.)

  24.2. BERKELEY, 1964

  The great expansion of public universities after the war intersected with all these changes, stimulating an upswing in student activism. Berkeley students, frustrated by giant lecture courses and what felt like assembly-line education, were picking up some of the courage of their African American peers. In 1960, a small group picketed Huac hearings in San Francisco, but when police attacked the peaceful demonstrators with clubs and high-pressure water hoses—suggesting that California was not entirely different from Alabama—a much larger demonstration formed the next day. This gratified people like Taylor and Lange, who had felt the hot breath of the witch-hunting monster.

  Lange wished she could roam the UCB campus to photograph the student radicals,4 but she hadn’t the strength. Her ulcers and esophagus condition flared up repeatedly, until by 1964 she was quite weak. By now, she had been in poor health for almost twenty years, during which time she had also suffered from misdiagnoses (gallbladder, pancreas, anorexia). Time after time, she had rebounded. In the spring of 1964, she undertook a demanding trip to New York and Washington, came home weak and in pain, and did not rebound. By July, her esophagus had closed so much she could not swallow. This time, the attempts to dilate it led to the discovery, in August, of a malignant and inoperable tumor.5 She hoped for a last stint of photographing and ordered a new camera, a Leica, two lenses, and other items she had longed for. She never used them.6 She continued to photograph sporadically, but this was not a time for her to try new equipment. Paul, in shock, continued to hope that she could regain some strength if only she would rest, so for a time during that fall of 1964, he discouraged visitors. He wanted to nurse her himself. She, however, wanted to work and soon broke through Paul’s protective cordon, returning to her studio for a few hours at a time.

  She now depended on a new assistant, Richard Conrat, a twenty-three-year-old photography student who stayed with her to the end. He looked back on his two years with her as an extraordinary opportunity.7 Conrat proved an excellent partner in preparing the MoMA exhibition, because of his politics as well as his skills. Drawn to Lange because of her photography of social commitment, he came into her life as she was moving away from that, both in her Asian work and her family photography, so he became a voice of conscience to her. He was willing to challenge her, and she responded openly and thoughtfully, not defensively. The MoMA show may well have been better because of Conrat’s presence in her life.

  24.3. BERKELEY, 1964

  Meanwhile, a producer who had just finished films on Ansel Adams began filming Lange. Her state of health required a labor-intensive method: filming her in her own work space as she carried out whatever was on her agenda. Each day, the film crew would telephone to see if she felt well enough to let them come. The intersection of the exhibit preparation and the film project produced a treasure for the historian and for photography lovers, because the tapes capture Lange’s intermittent, months-long running commentary on her photographic thinking. Although she could hardly have been oblivious to a film crew in her living room, and she was to some degree performing, the KQED recordings are the more valuable because she was at times explicating her thinking to nonphotographers. At other times she was addressing future generations of photographers. She had a historical sense of herself, as a figure within a coherent and continuing process of photographic development. Her words and her method of preparing the show combined to create a unique summation of her visual thinking.

  She began by selecting groups of images: “. . . a single photograph, it’s provocative, it’s an idea, but if you can do two or three maybe you make of that a phrase and if you can do it in ten maybe it’s a sentence. It’s a hard obscure language, but it’s worth studying.” Relations among photographs constituted a visual grammar or a musical piece. An image might be dominant or only contributory, or several might be perfectly balanced; one might amplify the other, or they might sound in unison; photographs might proceed logically or historically one from the other. The goal was not photojournalism, she insisted, but “closer to the literary form of essay.” Grouping was not the same as “cataloguing, not putting them into pigeon holes of organization.” For example, she rejected a distinction between images of people and of nature, in a shift from her three-decades-earlier self-description as “Photographer of People.” Now she insisted that the human and inhuman are part of a single repertoire of expression. “You can photograph a tree, certainly it isn’t human, but you who are doing it are human, and your understanding and the reason for doing that tree are strictly human motives.” Thus her photographic categories were becoming more symbolic than representational. She also enunciated what some might call a postmodernist approach to her work, acknowledging that photographic meanings change over time. She rejected images that had become hackneyed from overuse, losing their power to break through conventionalized seeing, and she actually tore up numerous photographs.8

  Lange knew that her photography had been labeled “sentimental.” Conrat asked her about this boldly: “Some people seem to think that poverty is inherently sentimental, that there is a kind of pathos in the filming of people in disadvantaged conditions. How can this ever be avoided?” Sentimentality is shallow emotionalism, she replied; images deepen when they force a recognition of something new. When photographs made her think “oh god, how many times have you seen this. . . . He’s doing a rehash of a rehash of a rehash of something that wasn’t very deeply grounded at the beginning,” then, she said, “that’s sentimental: a superficial thing, a too readily recognizable thing, an over-familiar thing.”9 Lange wanted to seduce viewers into seeing something for the first time.

  Lange did not connect allegations of sentimentality to conventional notions of female sensibility. She may not have registered that these accusations have been particularly directed at women, and at explorations of the domestic, the intimate, the emotional. Walker Evans, for example, used the phrase “photographing babies” as a synonym for selling out artistic integrity.10 The sentimentality charge also targeted Lange because her subjects worked and lived off the earth rather than in factories or offices. To the degree that FSA photography was sentimental, that quality derived from its ennobling the poor and the downtrodden and romanticizing rural life, and it appeared in male as well as in female photography.

  Several critics have read off the strong emotional content of Lange’s work as naturally, femininely instinctive and intuitive. George Elliott wrote in the catalog for her MoMA show, “For an artist like Dorothea Lange the making of a great, perfect, anonymous image is a trick of grace, about which she can do little beyond making herself available for that gift of grace.”11 Another described her as a piece of white photosensitive paper, or “an unexposed film,” onto which light and shadow marked impressions.12 Lange contributed to her reputation as instinctive through her own passive metaphors for her work, describing herself a
s a channel. Creative workers of all kinds and both sexes use such metaphors. Lange saw herself as both passive and active, aware that she worked, as most artists do, with both spontaneity and calculation, and that spontaneity comes from skill acquired from practice, much as dancers develop muscle memory.

  Recognizing the tension between specificity and universalism, Lange sought to resolve it through balance: “The better the work, the more ways there are of interpreting it . . .” but “If it is too particular and too personal, then your observer, you give him nothing.” She disliked her photographs becoming icons and for that reason wanted to leave the Migrant Mother photograph out of the MoMA show. “Some things you do get a life of their own. . . . They cut loose from the person who made them, marched off so you don’t have any relationship anymore.” Moreover, for Lange, the universality of an icon dishonored the subject by erasing the person’s own particular story.13

  She thought she could unite her universalist, family-of-man theme with the diversity of actual people. She constructed a wall for the MoMA show that she called “the human face”: “. . . the idea of that wall is that we have only one universal language that we all understand and that is in the reading of the human face.” The tension remains, however, unresolvable. Without uniqueness, human subjects lose dignity. As critic Clive Scott put it, “the photograph . . . refuses to lie down, to be an illustration . . . to depict the purely social. . . .”14 Yet documentary gains much of its power through viewers’ recognition of kinship with the subjects. Moreover, the more contextualized, the more dated the images. While rejecting the overused, Lange yearned nevertheless for eternal life for her images.