Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  The downward slope of her energy was erratic rather than steady, and the Berkeley fiasco probably contributed to a low point in early December. She had Paul write a letter to the children, explaining that Christmas would be minimal and that she had to overlook some birthdays—things that might be normal behavior from others were for Dorothea a signal of defeat.54 But she sprang back again, and Christmas turned out festive after all. “We said it would be quiet, but it made itself, and came out pretty much as always, as the family made it for us. You would have had a wrench,” she wrote Margot, “to see Wim [Onnie’s father] and Paulie [Ross’s son] play duets. . . . Ross . . . was here with the music. . . .”55

  In February 1965 came another family blow: Dan and Mia were divorcing. They knew how badly Dorothea would take it and had kept the news from her for several months. Dorothea loved Mia and thought the divorce another of Dan’s failures. She never knew that John and Helen also divorced—they told no one until after Dorothea’s death. By March, she was “losing ground everyday a little. . . . I’ve always had immense physical reserves, for a person who has such a bad body but it won’t last too long. . . . Sometimes it comes over me in a wave but generally it’s all right. I’ve accepted it, I have to find the right way through it, you know, so it isn’t horrible, and I have help.”56 But some of this was wishful thinking. She became more irritable and once actually hit out at Paul. “I watch my temper every second . . . I am not ready. The other day, I turned around, I punched on Paul. And I saw myself do it, real Jekyll and Hyde . . . it’s that opium that I take.”

  Yet she prepared for death as carefully as for a photo shoot. She dictated to Paul a list of those to whom she wanted to bequeath photographs and art objects. One list contains seventy-one names, from family and closest friends to Rexford Tugwell, Arthur Raper, and Romana Javitz, and other scraps of paper hold more names. She usually specified a particular photograph for each individual. To the Clausens went a photograph of her beloved live oak. Phil Green of KQED was to get a photograph of an endless highway. To cousin Minelda she bequeathed an Egyptian woman. Some, like John Szarkowski, were invited to choose the print they wanted. As people visited, she gave them items on the spot: pottery, baskets, wall hangings. Two years after her death, Paul was still distributing these gifts.

  Another list surfaced in her papers, made before the cancer diagnosis, yet part of a summing up before death. Titled “People who loved me,” it could have seemed egotistical to those who did not know her well. Those who did, however, knew that Dorothea was driven by ambition but also by self-doubt and the early lesson that only self-reliance is reliable; she was never entirely able to trust that others could be counted on. As the list grew, it became a larger statement of gratitude, the acknowledgments for a life. It started in Hoboken, listing “mother, uncle John, Sophie,” “little brother for goodness,” Caroline “for reliance,” and Fronsie “ for companionship . . . her vision, my trust.” She listed her godmother, Emily Sanderfield, “for patience and quietude,” photographer-employer Spencer-Beatty “for grit,” and “Genthe for?” She remembered two New York boyfriends—“Landon for devotion, sculptor for love.” (Had she forgotten the sculptor’s name?) The list told me some things I already knew, such as her continuing sense of Martin as “little brother,” and some things that were surprising, such as the question mark after Genthe’s name, and the distinction between love and devotion on the part of boyfriends. Her adult family members had no reasons after their names, a strong statement in itself, and, surprisingly, she placed Steichen between Maynard and Paul. There was no mention of Stryker; perhaps she had not completely forgiven him after all. Last on the list were “the power of prayer” and “Isadora Duncan for a lift unto the heavens clear of the known earth.” She was acknowledging gifts, remembering whom she loved as much as those who loved her. Perhaps her closeness to death also accounts for her reference to prayer, the first since she was a child.57

  LANGE’S LAST PROJECT was a photo-essay about freedom. Its material subject was her extended family—in two locations: the garden at Euclid Street and the Steep Ravine cabin. But she insisted that the project was not about family, or love, or togetherness, or natural beauty, but about freedom and growth: “The circumstances under which people, children and their parents and their friends, feel unlocked and free. What brings it about?”58 Attempting to visualize a utopian moment, she drew on the bohemian values of her youth and her abiding anxiety about urban life. At the same time, the project came from her grandmotherhood; young children were central to it because their capacity for freedom is so close to the surface and their growth so visible. Over the years, she had many times photographed a favorite tree in back of the house, a live oak, and its growth fused in her visual consciousness with that of her grandchildren. Her photographic plan incorporated that tree, her garden, the cabin, and the rocky Marin coast as symbolic elements. But now she understood these environments through a Spinoza-like, pantheistic sensibility, seeing the sacred in all living things.

  24.5. GRANDDAUGHTER LISA, BETWEEN 1957 AND 1964

  You approach the Steep Ravine cabins from a high cliff, looking down at a spectacular piece of rocky shoreline. Their cabin was the closest to the ocean and “the spray sometimes comes right to the door,” Dorothea wrote delightedly.59 Considering the dramatic setting, the place was quite accessible—only one hundred yards from where you left the car. Dorothea had no trouble with the walk until very late in her life, when general weakness, not her bad leg, made her need help. Once during a big storm, she and Paul drove up to the cabin to see “the ocean in full action . . . the seas . . . came over the dunes and into the village of Stinson itself.” Paul loved to sit with his back against a warm rock to do “his solitary thinking,” Dorothea reported.60

  24.6. STEEP RAVINE, BETWEEN 1957 AND 1964

  Dorothea believed that people changed when they came to the cabin. They moved and stood differently—sliding into what she had called in her studio period their “natural body language.” The children became more independent, less restless, and did not fight. They explored and invented games. The water was too cold for most adults, but Paul sometimes waded in with the grandchildren. Dorothea made hundreds of photographs of children there—her grandchildren, Partridge grandchildren, visiting children. Sleeping space was limited, so she and Paul formed the habit of taking several grandchildren at a time to the cabin for a weekend; sometimes their parents drove out for the day on Sunday. These times figure vibrantly in the grandchildren’s memories. They occupied the site, made it theirs. In Dorothea’s photographs, they are collecting rocks and shells, climbing, throwing rocks into the water, splashing, digging, watching tide-pool animals, reading in the sun, reading in a sleeping bag, collecting driftwood, balancing on a floating log, eating, napping. This is where Dorothea taught her grandchildren to see, they all remember. They picture her hunched over pebbles, seaweed, or small plants that usually went unnoticed. Here they could misbehave, refuse to fall asleep, with only mild reproof from Dorothea and Paul. These interactions were not necessarily ecstatic or intense, but they were by no means casual; in such exchanges, she was adding another dimension to freedom and growth: intimacy. Besides, the interactions were material for photography, and that was never casual for her.

  Cabin life brought memories of trips with Maynard—swimming naked, camping, setting up a tepee. Now the children wore bathing suits, but the meaning was the same. Children entered a space where restrictions were relaxed. Leslie Dixon thought, in retrospect, that Dorothea and Paul were not cautious enough about watching the children as they played by the ocean.61 If this is true, it speaks of Dorothea’s strong impulse to let the children be unrestrained.

  24.7. LANGE WITH GRANDDAUGHTER LISA, BETWEEN 1957 AND 1964

  She used trips to the cabin to redo her flawed mothering. Her single-mindedness about this was so clear that everyone around her understood the behavior as compensating the grandchildren for what her children did not get. Some considered it
expiation of guilt, but that is not quite right. Her retrospection was leading not to guilt, I think, because she knew she could not have made different decisions, but to sadness, about what she had lost as well as what she had denied her children.

  She also understood that her family had invented “the cabin.” “Listen,” she wrote in one of her meditative notes to herself, “we build up the cabin in our minds, we create the myth of THE cabin in order to fill our human needs. Way deep back we know that these are a sad and sorry string of poor little shacks, with dirty windows, leaky roofs, staring blankly down over the rocks at the cold and restless sea. But our spirits thrive because here we have room to expand and generate and create our world.”62

  Dorothea’s second-favorite place was her garden. She wished KQED could film there, but the background noise was too high. She conducted personal relationships not only with the live oak but with many of the garden’s inhabitants. She was attached to a chopping block from an old Berryesa ranch that ended up in her garden. She gave some of her flowers names, reporting that “Miss Nettie O’Melvany” (daffodil) was “being sulky” this year and that “Miss Milly von Hoboken” (phlox) was in good health. She cherished a stump: “That’s a very old friend of mine. When I pass that, I pat it . . . you know, like a friend.” It was a gift in repayment of some photographic equipment she gave to a young photographer. “It was so heavy, and now through erosion, wind, rain, it’s become much lighter. Isn’t that funny what time does?”63

  DOROTHEA SPOKE FREELY of dying, often in metaphorical language but without self-dramatization or apparent despair. She remarked that the silver Navajo bracelet she had worn every day for over forty years had worn away and now weighed much less, like the tree stump.64

  After Szarkowski’s last visit, she began losing the battle against dehydration and required intravenous liquids. The dehydration damaged her body systems. She tried to make plans for Paul—her love and her need to take charge mixed as she wrote one of his Asian contacts, requesting that Paul be invited on a big trip soon after her death, perhaps to Yemen.65 Characteristically, she tried to control her dying as long as she could. She hated hospitals, having spent at least a year of her life in them, and insisted on staying home when her doctor wanted her hospitalized. She managed that until October 8, 1965, when she said to Paul, “We’re licked,” and accepted hospitalization. On the afternoon of the tenth, her physician said, “She has finished her work,” but she remained energetic enough to spend an hour with her two sons and their wives in both serious and joking conversation, Dorothea saying, “I may be here three weeks yet.” But she soon began hemorrhaging, then stopped breathing at 4:37 A.M., October 11. Her last words were, “It’s in scale.66

  25

  Photographer of Democracy

  The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive. —John Dewey 1

  A portrait is a lesson on how one human being should approach another.—Dorothea Lange, 19652

  Dorothea Lange was America’s preeminent photographer of democracy. She was also a woman of great passion. Passion is often associated with intimate relationships, particularly romantic, sexual love, and Lange’s two marriages were both love affairs of intensity. Managing those relationships as well as two children and four stepchildren, a small business of her own, then one of the most demanding jobs imaginable, not to mention disability, gave rise to conflict, pain, and lasting hurt to others. Lange was no perfect woman. Her children bore some of the costs of her prodigious photographic contribution. Always insecure in some emotional dimensions, she could be manipulative, controlling, bossy, and explosive as well as generous, loyal, perceptive, and kind. She was sometimes at her worst with those closest to her. Some may judge her choices harshly, but no one can dispute that they were hard choices. Such a life could be a bit easier today, when there is less sex discrimination and more support for working mothers, but it would still, and perhaps always, be stressful. The responsibility I take is not to judge Lange or excuse her, but to present her in the round, so to speak. She constructed her life, as we all do, through choices and constraints. What was exceptional was her talent and her willingness to reach beyond limits.

  Lange was equally passionate about democracy. Her greatest contribution was in seeing it not only as an American achievement but as an ideal not yet reached, one that she had a responsibility to promote. She came to understand this responsibility as requiring her to act—against racism, against the particularly intense exploitation of farmworkers, against the environmental destruction of not just nature but also of community and beauty.

  Her deepest passion, however, was for photography. In 1954 she responded to an appeal by U.S. Camera to name the twenty-five greatest photographs of all time. Her list included two that were indictments of injustice—a lynching and police attacking strikes at Republic Steel in 1937. But mostly she listed images of great beauty—a Stieglitz of popular trees, a Cartier-Bresson of children playing, an Ansel Adams of Alaskan mountains, a Max Yavno of a crowded beach, a Eugene Smith of Spanish women in mourning. Her tastes were always eclectic, capacious. She loved to look—at everything.

  Yet she was not tempted by the avant-garde. Unlike her close friend Imogen Cunningham, unlike her European contemporaries Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy, unlike Diane Arbus, she was not a photographer trying to startle. She did not try collage, Surrealism, multiple exposure, or dizzying angles; her ironies were soft and even her images of suffering were somehow hopeful.3 She rarely deserted classical compositional structures and elegant portraiture as she made images of poverty full of information so as to provide evidence of injustice.

  Lange’s most consistent aim was communication, but not by any means exclusively in efforts to persuade. This goal prevailed as well in portraits of studio clients and of Asian peasants. She disliked narcissism: “. . . you’re not talking to yourself, you’re talking to others. And that’s the difference between being a professional and being an amateur.”4 Conceiving of herself partly as an educator, she taught visual as much as social acuity. “If you can come close to the truth there are consequences from the photographs. I’m not talking about social work. It can be in the area of something that is extraordinarily beautiful for its own sake . . . the consequence of its beauty is in the transmission of it.”5 In pursuit of communication, Lange recognized the limits of what photography could do. She wanted her pictures “fortified” by words, and she regretted that viewers rarely took in her words.

  She rarely separated her artistic from her social commitment. Her vision of democracy included democratizing art, making it possible for art to become a public resource, part of the national heritage, as well as a luxury commodity. Having experienced the New Deal’s expanded program of public arts, she never stopped trying to find support for public photography. For her, there was no “pure” art, as for Paul Taylor there was no “pure” scholarship, if purity meant avoiding citizenly responsibility. I am inclined to think that “pure” art is a myth, arising from a conception of the artist as floating unmoored to her society. Lange, by contrast, made no attempt to camouflage her moorings. Independent and original, she was nevertheless shaped by experience both individual and historical, from polio to the Cold War.

  The democracy Lange honored was a particular, historical kind, not a timeless one. She was a member of a 1930s and 1940s popular front that joined liberals, leftists, industrial unionists, and some populists at a moment of unique political opportunity. These groups created the grassroots political pressure that pushed the United States some distance toward economic as well as political democracy.

  But Lange’s work transcended the popular-front vision. Influenced by the cosmopolitanism of her San Francisco artists’ community, by multiracial California, and by Paul Taylor, Lange developed a commitment to antiracism that was extremely unusual among whites at the time. The California context also taught her
that “race” in the United States was a matter not only of white and black but of many other groups as well, with unique histories. She made portraits of people of color that were rare at the time, portraying them as individuals, thoughtful, complex, and dignified (the hackneyed term cannot be avoided). They neither defer nor posture, at a time when mainstream white images of people of color were undignified in the extreme. They are hardworking and rational actors. They often display uncommon grace and elegance of movement; she could make bodies as expressive as faces. Lange and Taylor ceded some ground to political opportunism by featuring white “Okies” in their appeals for better treatment of farmworkers, but they did not surrender their commitment to advocating for “nonwhite” populations. They both challenged—Lange with particular bravery—the internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans, an extreme violation of both citizens’ and human rights. They intended their work in Asia to continue this antiracism on an international scale.