Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  10. Tony Gould, A Summer Plague: Polio and Its Survivors (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 5; Paul, Poliomyelitis, 13; Fred Davis, Passage Through Crisis: Polio Victims and Their Families (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963), 36–38; Marc Shell, Polio and Its Aftermath: The Paralysis of Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 67.

  11. Paul, Poliomyelitis, 2–3.

  12. Leonard Kriegel, The Long Walk Home (New York: Appleton-Century, 1964), 8. My description of a child’s polio experience is also taken from Raymond Leslie Goldman, Even the Night (New York: Macmillan, 1947)—the polio memoir of a writer born in the same year as Lange, 1895, who developed the illness in 1899. Other useful polio memoirs include Alan Marshall, I Can Jump Puddles (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1956); Turnley Walker, Rise Up and Walk (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1950). Several studies synthesize many interviews and memoirs: Shell, Polio and Its Aftermath; Edmund J. Sass, Polio’s Legacy: An Oral History (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1996; Finger, Elegy for a Disease; Davis, Passage through Crisis; Vermont State Board of Health, Infantile Paralysis in Vermont; Jill Lewis, unpublished memoir, and interviews with Jill Lewis, March and April 2007.

  13. Quoted in Finger, Elegy for a Disease, 56–57.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Muirhead Little, “An Analysis of a Series of Cases of Infantile Paralysis, with some Notes on Treatment,” British Medical Journal 2(1900); 581.

  16. The mildest included applying “counter-irritants,” such as mustard plasters or cupping, aimed at reducing the “congestion” of the spinal cord by bringing the blood to the surface, but physicians also tried bloodletting, withdrawing spinal fluid, purgatives, and enemas. Some of the more up-to-date experimented with using disinfectants inside the body; one tried a nasal spray of hydrogen peroxide, another ammonium salicylate. Others injected urotropin or Adrenalin into the spinal column. Still others used electric current. Naomi Rogers, Dirt and Disease: Polio Before FDR (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 87 ff.; G. M. Hammond, “The Restoration of Vitality to Muscles Which Have Been Completely Paralyzed from Poliomyelitis,” Transactions of the American Electrotherapy Association (New York, 1892), 161–67.

  17. Kriegel, The Long Walk Home, 14.

  18. One man recalled in his memoir how his left leg, having become two inches shorter than his right, was stretched. His mother and a nurse stood by his head, holding down his arms and shoulders, while the doctor pulled down on his leg. Fifty years later, this polio recalled it as “an Inquisitional rack.” Goldman, Even the Night, 9; further examples in Gould, A Summer Plague, Part II.

  19. HM interview with Joy Lange Boardman; Robert W. Lovett, M.D., The Treatment of Infantile Paralysis (Philadelphia: P. Blakiston’s Son & Co., 1917), 46 ff.; John Ruhräh, M.D., and Erwin E. Mayer, M.D., Poliomyelitis in All Its Aspects (Philadelphia: Lea & Febiger, 1917), chapter XII; F.P. Millard, D.O., ed., Poliomyelitis (Kirksville, Missouri: Journal Printing Co., 1918), chapter V and p. 116.

  20. Shell, Polio and Its Aftermath, 41.

  21. KQED 10 and 12.

  22. Marshall, I Can Jump Puddles, 12.

  23. Quoted in Shell, Polio and Its Aftermath, 30.

  24. Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Viking, 1988), chapter 4.

  25. Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 38.

  26. All of the information regarding the divorce comes from papers pursuant to the divorce proceedings, copied by Eileen Thompson for HM. The interpretation of what transpired, however, is entirely my own.

  27. To the best of my knowledge, Hudson County criminal records and local newspapers contain no account of the charge against Henry.

  28. In December 1907, Joan passed on money from her librarian’s wages to him. Two years later, Henry gave her money and a commitment to supply eighteen dollars a week, telling her that he was now earning “a little money in real estate.” Still, he and Joan sold the property at 62 Hudson Street, his father’s grocery store. In 1914, he was sending seven dollars a week from “the west,” where he was working, still under a different name.

  29. In 1916, Henry Nutzhorn was in Wilmington, Delaware, a salesman for the Pennsylvania and Delaware Development Corporation (probably a real estate venture). There, in 1918, apparently by coincidence, John Lange, Joan’s younger brother, ran into Henry; Henry announced that he had given up any plans for a family life with Joan; John angrily responded, don’t you realize that you’ve been keeping my sister “in a hole”—that is, keeping her from meeting someone. Yet Henry met with her several more times.

  30. CD to MM, September 9, 1976. Photocopies of these letters were given to me by Consie’s daughter Becky Jenkins.

  31. “Although I was a little child, I hated it,” she recalled; Riess, 5. But it is unlikely that a very ill seven-year-old would have thought this; it was probably an impression formed later in her life.

  32. Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 21–22.

  33. Riess, 1–4.

  34. Ibid., 7, 60.

  35. Ibid., 5.

  36. Ibid., 6.

  37. Ibid.

  2. Apprentice to the City

  1. Today, Seward Park High School occupies the site.

  2. Richman created playgrounds, lunch programs, health and eye examinations, and special programs for foreign-language-speaking and gifted students. She converted her own house into a social center for teachers.

  3. Riess, 13.

  4. Ibid., 82.

  5. Lange quotes as recounted to author by CG and in her interview with TH, August 26, 1975; Susan Glenn, Daughters of the Shtetl: Life and Labor in the Immigrant Generation (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990), 208–9, 220–21.

  6. I refer, of course, to Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City.

  7. Robert Coles, untitled essay, in Dorothea Lange, Photographs of a Lifetime (Millerton, New York: Aperture, 1982), 10.

  8. Riess, 23.

  9. Ibid., 2.

  10. Ibid., 19.

  11. Her highest grades were 80s but many were in the 60s. Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 15; Meltzer’s information was taken from her school record, now at Louis D. Brandeis High School Annex, 165 West 65th St., New York, N.Y.

  12. Riess, 24.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Meltzer, Dorothea Lange, 17.

  15. Kenneth I. Jackson, ed., The Encyclopedia of New York (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 1137.

  16. Arthur Frank Wertheim, The New York Little Renaissance: Iconoclasm, Modernism, and Nationalism in American Culture, 1908–1917 (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 135.

  17. Riess, 60.

  18. I wonder if Lange ever knew that she and Duncan were born on the same day, May 26.

  19. Elizabeth Kendall, Where She Danced (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), xiii.

  20. Riess, 61.

  21. Elizabeth Francis, “From Event to Monument: Modernism, Feminism and Isadora Duncan,” American Studies 35, no. 1 (1994): 25: see also Ann Daly, “Isadora Duncan and the Distinction of Dance,” American Studies 35, no. 1 (1994), 5–23.

  22. In fact, Duncan’s choreography, her look, and the relation of her choreography to her music were carefully composed.

  23. Riess, 27.

  24. Doud, DL, May 22, 1964.

  25. Nat Herz, “Dorothea Lange in Perspective: A Reappraisal of the FSA and an Interview,” Infinity 12, no. 4 (1963): 10.

  26. Genthe, quoted in L. Victoria de L’Arbre, “Photography in California: 1900–1910,” in Images of El Dorado: A History of California Photography, 1850–1975, ed. Joseph A. Baird (Davis: University of California, 1975); Oscar Lewis, Bay Window Bohemia (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1956), 180–83.

  27. Anthony W. Lee, “Picturing San Francisco’s Chinatown: Th
e Photo Albums of Arnold Genthe,” Visual Resources [Amsterdam] 12: 107–14; John Kuo Wei Tchen, Genthe’s Photographs of San Francisco’s Old Chinatown (New York: Dover, 1994).

  28. Riess, 28–29. At least one person close to the adult Dorothea believes she had an affair with Genthe.

  29. Portrait is LoC negative LC-G399-0004; drawing is LC-G405-T01-0138.

  30. Arnold Genthe, As I Remember (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1936), 119.

  31. Riess, 28, 30–31.

  32. Ibid., 45.

  33. Doud, DL.

  34. Riess, 32–34.

  35. Ibid., 45–46. Lange did not mention the name of this photographer.

  36. Davis was an upstart competitor of the well-known Napoleon Sarony. As was common in the late nineteenth century, he began as a lithographer and switched to photography in the mid-1860s. He photographed Oscar Wilde and reputedly paid Sarah Bernhardt fifteen hundred dollars to pose for him.

  37. Riess, 48–49, 51.

  38. Ibid., 50.

  39. Ibid., 37.

  40. Bonnie Yochelson, “Clarence H. White, Peaceful Warrior,” in Pictorialism into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography, ed. Marianne Fulton (New York: Rizzoli, 1996), 18, 26, 54.

  41. White sought to redefine pictorialism more inclusively: “ ‘Pictorial photography is simply a name applied to photography that really has . . . construction and expression’ ”; Christian A. Peterson, After the Photo-Secession: American Pictorial Photography, 1910–1955 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 86.

  42. Riess, 38.

  43. New York City had opened a path for women photographers earlier, with the 1859 establishment of Cooper Union, a free, privately endowed college of architecture, art, and engineering that accepted women students from the beginning. Many of White’s female students became professional photographers. Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994); Peterson, After the Photo-Secession, 104.

  44. “I don’t think he mentioned technique once, how it’s done, or shortcuts, or photographic manipulations,” Lange stated. Riess, 39.

  45. Gilpin, quoted in Yochelson, “Clarence H. White, Peaceful Warrior,” 66.

  46. Riess, 75, 76, 86.

  47. Ibid., 64–69. Lange called Landon president of the club, but its records show a Landon as first vice president in 1917–1918. Pleiades Club Collection, box 2, folders 6–9, Fales Special Collections, Bobst Library, New York University. Thanks to Melissa Milewski for research on the Pleiades Club.

  48. “I think we conjure up and invent people, and then whoever happens to be there is the recipient of our imagination. . . . It wasn’t really me. I must have been aware of that, too, because I always pitied him just a little,” Lange said. Riess, 68.

  49. Ibid., 80.

  50. Doud, DL.

  3. Becoming a Photographer

  1. Martin, Dorothea’s younger brother, also took the name Lange after joining his sister in San Francisco.

  2. Information on San Francisco from the following sources: U.S. census; T. H. Watkins and R. R. Olmsted, Mirror of the Dream: An Illustrated History of San Francisco (San Francisco: Scrimshaw Press, 1976); Jerry Flamm, Good Life in Hard Times: San Francisco in the ’20s & ’30s (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1978); Judd Kahn, Imperial San Francisco: Politics and Planning in an American City, 1897–1906 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979); Charles Wollenberg, Golden Gate Metropolis: Perspectives on Bay Area History (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, 1985); William Issel and Robert Cherny, San Francisco, 1865–1932: Politics, Power and Urban Development (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Robert O’Brien, This is San Francisco: A Classic Portrait of the City (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994), a reprint of his columns from 1939 ff.; Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

  3. For a discussion of regional variations in the meaning of “white” in the United States, see Linda Gordon, The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), chapter 3.

  4. TH interview with Willard Van Dyke (1977), OM.

  5. TH interview with Roger Sturtevant, n.d., OM.

  6. Doud, DL; CD to MM, September 4, 1976.

  7. Twenty-six photographers were listed in the 1919 city business directory, not counting the commercial and view photographers, flashlight photographers, photographic colorists, or suppliers of photographic equipment.

  8. By the year 1900, there were already 3,500 women listed as photographers in the U.S. census.

  9. Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 210.

  10. Colleen McDannell, Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 46–47; Melissa A. McEuen, Seeing America: Women Photographers Between the Wars (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000), 2–3.

  11. Sally Stein, “Starting from Pictorialism: Notable Continuities in the Modernization of California Photography,” in Capturing Light: Masterpieces of California Photography, 1850 to the Present, ed. Drew Heath Johnson (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

  12. Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers (New York: Abbeville Press, 1994), 150, 156; Rosenblum, speech at the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, 1990. In the decade between 1910 and 1920, the California Camera Club organized yearly trips to Yosemite and mounted exhibits.

  13. Riess, 18.

  14. Lange’s records make it impossible to calculate her fees, but before the Depression she had no economic problems, even when she was supporting two children and a husband.

  15. Quoted in Vicki Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White: A Biography (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 71–72, 87.

  16. San Francisco Chronicle, January 22, 1920.

  17. Camera Craft 27 (1920): 378.

  18. Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers, 155.

  19. Christina Page Gardner, “The Contemplation of Dorothea,” unpublished manuscript, author’s possession; CD to MM October 25, 1976.

  20. Riess, 92, 89.

  21. TH, Roger Sturtevant. Dorothea’s own reputation as an interior decorator was such that in 1926, when artist Otis Oldfield got married, he asked her to create the decorations. Doud, interview with Ruth Oldfield, AAA; Beatrice Judd Ryan, “The Bridge Between Then and Now,” typescript of memoir, unpublished manuscript, University of California/Berkeley Library, 24.

  22. Ryan, “The Bridge Between Then and Now,” 13.

  23. HM interview with Greta Mitchell, July 24, 1998; Doud, TH; HM interview with Joy Lange Boardman, October 14, 1999.

  24. This kind of sexual daring was more common among female photographers than one might suppose. Rosenblum says that Lange was one of this group, but I have never seen a nude photograph of Lange; Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers, 164.

  25. Imogen’s son Rondal Partridge and his daughter Betsy Partridge described this incident to me, Rondal quoting what his father had said.

  26. They developed a pattern of not talking about work, in a mutual but unarticulated strategy to defend their friendship against the tensions that could have arisen from Dorothea’s drive and occasional bossiness and from Imogen’s occasional resentments and caustic tongue. In one of her less straightforward comments, Cunningham remarked, “Dorothea and I have always been such friends that we are more liable to talk about our offspring than about our work.” KQED 2; IC to Minor White, May 20, 1964, Imogen Cunningham Papers, AAA.

  27. When Imogen was four, her father moved the family to the Puget Sound Co-operative Colony at Port Angeles, Washington, on the Strait of Juan de Fuca. This was the first of several utopian communities established in Washington that derived their social philosophy from pre-Marxist socialist thinkers like Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, and Edward Bellamy. The Cunninghams could not make a living there and moved to Seattle a few years later, where Isaac began a wood and coal business
.

  28. Richard Lorenz, Imogen Cunningham: Ideas Without End (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993), plate 1.

  29. Like Dorothea, Imogen knew very early on that she wanted to be a photographer, and bought herself a mail-order camera while a college student. From 1907 to 1909 she worked for the studio of Edward Curtis, famed early photographer of western landscape and American Indians. Upon her graduation, her college sorority gave her a fellowship of five hundred dollars (sisterhood indeed!) and she went to Dresden in 1909 to study photographic chemistry at the Technische Hochschule. Here and in Paris, she saw the best of European modernist photography and realized that composition interested her more than chemistry. Stephanie Bart, “Imogen Cunningham: Fame, Personality, Work” (B.A. thesis, Ohio State University, 1976), 64.

  30. HM interview with RP, July 7, 1999. As if in confirmation, he appears handsome and slightly sneering in a Lange portrait.

  31. Riess, 88. Unless otherwise cited, the information on Kanaga is taken from Barbara Head Millstein and Sarah M. Lowe, Consuelo Kanaga: American Photographer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992).

  32. Kanaga’s reputation was such that Langston Hughes, on a visit to Carmel, came up to San Francisco so Kanaga could photograph him. Millstein and Lowe, Consuelo Kanaga, 33–35. She traveled to the South in 1948 and 1950, where she made some documentary photographs of black workers, but was not able to work there long enough to perfect a way of using her portrait style in the fields.

  33. Both quotations from Amy Stark, ed., The Letters of Tina Modotti to Edward Weston (Tucson: Center for Creative Photography, 1986), 30.

  34. She had hoped to have the place to herself, but “the photographer was there—all day long—developing, printing, spotting—you know how nervous I get working with people around.” (Not a particularly appropriate response to the woman who had generously offered to share her space.) “Tomorrow night we gather at Consuelo’s,” she wrote in one letter. Ibid., 40, 42.

  35. It is ironic, as historian Naomi Rosenblum points out, that she declined to try photojournalism during the Spanish Civil War because she considered it men’s work. Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers, 170.