Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  12. Personal Justice Denied, 6.

  13. Jeanie Cooper Carson, “Interpreting National Identity in Time of War: Competing Views in United States Office of War Information (OWI) Photography, 1940–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1995), 76–77.

  14. Jason Scott Smith, “New Deal Public Works at War: The WPA and the Japanese American Internment,” Pacific Historical Review 72, no. 1 (2003): 63–92.

  15. FSA staff assisted Japanese Americans in disposing of their belongings; the FSA, along with the San Francisco Federal Reserve, was assigned to hold Japanese American land and property, until the WRA took over the job in 1943. The two Arkansas WRA camps, Rohwer and Jerome, were built on FSA land originally purchased to help settle poor southern families. Some internees who left the camps to take temporary jobs as agricultural laborers in western states lived in settlements run by the FSA. Attorney General Biddle planned to use FSA camps as assembly centers if necessary, but this did not happen, quite possibly due to opposition from West Coast FSA staff. Greg Robinson email and his By Order of the President.

  16. The Wartime Civil Control Administration originally conducted the evacuation and was succeeded by the War Relocation Authority. I could never quite distinguish the roles of the WCCA, the WRA, and the military police in the internment, not to mention the War Manpower Commission, the Department of Justice, and the FSA, and I suspect my confusion reflects the reality of the situation.

  17. Her workhorse was a Rolleiflex, which used 2-1/4″ × 3-1/4″ roll film. She also carried an older Rolleiflex, which had been Paul’s during World War I and during his field work on Mexican labor, in case hers malfunctioned. She also packed her heavier cameras: a Zeiss Juwel, a ground-glass camera, urged upon her by Ansel Adams, and a Graflex, her old favorite for studio work but too heavy to carry around for any length of time. TH interview with RP and CG, August 26, 1975.

  18. On several occasions when Christina was not available, Dorothea summoned one of her sons into service, and Paul accompanied her on at least four trips. Box 1, folder 13, PST Bancroft.

  19. Dorothea came to see that Christina had no gift for photography—as Christina Gardner herself told me without resentment—but for those months, she was an ideal assistant. Homer Page, by contrast, became a superb photographer, his work sometimes considered a bridge between Lange and Robert Franks.

  20. Broad & Co. of Los Angeles was engaged by the Wartime Civil Control Administration, Public Relations Division.

  21. Transcript of conference call, n.d. The participants are identified by letters, but the conversation allowed identification of some participants: Colonel Boekel, Braeden, Colonel Evans, and Colonel Hass, with an an unnamed “B” giving out instructions. RG 499, boxes 1–17, .

  22. Author’s interview with CG.

  23. Riess, 189–194, 182–183, 189; Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 241–242; Dorothea Lange to Dan Jones, letter dated July 13, 1964; Judith Fryer Davidov, “ ‘The Color of My Skin, the Shape of My Eyes’: Photographs of the Japanese American Internment by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams, and Toyo Miyatake,” Yale Journal of Criticism 9, no. 2 (1996): 226.

  24. Riess, 189. She got permission to give out one photograph: She had made a set of photographs of the Shibuya family before evacuation; when the elder Mrs. Shibuya died in camp, her daughter asked for one of the pictures. Karen Becker Ohrn, “What You See Is What You Get: Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams at Manzanar,” Journalism History 4, no. 1 (Spring 1977): 22.

  25. To make this case, she interviewed white employers—far outside her assignment. In the Sacramento delta she made four single-spaced typed pages of notes on interviews with owners of commercial farms regarding the cost of losing Japanese American workers. She heard an argument in which a “Caucasian farmer representing a company was trying to get his workers to continue working in the asparagus fields until Saturday when they were scheduled to leave. The workers wanted to quit tonight in order to have time to get cleaned up, wash their clothes, etc.” Lange field notes.

  26. War Relocation Authority photographs 537475, 536430, 537530, NARA. All photographs referred to in this chapter are from this source.

  27. Elena Tajima Creef, Imaging Japanese America: The Visual Construction of Citizenship, Nation, and the Body (New York: NYU Press, 2004), 40. Ironically, while photographing such a sale, she and Paul bought a beautiful tansu (chest) for only $25—surprisingly, they did not feel that they were taking unfair advantage. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 234.

  28. Riess, 185.

  29. Miné Okubo, Citizen 13660 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1946), 59.

  30. Riess, 187–188.

  31. Armor and Wright, Manzanar, 7. In Citizen 13660, Miné Okubo draws scenes like this from memory.

  32. Jean Kariya to author, October 24, 2006; Smith, “New Deal Public Works at War,” 73.

  33. Description from Valerie J. Matsumoto, Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919–1982 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 104–5. When some women complained that men were peering at them over the partition between men’s and women’s showers, a camp official responded, “ ‘Are you sure you women are not climbing the walls to look at the men?’ ” Armor and Wright, Manzanar, 9.

  34. She wanted to go to Tule Lake, where the WRA was sending the “obstreperous ones,” as Lange called those branded “disloyals” by the army, but could not get permission. Riess, 193–94.

  35. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 231–33.

  36. John C. Welchman, “Turning Japanese (In),” Artforum 27 (1989): 152–56; Emily Medvec, introduction to Born Free and Equal: An Exhibition of Ansel Adams Photographs (Washington, D.C.: Echolight, 1984).

  37. The U.S. Patriot Act after September 11, 2001, stimulated efforts to use U.S. census data for racial- and ethnic-based targeting. William Seltzer and Margo Anderson, “The Dark Side of Numbers: The Role of Population Data Systems in Human Rights Abuses,” Social Research 68, no. 2 (2001); William Seltzer and Margo Anderson, “Census Confidentiality Under the Second War Powers Act, 1942–1947,” at http://www.uwm.edu/~margo/govstat/Seltzer-AndersonPAA2007paper3-12-2007.documentary.

  38. KQED, 15.

  20. Unruly War Photography: The Office of War Information and Defense Workers

  1. As a result of the administration’s push for propaganda as part of the war effort, by the spring of 1941 there were 153 such offices in the executive branch. The OWI was created in June 1942 in an attempt to coordinate their work. Allan M. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda: The Office of War Information 1942–1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978); Jeanie Cooper Carson, “Interpreting National Identity in Time of War: Competing Views in United States Office of War Information (OWI) Photography, 1940–1945” (Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 1995), 6.

  2. It was published in Afrikaans, Arabic, French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. Winkler, The Politics of Propaganda, 57.

  3. An indication of the OWI’s reluctance to challenge racism was that it referred to Negro pilots as “combat flyers [sic];” the label pilot was limited to whites in Victory. Victory 1, no. 5.

  4. All the FSA photographers disdained OWI work: Edwin Locke, “FSA,” U.S. Camera, February 1941, 25. Ben Shahn raged against its limits: it was run by admen who wanted glitzy, positive propaganda, he charged, never education about Nazism; it even banned the word Nazi, and it rejected virtually all of his suggestions. Howard Greenfeld, Ben Shahn: An Artist’s Life (New York: Random House, 1998), 189 ff. John Vachon disliked “ ‘your pretty little well planned neatly hedged red and white barned farmsteads, orderly minded Christian Pennsylvania and NY Dutch farmers. . . . They smell bad from where I sit.’ ” OWI people, in turn, considered the FSA photography project biased and detrimental to the national interest, and accused them of “employing props to create a sense of desolation and despair.” Carson, “Interpreting National Identity in Time of War,” 129, 165.

  5. Carson, “Int
erpreting National Identity in Time of War,” 92, 171–172.

  6. David A. Gray, “New Uses for Old Photos: Renovating FSA Photographs in World War II Posters,” American Studies 47, nos. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2006): 5–34. Lange’s original images are LoC 020006, 020008, 020009, 020010, and 020011-E.

  7. DL to Jess Gorkin, July 10, 1943, OM.

  8. DL to Gorkin, May 22, 1943, May 31, 1943, and June 10, 1943; Gorkin to DL, May 5, 1943, OM; Riess, 179–81.

  9. When you add in the undocumented, about 350,000 Mexicans came to work in the United States during the war. These figures resembled those for the Mexicans expelled from the United States during the Depression. The only Bracero photographs available are among those Lange held back from OWI for her personal collection: LNG42043*, for example.

  10. She agreed to a flat fee for the job ($300), but she spent so much time sitting in offices waiting for credentials that she was being paid too little and could not finish by the deadline agreed upon. DL to Gorkin, May 22, 1943, May 31, 1943, and June 10, 1943, OM; Riess, 179–181. After the first assignment, she was paid a per diem fee, $16.53, at the end of her OWI employment. Memo to “Mrs. Taylor, Dorothea Lange,” regarding “Separation (Invol.),” March 23, 1946, OM.

  11. OWI captions, OM.

  12. Victory 2, no. 2; OWI captions, OM.

  13. Gorkin to DL, March 21, 1944, OM. It was published as “Exchange Students Master Vital Skills in American Universities,” Victory 2, no. 1, 60–62.

  14. Joseph C. Whitnah, A History of Richmond, California (Richmond, California: Richmond Chamber of Commerce, 1944), 123–127; Roger W. Lotchin, The Bad City in the Good War: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Oakland and San Diego (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 194, 214; T. H. Watkins and R. R. Olmsted, Mirror of the Dream: An Illustrated History of San Francisco (San Francisco: Scrimshaw Press, 1976), 247–48; Charles Wollenberg, Photographing the Second Gold Rush: Dorothea Lange and the Bay Area at War, 1941–1945 (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1995), 12.

  15. Lange notes, OM; Robert O. Self, American Babylon: Race and the Struggle for Postwar Oakland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Wollenberg, Photographing the Second Gold Rush.

  16. Karen Tsujimoto, Dorothea Lange: Archive of an Artist (Oakland: Oakland Museum, 1995), 30–31; Wollenberg, Photographing the Second Gold Rush, 17.

  17. KQED 22.

  18. LNG 42043.8.

  19. As always, Lange’s best work was critique. By “critique,” I do not mean negativity, for she obviously relished some of the changes, but, rather, questions, pointing out contradictions. Adams, by contrast, was more exclusively negative: “At Richmond I was exposed to a cross-section of sheer brutal life that exceeded anything in my experience.” AA to Alfred Stieglitz, December 25, 1944, in Ansel Adams: Letters and Images 1916–1984, ed. Mary Street Alinder and Andrea Gray Stillman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 154.

  20. Wollenberg, Photographing the Second Gold Rush, 13.

  21. “Richmond Took a Beating,” Fortune, February 1945, included nineteen of the Adams/Lange photographs.

  22. About her famous “Argument in a Trailer Court,” Homer Page recalled that the subjects were a husband and wife “uprooted from Oklahoma . . . to enter a radically different kind of life, and driven apart by the pressures of long and conflicting hours. Their inner relationship is revealed . . . in that shot. It’s the space between that counts.” Quoted in Mark Durden, ed., Dorothea Lange (London: Phaidon, 2006), introduction, unpaginated.

  23. DL to Nancy Newhall, May 13, 1958, Beaumont and Newhall Papers, GRI.

  24. OWI captions, OM.

  25. LNG 42010.8.

  26. Wollenberg, Photographing the Second Gold Rush, 69.

  27. LNG 42070.2.

  28. These recollections are Christina Gardner’s. Homer Page and Dorothea’s brother, Martin, were already working in the Richmond shipyards. Martin had arranged a job for Dan there, and he tried to discipline his nephew to focus on work, but Dan was fired in six weeks—at a time, Rondal Partridge pointed out, “when even a one-legged carpenter could get work.” Author’s interview with RP; TH interview with RP and CG, August 26, 1975.

  29. Lange quotation from TH interview with Van Dyke. Christina Gardner made a list of the equipment in Adams’s car: 2 Juwel cameras, a Contax, a Super Ikonta, two cartons of flashbulbs, two reflectors, two tripods—“one a massive arrangement guaranteed to withstand a hurricane,” a droplight with cord, several boxes of 35-mm. film loose on the seat, plus a carton of various sheet and roll films, two suitcases containing she didn’t know what, a few bottles of chemicals, miscellaneous cords and light holders, his ten-gallon hat, a raincoat, a blanket, chains for the car, and a pair of large white tennis shoes. Christina Page Gardner, “The Contemplation of Dorothea,” unpublished manuscript, author’s possession.

  30. Gardner, ibid.

  31. TH interview with AA, September 15, 1976.

  32. Although “open-minded,” Partridge recalled, Lange was firm “about her working methods . . . allowed nothing to interfere with the way she worked, which is why she had so much trouble on the Richmond job with Ansel.” TH interview with RP and CG.

  33. Lange quoted in Sandra S. Phillips, “Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange: A Friendship of Differences,” in Ansel Adams/New Light: Essays on His Legacy and Legend (San Francisco: Friends of Photography, 1993), 51.

  34. TH interview with AA.

  35. TH interview with AA. Lange was not the only West Coast photographer to question Adams’s relatively lavish lifestyle. Most others, including Edward Weston, had to live frugally in order to do the photography they wanted. Brett Weston, Edward’s son and a superb photographer himself, commented, “Ansel Adams is touring Scotland right now in a Rolls Royce with a chauffeur. When I go over next month, I’ll be in a VW bus.” James Danziger and Barnaby Conrad III, Interviews with Master Photographers (New York: Paddington Press, 1977), 156.

  36. TH interview with AA; Ansel Adams, An Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988), 225.

  37. AA to Edward Weston, November 1938, quoted in James R. Mellow, Walker Evans (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 381.

  38. Elizabeth Partridge and Sally Stein, Quizzical Eye: The Photography of Rondal Partridge (San Francisco: California Historical Society Press, 2003), 25.

  39. Alinder and Stillman, eds., Ansel Adams, 129, 154.

  40. PST to DL, undated letters (1943 and 1944), JDC.

  41. PST to DL, “Saturday,” from train (1943 or 1944), JDC.

  Scene 5

  1. William Kent was a congressman from California. His sons were Roger, a lawyer, and Sherman, a Yale history professor and early CIA analyst, often described as “the father of intelligence analysis.”

  2. Quotation from Clifton Fadiman, “Who Are They?” in Milwaukee Journal, Sunday magazine, February 16, 1952, My thanks to Arthur MacEwan for finding this for me.

  3. KQED 23.

  21. Surviving in the Cold

  1. Her weight dropped from 120 to 87 in 1943. US Civil Service Commission, Certificate of Medical Examination, July 28, 1943. She was 5'2".

  2. DL to Edward Steichen, July 7, 1954, OM. All Steichen correspondence in this chapter is from OM.

  3. The photograph can be found on the Web at http://www.afterimagegallery.com/lifeclarkCPO.htm.

  4. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 235.

  5. The following medical history comes from notes by one of her physicians (undated), carton 88, folder 19, PST Bancroft. Where possible, I consulted with medical and history of medicine experts to try to explain these treatments, but for several there is too little information available. I am particularly grateful to Jed Appelman, Judith Leavitt, Lewis Leavitt, Jill Lewis, Milton Meltzer, and Helen Nestor for help in understanding Lange’s ailments.

  6. Called the “Sippy” treatment, it called for three ounces of a mixture of half milk and half cream every hour, along with powders of magnesium and soda and bismuth and soda; eggs, cereal, and creamy foods were to be added gradually after ten days. O
liver T. Osborne and Morris Fishbein, Handbook of Therapy (Chicago: American Medical Association, 1920), 295.

  7. MM interviews with physicians and PST.

  8. Taylor FOIA file, FBI San Francisco memo, February 11, 1949, quoting Professor Edward W. Strong, 9,

  9. DL to Nancy Newhall, March 18, 1958, box 68, folder 3, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Papers, GRI. Lange’s typed lists of categories, n.d., JDC.

  10. John Morris of Magnum to DL, letters dated April 9, 1955, and June 18, 1955, JDC; MM interview with John Morris; HM interview with Burt Glinn, July 19, 2000.

  11. Beaumont Newhall, “The Aspen Photo Conference,” Aperture 3, no. 3 (1955): 3–4.

  12. Lange continued to be connected to the magazine over the long haul. Editor Minor White corresponded with her frequently, as did the first funder, photographer Shirley Burden, great-great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt and an admirer of Lange’s work.

  13. Shots she mentioned included an aerial view of the town, followed by autumn foliage, battered jeeps next to an old building, and the beautiful brass clock in the lobby of the hotel where they stayed—not very convincing as a narrative. Newhall, “The Aspen Photo Conference,” 5, 7.

  14. There must be room “for rearrangement, for probing, for balance, for discard, for embrace.” “Aspen Conference,” undated typescript, JDC.

  15. She may have given the course more often, but there are only two years’ worth of documentation in her papers in OM. The fee was $300, which seems high, but it probably included darkroom access and use of cameras. She did not think of this as a continuing commitment, however. DL to Minor White, March 15, 1957, JDC.