Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  16. Copied out by Lange, OM; the poem can be found in Wallace Stevens, Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: Library of America, 1997), 70.

  17. “Person-to-Person,” New York Times, March 20, 1955; copy at OM.

  18. She urged them to photograph when they first woke, and/or at set intervals, such as 10:00 A.M., noon, and 2:00 P.M. Photographs could be realistic or symbolic, and students could begin by bringing in rough proofs, but by the end of the course they would be expected to bring in folios of good prints. From these, one from each student would be selected and all of these integrated into “a meaningful visual essay which will be submitted to a national picture magazine.” I don’t think the submissions were ever made, and it seems a typical Lange hubris to think that this could be accomplished with twenty photographs by twenty people.

  19. KQED 3.

  20. These letters are at OM and in JDC.

  21. Mary Ellen Leary, “The Power of a Tenacious Man,” The Nation, October 12, 1974, 333–38.

  22. Greg Mitchell, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady: Richard Nixon vs. Helen Gahagan Douglas—Sexual Politics and the Red Scare, 1950 (New York: Random House, 1998), 21.

  23. When Lange was hospitalized in 1945, Taylor and Gahagan Douglas corresponded about her condition; PST to Helen Gahagan Douglas, undated letter, box 5, folder 12, PST Bancroft. When Paul sent her a copy of the catalog from Lange’s MoMA show, she wrote back, “I walked again in the valleys . . . hand in hand . . . with you and Dorothea.” OM.

  24. Mitchell, Tricky Dick and the Pink Lady, 29. Lawrence Hewes of the FSA believed it was Taylor who convinced her to run. HM interview with Lawrence Hewes, June 6, 1999.

  25. Dies’s operation became the infamous House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).

  26. Goldschmidt “held the fort alone on this 160 A. Limit . . .” PST to DL, April 24, 1944, JDC. At dinner on a trip to Washington, Taylor heard Goldschmidt’s story of being called before the Dies Committee, and he wrote to Dorothea, “Fantastic proceedings star chamber. Do you believe in the capitalistic system? Do you believe in God? Do you believe in immortality of the soul? Why did you fight in Spain? . . . Why did you join the Washington coop bookstore?” PST to DL, May 6, 1943, JDC.

  27. His FBI file (in the author’s possession) is several inches thick. However, like most dossiers released under the Freedom of Information Act, it is only fragmentary—in the several hundred pages I have, more than half the text is blacked out and another 30–40 percent is filler—repeated cross-referencing sheets with no information. Taylor’s dossier is entirely unreliable as an account of what he did and thought, but as evidence about McCarthyism, it is informative. These surveillance and interview reports are notoriously inaccurate. He is frequently referred to as Paul F. Taylor and once he was confused with another Paul Taylor, who apparently showed up on a wire tap as an acquaintance of Alger Hiss.

  28. Asked by the FBI to list his memberships, Taylor named thirteen, mostly learned societies such as the American Economics Association, but also Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Berkeley Faculty Club, the Washington Cosmos Club, and four political affiliations—the Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy (UCB faculty and students raised fifteen hundred dollars in 1938 to send an ambulance to the Spanish Loyalists), the Committee on American Principles and Fair Play (opposing the internment of Japanese Americans), the National Consumers League (a Progressive-era organization campaigning for better working conditions through consumer power), of which he was an honorary vice president, and the National Citizens Council for Migrant Labor, of which he was honorary chairman.

  29. The only named sources in the FBI reports are representatives of the Associated Farmers, the California Farm Bureau Federation, the Prune and Apricot Growers, and the San Francisco American Legion’s “Radical Research Committee.” They were explicit, if often misinformed, about the bases on which they judged Taylor a Communist: he favored “too many advantages to the workers at the expense of the employers, and also he advocates dividing up all the lands and giving them to the workers;” or he wanted to restrict their water. A few had probably neither met Taylor nor read his work, such as the author of these statements: “a caustic, acid and fanatically minded person. . . .” “A person of mediocre ability permeated with radicalism.” (Someone who had met Taylor would have to hoot at such a mischaracterization.) Others who denounced his anti–big business ideas nevertheless conceded that there was no reason to doubt his loyalty to the United States. One or two (it is impossible to tell when the same source is being quoted in additional reports) witnesses were FBI plants within the Communist party. These people, I have to conclude, were just lying. Supporting that conclusion is the fact that FBI agents added the caveat, following nearly every charge, that the “reliable confidential informant . . . will neither furnish a signed statement nor testify before a Loyalty Hearing Board.” Other FBI agents tried and failed to find evidence that he had misused his university or federal position to promote the 160-acre limit.

  30. PST/Riess, vol. 1, 303–313.

  31. Her FBI file is in the author’s possession. The FBI referred to Blitzstein as Blitzenstein. Among other allegations against Lange were telephone calls to Euclid Street from someone under surveillance; her contacts with photographers Hansel Mieth and Otto Hagel, labeled as Reds; membership in the American Artists’ Congress, established in 1936 to unite artists against “war, fascism, and reaction”; and her support of the New York Photo League.

  32. Supporters of agribusiness dominated the board of regents, two-thirds of whom were corporate lawyers, executives, or bankers, while there was no representative of labor, small farmers, or intellectuals. The board included, for example, A. P. Giannini, the head of Bank of America and the largest agribusiness owner in the state; Charles Collins Teague, a large citrus grower and a major fund-raiser for AF; John Francis Neylan, an attorney for the Hearst interests and Safeway (tightly integrated with California agribusiness) and also fund-raiser for AF; and Mortimer Fleishhacker.

  33. The loyalty oath conflict is related in detail in George R. Stewart et al., The Year of the Oath: The Fight for Academic Freedom at the University of California (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1950).

  34. PST/Riess, vol. 1, 301. Years later, he told his daughter Margot that he would have continued to refuse if he had been younger and Dorothea’s health had been better. HM interview with the Fangers, April 16, 1999.

  35. PST/Riess, vol. 1, 302–303, 319.

  36. Nineteen-twenties Germany led in photo-illustrated newspapers and magazines. Leah Ollman, “The Photo League’s Forgotten Past,” Anne Tucker, “A History of the Photo League: The Members Speak,” and Fiona M. Dejardin, “The Photo League: Left-wing Politics and the Popular Press,” all in History of Photography 18, no. 2 (Summer 1994); special issue of Creative Camera (London), July–August 1983; Terry Dennett and Jo Spence, eds., Photography/Politics: One (London: Workshop, 1979). The American group emerged in New York as the Workers’ Film and Photo League in 1930, soon dropped Workers’ from its name, acknowledging the very different political conditions in the United States, and the film and photographic units separated in 1936.

  37. Joseph Entin, “Modernist Documentary: Aaron Siskind’s Harlem Document,” Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (1999): 360. Its membership reached 80 just before the war, then dropped off, and then rebounded to 200 in 1947.

  38. Adams called the League’s publication, Photo Notes, “ ‘the only real photography journal in the US.’ ” Quoted in Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 283.

  39. Nancy Newhall to Anne Tucker and AA to the Newhalls, undated but late 1940s, box 108, folder 9, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Papers. Lists of names are also in Lange’s FBI dossier.

  40. Adams wrote a statement in support, December 10, 1947, when the League was first blacklisted, but in 1949 he wrote that “lots of us good-meaning people have been too credulous. . . . No CP member can be trusted to
tell the truth. . . . It is perhaps this lack of New England ethics which gripes me. . . .” AA to Nancy Newhall, June 12, 1949; she responded in agreement. Box 108, folder 9, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Papers.

  41. Some West Coast observers thought Lange should have been named as a cocurator. Author’s interview with Pirkle Jones, February 2003.

  42. Beaumont, educated at Harvard, the University of Paris, and the Courtauld Institute in London, began a Museum of Modern Art career in 1935. Nancy, educated at Smith, replaced her husband as MoMA’s curator of photography while he was in the army during World War II.

  43. Much of the discussion that follows is taken from John Szarkowski, “The Family of Man,” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century: At Home and Abroad (Studies in Modern Art, no. 4, ed. John Elderfield) (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1994); quotation from Steichen, 21.

  44. Exposed first in 1967 in an article by Christopher Lasch, “The Cultural Cold War,” The Nation, September 11, 1967.

  45. Two scholars recently put the argument this way: Photographs can “operate as a political aesthetic that provides crucial social, emotional, and mnemonic resources . . . necessary to a liberal-democratic politics. . . .” John Lucaites and Robert Hariman, “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism and Democratic Public Culture,” Rhetoric Review 20 (Spring 2001): 38.

  46. Wayne Miller to Edward Steichen, December 29, 1952, Steichen to DL, July 25, 1952, and January 9, 1953, JDC. All Steichen correspondence is from JDC.

  47. DL to Steichen, January 14, 1953, and February 4, 1953.

  48. DL to Steichen, May 13, 1953.

  49. Wayne Miller to Steichen, May 28, 1953.

  50. Wayne Miller to Captain [Steichen], May 12, 1953.

  51. Forty photographers came to the first meeting, in March 1953 at the Millers’ place in Orinda. (Lange roped two photographers’ wives—Joan Miller and Christina Page—into preparing a supper for them all.) She invited more than fifty people by personal telephone call. Steichen flew out for this one. A second meeting, in June, took place at her house and she got Shirley Burden to call a meeting in Los Angeles in September. DL to Steichen, February 2, 1953; DL to Steichen, undated (March 1953).

  52. Szarkowski, “The Family of Man,” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century, ed. Ziderfield, 33.

  53. Eric J. Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 41; Wayne Miller to “Captain” [Steichen], May 12, 1953.

  54. Szarkowski, “The Family of Man,” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century, ed. Elderfield, 25 and 29; quotation, 26.

  55. Monique Berlier, “The Family of Man: Readings of an Exhibition,” in Picturing the Past: Media, History and Photography, ed. Bonnie Brennen and Hanno Hardt (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999).

  56. Szarkowski, “The Family of Man,” in The Museum of Modern Art at Mid-Century, ed. Elderfield, 33.

  57. Allan Sekula, “The Traffic in Photographs,” Art Journal, Spring 1981, 21.

  58. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “ ‘The Family of Man’: Refurbishing Humanism for a Postmodern Age,” in Jean Back and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, The Family of Man 1955–2001: Humanism and Postmodernism: A Reappraisal of the Photo Exhibition by Edward Steichen (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 2004), 37.

  59. Ibid., 29–55.

  60. Olivier Lugon, “Edward Steichen as Exhibition Designer,” in Todd Brandow and William A. Ewing, Edward Steichen: Lives in Photography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 271; Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition, 49–50; Berlier, “The Family of Man, in Picturing the Past, ed. Brennen and Hardt, 217.

  61. She proposed a three-part organization of photographs—the people, their actions, and a third, untitled group that would include “A Comment on Freedoms” and “Indoctrination (as opposed to Learning).” She also wanted a series on emotions, negative as well as positive: “Curiosity, Fear, Jealousy, Prejudice, Anger, Hatred, Joy, Love, Rage, Vanity, Loneliness, Anxiety, Gossip, Dismay, Envy.” “Dorothea Lange’s Group Titles for ‘Family of Man,’ ” OM.

  62. DL to Steichen, January 21, 1953.

  63. Steichen to DL, January 9, 1953; DL to Steichen, January 7, 1953, and January 21, 1953.

  64. Berlier, “The Family of Man,” in Picturing the Past, ed. Brennen and Hardt, 233–34.

  65. HM interview with Wayne and Joan Miller, September 28, 1998.

  66. She and Paul were happy for Dan, but they nevertheless felt a responsibility to warn Mia of Dan’s checkered record. Before they married. Paul called her into his study for a “grave talk” about what she was getting into, i.e., Dan’s history of instability; he was not trying to stop the marriage, but he wanted her to be aware, he said. Mia thought she could help stabilize Dan, even bring him back into his family’s bosom. HM interview with Mia Dixon, October 5, 1999.

  67. She may have avoided talking about her mother in order to keep her father out of sight.

  68. HM interview with Margot Fanger, January 24, 1999.

  69. Dorothea and Martin received, as well, a small inheritance from their mother, AT&T stock, which Joan had inherited from Bowly. Riess, 6.

  70. DL to Margot Fanger, December 15, 1957, author’s possession.

  71. This number includes her stepgrandchildren.

  22. Working for Life

  1. KQED 22.

  2. At the Aspen conference, photographers denounced this practice of editors and called for a collective stance against it, part of what Magnum was trying to do. Beaumont Newhall, “The Aspen Photo Conference,” Aperture 3, no. 3 (1955): 8.

  3. Ray Mackland of Time-Life offered them jointly $2,500, including expenses. Ray Mackland to AA, June 27, 1952; AA to Ray Mackland, November 12, 1952; AA to DL, December 3, 1952, OM.

  4. Dan, now twenty-seven, thought it the “thrill of a lifetime” to be able to work with his mother and Ansel. Author’s interview with Dan Dixon, June 18, 2002.

  5. One of Adams’s biographers reports that he undertook the job only as a favor to a very ill woman, sensing “that she did not feel strong enough to complete it herself.” Mary Street Alinder, Ansel Adams: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1996), 244. This is not convincing: With Paul and Dan, she could have managed without Adams, and the job fit his own aspirations: “I feel that now I have come to a point where I must expand my subject material. The work I did with Dorothea Lange is just up my alley; we complement each other in an amazing way. . . . I have a dismal reputation to live down—that of not being interested in people.” Adams, quoted in David. L. Jacobs, “Three Mormon Towns,” Exposure 25, no. 2 (1987): 6.

  6. Sociologist Edward Banfield, Taylor’s friend, had written about Mormon villages, and he helped them choose. HM interview with Laura Banfield, April 16, 1999.

  7. Lange field notes.

  8. Quoted in Jacobs, “Three Mormon Towns,” 10, 15–16.

  9. A good discussion of the permission problem can be found in Jacobs. See also Jonathan Spaulding, Ansel Adams and the American Landscape: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 277. Coverage of the photography project in St. George’s Washington County News indicates what local residents thought: “The completed piece of art will possibly be placed on exhibition in museums of modern art throughout the US and abroad as a device to promote understanding.” Washington County News, September 3, 1953. I could not determine if Taylor’s withholding the Life publication plan was deliberate. Later, one woman whose picture had appeared in Life demanded $1000, complaining that the photographs were unflattering. Taylor convinced her that her financial claim had no merit. AA to DL, October 25, 1954, and December 4, 1954, JDC.

  10. Toward the end of her life, speaking more bluntly than usual, she remarked that Nancy gave her “the cold chills . . . I’m scared of her.” KQED 15.

  11. I was not able to determine how many of the 135 she sent to Life were hers and how many Adams’s, but I am sure that most of the 1,100 they made were hers, since he worked more slowly. A few of the published photog
raphs cannot be definitely attributed to one or the other of the photographers. Jacobs, “Three Mormon Towns.” The editor claimed that Adams’s pictures were too fine to reproduce well. Alinder, Ansel Adams, 244–45.

  12. The sentimentality here foreshadowed “The Family of Man” exhibit, as in a photograph of a blond toddler with a man’s rough hand on her silky head, captioned “The hand of love.”

  13. It appeared as “Three Mormon Towns,” Life, September 6, 1954, 91–100.

  14. Spaulding, Ansel Adams and the American Landscape, 277.

  15. Author’s interview with Dan Dixon.

  16. Alinder, Ansel Adams, 229, 246.

  17. Lange asked Life for $5,035, and accepted $3,500, with Life providing film, developing, and printing. DL to Ray Mackland, July 9, 1954, and July 31, 1954, OM. Ultimately, nine pages and twenty-two photographs were printed.

  18. They stayed in virtually unheated rooms at the Old Ground Hotel. Dan wrote that they were “chilled by the Irish temperatures but warmed by the Irish temperament.” Gerry Mullins and Daniel Dixon, eds., Dorothea Lange’s Ireland (Boulder: Roberts Rinehart, 1998), 14.

  19. Ibid., 9, 12.

  20. After official closing time, it seems, pubs could legally serve those who came from farther away than three miles—who in turn could share with others—so Dan pulled several all-nighters. Unfortunately, what Life wanted from the inexperienced Dan were names, dates, places, and written permissions from subjects, which they had not collected. Still, Life thought the photographs good enough to send researchers from London to County Clare with a set of prints in order to identify people and get their permissions. Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 292; Mullins and Dixon, eds., Dorothea Lange’s Ireland, 15–16.

  21. She had read an anthropological study of the county, Conrad Arensberg’s The Irish Countryman (London: Macmillan, 1937). Her handwritten plans are in OM.