Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  22. Lange was well aware of the emigration. She noted that “1 of 3 boys and girls will be living outside Ireland if they live to the age of 50.” Many of her subjects told her of relatives in the United States, and she went to see one of them in New York. The woman lived on the sixth floor of an old-law cold-water tenement, Lange noted, and “she gave me a drink of whiskey in a tumbler, you know, like cottage cheese used to come in. . . .” Lange asked if she would like to go back to Ireland, and the woman smiled and said, “Too backward. . . .” KQED 5.

  23. Lange field notes, quoted in Karen Tsujimoto, Dorothea Lange: Archive of an Artist (Oakland, California: Oakland Museum, 1995) 41.

  24. “That face. The winds of the Atlantic ocean have blown over it all his life. . . . A very lively intelligence of that soil and wind. . . .” KQED, 19.

  25. KQED 9. This is Lange at her most mistakenly self-critical. The OM holds approximately 2,600 of these photographs, and they include scores of her most beautiful. Filmmaker Deirdre Lynch made a lovely video of Lange’s Ireland trip, “Pictures to Send,” but it has unfortunately had very little distribution.

  26. “Irish Country People,” Life, March 21, 1955. Ansel Adams wrote to Life, at Lange’s request, asking for credit for Dan Dixon as writer. AA to DL, October 25, 1954, OM.

  27. Jones recalled this project as one of “the highlights of my life.” As always, Lange’s relations with younger photographers were smoother than those with her peers; she became Jones’s much-appreciated mentor. Author’s interview with Pirkle Jones, February 2003. He would become a renowned photographer, noted particularly for photographic documentation of the Black Panthers.

  28. Oral history of Robert McKenzie at http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=kt3h4nb1j3&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=d0e839&toc.depth=1&toc.id=&brand=calisphere.

  29. DL to Ray Mackland, March 5, 1957; Ray Mackland to DL, April 10, 1957, OM. The photographs appeared at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Aperture published the photo-essay in 1960. A lovely catalog, edited by Pirkle Jones, appeared with an exhibition in Vacaville in 1994: Berryessa Valley: The Last Year (Vacaville, California: Vacaville Museum, 1994).

  30. She proposed it to Life and got a $1000 commission. In the end, Life demanded changes that she would not accept, so she withdrew it. Weirdly (possibly due to Paul’s connections), it appeared in the Manila Chronicle, August 7, 1960, 24–27. A selection of the photographs appeared in 1964 in a manual for lawyers on civil rights in pleadings and practice. This small pamphlet grew into a 1969 National Lawyers Guild book of 250 pages, Minimizing Racism in Jury Trials, making it clear that her photographs, six of them as full-page images and on the cover, were seen by others to underscore the presence of racism. Charles R. Garry, Huey P. Newton, and Ann Fagan Ginger, Minimizing Racism in Jury Trials: The Voir Dire Conducted by Charles R. Garry in People of California V. Huey P. Newton (Berkeley, California: National Lawyers Guild, 1969).

  31. Her original plan was to follow a single case so that “by the time we have finished the story, we should know not simply about the man but . . . why his office is important to us all.” If she could not show through this method the origin of a case—the crime and the arrest—then she would use “flashbacks” to reveal it. Typescript at OM.

  32. Euphemisms in her notes intimate the delicacy with which liberal whites spoke about race in those days. She reported that 83 percent of the public defenders’ clients came from out of state, largely from Georgia, Texas, and Mississippi—that means, blacks or Okies—but in all her captions, she never used the word Negro, although African American defendants dominated in her pictures.

  33. One of seven attorneys in the office, he had handled 2,739 cases in his eight years on the job. Working under Public Defender George Nye, Martin Pulich was, from all accounts, an unusually effective attorney, becoming a judge in the Oakland municipal court in 1963 and in the superior court in 1975.

  34. KQED 4.

  35. Lange did two more Life assignments, the Republican National Convention of 1956 and a UNESCO conference in 1957. Little memorable emerged. The lack of close-up access—at the UNESCO event as in the 1945 UN assignment, she could photograph only from a balcony—produced photographs without faces; the subjects could have been groups of important men in any kind of meeting. At the convention, she sat with the crowd and produced images animated by cheering delegates waving signs, a raucous and not at all contemplative gathering, for which she had little sympathy.

  36. KQED 20.

  23. Diplomat’s Wife

  1. He served as a consultant on agrarian reform and “community development” for the U.S. State Department, the UN, the U.S. Export-Import Bank, and the Ford Foundation, traveling in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

  2. DL to Margot Fanger, June 1, 1958, Fanger family collection. All Fanger correspondence is from this source.

  3. KQED, 22.

  4. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 266; KQED, 17.

  5. DL to Margot Fanger, May 14, 1958.

  6. This and all further Lange quotations in this chapter are from her Asia journal, OM, unless otherwise cited.

  7. Riess, 101.

  8. On Gilmartin, see Riess/PST, vol. 3, 416; on Japan’s land reform, see Rehman Sobhan, Agrarian Reform and Social Transformation (London: Zed Books, 1993), 29–32.

  9. Denounced as a security risk and a Communist sympathizer, Ladejinsky had been fired by the Department of Agriculture in 1954. Rescued by Eisenhower adviser Harold Stassen, he was then appointed to direct land reform in Vietnam for the State Department. At the same time, Arthur Raper, influential in the FSA and particularly on Lange’s North Carolina photography, was consulting in Japan, Taiwan, Pakistan, and the Philippines. Al McCoy, “Land Reform as Counter-Revolution: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Tenant Farmers of Asia,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 3, no. 1 (Winter/Spring 1971): 14–49; Mary McAuliffe, “Dwight D. Eisenhower and Wolf Ladejinsky: The Politics of the Declining Red Scare,” Prologue 14, no. 3 (Fall 1982): 109–27.

  10. Taylor considered Jane Addams’s work at Hull House his model for community development. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 272.

  11. Ngo Dinh Diem’s land reform in Vietnam actually took land away from peasants who had acquired it from the Vietminh; Diem not only returned land to the landowning elite but demanded that peasants pay back rents “owed” from the period of the Vietminh government. As a result, many peasants became worse off than they had been before the Vietminh took over. Taylor labeled these programs phony, and criticized U.S. policy—tactfully—for supporting corrupt and authoritarian regimes and refusing to confront egregious repression of free speech. See, for example, PST to Bernard Bell of Ex-Im Bank, July 19, 1952, carton 28, folder 29, PST Bancroft; Paul S. Taylor, “Venezuela: A Case Study of Relationships Between Community Development and Agrarian Reform,” mimeographed report, 1960, Bureau of Social Affairs, UN, and memo, September 20, 1958, recapping what he told Ambassador Bohlen, carton 29, folder 7, PST Bancroft.

  12. Taylor got it published, however, by the House Committee on Government Operations. Riess/PST, vol. 3, 410.

  13. Ibid., 386 ff; quotation, 387.

  14. “. . . The lower the level of living of the man on the land, the less he dares experiment with a new technique. He knows what he can do the old way, but . . . he doesn’t have an extra acre of rice land on which he dares experiment. . . .” Riess/PST, vol. 3, 389. He had experienced this calculation among the dust-bowl farmers who would not stop plowing.

  15. Author’s interview with Ray Marshall, April 28, 2004.

  16. Riess/PST, vol. 3, 388.

  17. He traveled to Sacramento and Washington to lobby not only politicians and officials but also the AFL, the Grange, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the American Legion, the Farmers Union, and the National Catholic Rural Life Conference; he spoke at meetings and debated growers’ representatives on the radio. Riess/PST, vol. 2, 172–75, 195–96; miscellaneous correspondence in carton 31, folders 23 and 28, PST Bancroft.

  1
8. LNG 58213.25.

  19. On weekends, Paul helped by trying to distract the crowds, but most of the time she had no help. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 252.

  20. “Many things Koreans are not allowed to do in their own country, situation I do not enjoy.” DL to Margot Fanger, undated letter.

  21. DL to John Dixon, undated letter, JDC.

  22. Riess/PST, vol. 1, quotation 254, and vol. 3, 405–6.

  23. This interest was not new—they had bought crafts in the United States, as well. CG, “The Contemplation of Dorothea,” unpublished manuscript, author’s possession. HM interview with Margot and Donald Fanger, January 24 and April 16, 1999. Paul made lists of good stores and other sources of artifacts to purchase: carton 30 passim, PST Bancroft. Interviewed fifteen years later, he still crowed about the excellent bargains they had gotten and praised Dorothea’s bargaining skill. They got free shipping to San Francisco through diplomatic channels and had to pay postage only from San Francisco to Berkeley. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 249, 258, 267.

  24. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 254; DL to John Dixon, undated letter, JDC. Dorothea was a generous and sensitive gift giver. Author’s interview with Onnie Taylor, April 14, 2004.

  25. DL to John and Helen Dixon, May 29, 1963, JDC.

  26. Riess/PST, vol. 1, 248.

  27. DL to Margaret Bourke-White, June 25, 1959, box 26, Margaret Bourke-White Papers, Syracuse Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library, Syracuse, New York.

  28. Hearing about her longing for Paris, Paul’s daughter Margot scoffed at Dorothea’s hope that she could divert him from visiting that battlefield: he wore his Purple Heart all his life, she said—an exaggeration, but one that captures his feelings.

  29. This could be because Taylor was working for the UN in these countries and was therefore associating with people who felt freer to criticize the United States. PST to David Luscombe, Mission Chief in Riobomba, Ecuador, October 10, 1960, carton 31, folder 4, PST Bancroft.

  30. KQED 16.

  31. DL to Margot Fanger, June 18, 1961, and undated letter.

  32. Lange, “Sayings of Aly Agua,” in travel diary.

  33. DL to the whole family, postcard, March 28, 1963, JDC.

  34. PST report to William E. Warne, UNC Ec Coordinator, August 4, 1958, 13, carton 29, folder 20, PST Bancroft.

  35. The failure to diagnose this earlier is puzzling, since medical workers in Egypt and Iran should certainly have been familiar with malaria; evidently, hers was an atypical form, because physicians had previously considered and rejected that diagnosis.

  36. While there, he read Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, but it should have been The Magic Mountain, because its imagery fit the Interlaken hospital precisely.

  37. KQED, 22.

  38. Riess, 195–96.

  39. Richard Conrat to MM, June 7, 1977, author’s possession.

  40. Rondal Partridge thought, to the contrary, that it was important to her at that time to be with Paul and to try something new. TH interview with RP and CG, August 26, 1975.

  41. She knew that in Asia she would have no regular darkroom access and planned to send exposed film to New York, but the tropical heat made that impossible. So she found labs in several cities to develop her film, mailed the negatives to California, and half of all her work in Japan and Korea went down in a plane crash. DL to John Dixon, October 6, 1958, from Saigon, JDC.

  42. KQED, 16.

  43. Attitudes toward those photographs divide in the main between left and right, between those whose highest value is social content and those for which it is aesthetics.

  44. Conrat to MM, June 7, 1977.

  24. To a Cabin

  1. Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman (Fort Worth: Amon Carter Museum, 1967); Dorothea Lange and Margaretta K. Mitchell, To a Cabin (New York: Grossman, 1973). The origin of the former was a 15-photograph collection that Lange had offered to museums for $750 per set. Among those portrayed were Reb Chambers, Maynard’s sister, then eighty-one; and beloved Euclid Street neighbor Lyde Wall. After her death, they were published with a preface by Beaumont Newhall.

  2. PST diary, OM. Everyone who was with her in those last years understood her will to live long enough to finish the MoMA show. Richard Conrat: “If ever a mind controlled a body, Dorothea’s was it.” Richard Conrat to MM December 10, 1976, author’s collection.

  3. KQED, 1 and 2.

  4. Helen Nestor to PST, December 7, 1965, OM.

  5. She and Paul briefly considered returning to Switzerland to see if the Interlaken physician they loved could help, but he responded that she was better off where she was.

  6. KQED 22.

  7. He went on, as had others of her assistants, to become a fine photographer, known for environmentalist photography, won a Guggenheim in 1968, and taught at the San Francisco Art Institute. He and his wife, Maisie Conrat, published Executive Order 9066 in 1972, a collection of photography about the Japanese internment. He worked with Lange four full days a week, and she tried to keep herself working then from nine to five, taking rests when she needed them. Richard Conrat correspondence with MM, author’s possession.

  8. KQED 15, 18, 19.

  9. KQED, 16, 17.

  10. Doud, Ben Shahn, April 14, 1964.

  11. George Elliott, introductory essay in Dorothea Lange (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1966), 7; see also George P. Elliott, A Piece of Lettuce (New York: Random House, 1964), where he compares Lange to Walker Evans.

  12. Weston Naef, interviewed by TH, in Judith Keller, Dorothea Lange: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 101. Another example: “Dorothea Lange lived instinctively . . . photographed spontaneously,” Christopher Cox, introductory essay in Dorothea Lange (Millerton, New York: Aperture, 1981), 5.

  13. KQED 8, 13, 17. Lange was trying to pierce what C. Wright Mills called “sociological ignorance.” She sought a socially embedded portraiture. Photographer Susan Meiselas’s image of a young Nicaraguan revolutionary throwing a Molotov cocktail became iconized in a similar way, and Meiselas had the same objection to its decontextualization. Joy Garnett and Susan Meiselas, “On the Rights of Molotov Man,” Harper’s Magazine, February 2007, 53–58.

  14. KQED 23; Clive Scott, The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 81.

  15. Raymond Williams, quoted in John Lucaites and Robert Hariman, “Visual Rhetoric, Photojournalism and Democratic Public Culture,” Rhetoric Review 20 (Spring 2001): 40.

  16. Lawrence W. Levine, “The Historian and the Icon: Photography and the History of the American People in the 1930s and 1940s,” in Documenting America, 1935–1943, ed. Carl Fleischhauer and Beverly W. Brannan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 25–26.

  17. DL to Minor White, May 2, 1961, OM.

  18. KQED 3.

  19. JZ to DL, July 6, 1965, OM.

  20. Therese Heyman, former photography curator at the Oakland Museum, reported that he had to accept it when a trustee of MoMA put up the money, while another source reported that Steichen had insisted on it.

  21. KQED 15, 19, 22.

  22. HM interview with JZ, March 18, 1999.

  23. KQED 10, 11; Szarkowski responded, “All right, you stand in front of that picture during the twelve weeks of the exhibition and make that speech. . . . Then it will be a good picture; without the speech, it’s not a good picture.” John Szarkowski, untitled lecture, in Photography Within the Humanities, ed. Eugenia Parry Janis and Wendy MacNeil (Danbury, New Hampshire: Addison House, 1977), 86.

  24. Typed undated statement, OM.

  25. By the end of their negotiations, however, neither Lange nor Szarkowski was consistently arguing for an either/or, purely visual or purely historical/topical, organization. In their final correspondence through the spring and summer of 1965, it was he who wanted to scratch the abstract categories such as “Last Ditch,” arguing, “The trouble with abstract categories is that they dilute themselves . . .” and “swallow up the exp
erience. Try putting the pictures from this group which are relevant into the California group, and see how the California wall comes alive.” KQED, 12; JZ to DL, July 6, 1965, OM.

  26. Jacob Deschin, “Dorothea Lange and Her Printer,” Popular Photography, July 1966.

  27. DL to JZ, September 21, 1965, OM.

  28. DL to AA, March 15, 1964, OM; Riess, 250; DL to JZ, July 18, 1965, OM.

  29. DL to Irving Bernstein, UCLA Institute of Industrial Relations, August 15, 1964, OM.

  30. Meltzer, Dorothea Lange, 343, citing a letter from Szarkowski.

  31. DL to JZ, July 13, 1965, OM. Paul Vanderbilt of the Wisconsin State Historical Society to DL, undated, JDC; DL to Beaumont Newhall, July 29, 1965, box 68, folder 1, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Papers, GRI.

  32. Carton 89, folders 58–59, PST Bancroft. Others made related attempts, such as Cornell Capa’s Fund for Concerned Photography, established in 1967; miscellaneous papers in box 6, folder 5, Peter Pollack Papers, GRI.

  33. JZ to DL, July 21, 1965, OM.

  34. KQED 1 and 2.

  35. Maurice Berger, “Photography Changes the Struggle for Racial Justice,” in Click, on-line journal of the Smithsonian Institution, at http://click.si.edu/Story.aspx?story=29. The project also took on some of the activities of the old Photo League, not only making a photographic record but also teaching photography and making cameras accessible to those who could not afford them. Matt Herron to DL, January 26, 1964, April 28, 1964, and May 2, 1964, and undated letter, OM.

  36. “How can we help perpetuate the love and intensity you have brought to our medium?” Homer Page wrote. Homer Page to “Dorrie,” September 21, 1964, JDC.

  37. KQED 12, 22; IC to Minor White, September 27, 1964, AA to IC, September 18, 1964, IC Papers, AAA.

  38. “My children have been just grand, just grand. . . . Dan says I’ll give up my job for a year. I’ll get a leave of absence, I’ll just work with you, I’ll help you see it through. And then he had the wonderful idea, that all my photographer friends who will be saying what can I do to help, I should answer yes, come in and help and it could be all part of the film.” KQED, 18.