Dorothea Lange. A Life Beyond Limits. By Linda Gordon
There will always be a need to be reminded that beauty can be found in unlikely places, that we must learn to see beyond the limits of the conventional and the expected. Such indelible images mean more, not less, if we understand how they came to exist. They were produced not by a faultless genius would could remain above the wounds, failings, and the sins that afflict the rest of us, but by a fallible and hardworking woman. They were produced also by the historical times she lived in, times optimistic and pessimistic, times that honored generous, compassionate and respectful impulses of Americans and times that encouraged the closed, fearful, and intolerant. Lange’s photographs will always evoke the best of American democracy.
Dorothea Lange is one of America’s most important and influential artists. She just had her second large retrospective at MOMA and is universally recognized as one of the sources of documentary photography in America. She is the rare artist that can be said to have had an effect on public policy.
My favorite form of non-fiction is the “Life and Times” biography – the kind of book that explores the history of a time period through the life of one person, placing the subject in context, but also viewing the context through the life of the subject. Robert Caro’s The Powerbroker and Taylor Branch’s America in the King Years are among my favorite examples. Though perhaps less sweeping in its accomplishment, Linda Gordon’s life of Dorothea Lange is an excellent example of this balance of history and biography.
Foremost, this is an excellent biography of a fascinating person. Lange was born into a prosperous middle-class family in Hoboken New Jersey in 1895 – when Hoboken was a shipping and manufacturing power of its own. Her father, Henry Nutzhorn, was a lawyer and investment banker, and her early childhood was idyllic. However, things changed rapidly. Dorothea contracted polio at 7 and nearly died. She was left with a badly maimed leg and walked with a severe and uncomfortable limp for the rest of her life. A few years later, her father committed some crime – probably embezzling money from clients – and went into hiding. Though he continued to supply child-support and kept track of his children, he lived under another name in Brooklyn and left Dorothea with a profound sense of embarrassment. As an adult she adapted her mother’s maiden name, Lange . Gordon occasionally plumbs this situation for psychological insights into Lange’s life and work, but never pushes it too far.
These early tragedies left Dorothea with a deep need for independence. She would never be someone who relied on others, waited for perfect opportunities, or blamed circumstances for her situation. Though obviously very bright, she was at best a mediocre student. Both her mother and her teachers were frustrated by this – Gordon even turns up evidence that a teacher cheated for her to get her through a class in high school.
Lange decides she wants to be a photographer while still in high school, before she had ever held a camera. She had spent long afternoons during her adolescence wandering the streets of Manhattan when she should have been in class, and had developed a love of simply seeing things. At her mother’s insistence, she enrolled in New York College for the Training of Teachers (later to become Teachers College) to get a practical career. There, John Dewey –
true to his philosophy of active learning – had hired a progressive photographer, Arthur Gente, to teach art history and photography to the mostly female student body. Gente was unusual in his openness to female accomplishment and recognized in Lange a talented and energetic pupil. For her part, Lange learned the basics of photography and dropped out.
She began to apprentice for a number of photographers in New York. These were men who ran portrait studios and needed female assistants to help with everything from clerical work and posing subjects to taking care of equipment and handling film and developing prints. Within a few months, Lange had enough knowledge of both photography and running a studio to work independently. She left New York with a high school friend with a plan to travel the world, with the idea that if she ran out of money, she could get a part time job as a photographer’s assistant virtually anywhere in the world.
When they were robbed in San Francisco, the pair ran out of money sooner than they anticipated. Lange again worked for several studios, including some that catered to the posh of San Francisco’s upper classes. In this work she learned important lessons about the technical aspects of photography, and the basics of posing and composition, but she also learned how to deal with people who might be demanding of the outcome or nervous about the whole experience. Later, she would be well known for her ability to coax nervous people on the streets into posing for her.
By 1920, she was among the leading portrait photographers in San Francisco, prosperous and popular – her studio doubled as a salon for the San Francisco bohemian community. She married Maynard Dixon, who was then a famous western artist, a bit of a cowboy who painted western scenes and revered the mythologized Native American image. He was twenty-five years her senior and had a teenaged daughter from a previous marriage.
This marriage shifted Lange’s life and career in a number of ways. While it enhanced her reputation as an artist and a bohemian – they became the it-couple of San Francisco – it also shifted her life towards the domestic. Dixon was a professional painter and refused to work a day job even during periods when his paintings brought in little money, so Lange’s income was important to the small family. But Dixon was otherwise a man of his generation and did little to maintain a household. His first wife was an alcoholic, so his daughter, Consie, came to live with him and Lange, but he did little parenting and Lange became the full-time caretaker for this rebellious young woman. In addition, Lange and Dixon had two children of their own, and Dixon was frequently absent for long periods of time painting or simply camping in the desert.
This life as a working mother lasted for the rest of Lange’s life. Her marriage to Dixon slowly dissolved as he began to have affairs. Lange would take on parenting duties with the children of her second husband, Paul Taylor, who was only marginally more involved in the domestic life than Dixon had been.
Lange had always been drawn to left wing politics, but it had become important to her photography early in the Depression. She responded to the drastic reduction in her studio business by wandering the streets of San Francisco (much as she had once wandered the streets of New York) with her camera. She was drawn to groups of men at bread lines and soup kitchens and the clusters of men on street corners looking for work. Her 1932 photograph, White Angel Breadline, came to represent the damage the Depression had done to men’s spirits and gave Lange her first national exposure. She soon began to supplement her studio work with government contracts. While working for the New Deal, she met Paul Taylor.
Taylor was an important figure in California’s history, in part because of his association with Lange. In fact, their association was both a loving and loyal marriage and a central career move. She met Taylor when she was hired as a photographer to document the work of Unemployed Exchange Programs of the New Deal. Gordon stresses how complementary their working styles were and how much they learned from each other. Taylor was an academic economist before the Depression, but his work in economics was far more social than that of most economists. Part sociologist, Taylor believed that the study of economics should focus on field work, getting out and seeing what the actual economic lives of people were like. Since 1927, he had been on leave from UC Berkeley, working for the Social Science Research Council on a study of migrant workers in California. By the early 1930s, he was America’s leading agricultural economist, and the only one with a focus on agricultural labor.
At this point, Gordon gives an excellent introduction to the politics and policies of the New Deal agricultural programs. We get a capsule history of the WPA, the Farm Security Administration, and the key work of Roy Stryker’s photography division of the FSA. For much of the late 1930s, Lange and Taylor are travelling together – up and down the length of the west coast, through Arizona and New Mexico, and into the Deep South, investigating and documenting the lives of farm workers and the effects of the Dust Bowl and the Depression generally. Gordon concentrates on the problems and failures of these programs, which makes sense because both Taylor and Lange were continually frustrated that they did not go far enough, were suffused with racism and needed to be greatly expanded. In this history, the New Deal was less a revolutionary shift in government activity than a badly compromised attempt to work around the power of the large landowners that dominated politics.
Gordon provides an excellent analysis of how Lange’s experience as a portrait photographer influenced her work – both in terms of how she approached people and made them comfortable around her and how she chose subjects to photograph. While other FSA photographers – Ansel Adams, Margaret Bourke-White and Walker Evans come to mind – concentrated on the farms, housing and environment, Lange’s best work always documented the people. She was especially adept at capturing relationships, with many photographs of families, but also subtle portraits of racism and power relations. One of the key features of Lange’s work is that she often captioned her photos with exact quotes from the person photographed. It was a common and deceptive practice of “educated” photographers to invent quotes for their “uneducated” subjects. Lange never made up quotes from subjects and took great care to quote them accurately. Gordon provides an excellent history and analysis of Lange’s most famous photograph, Migrant Mother, including the controversies that have bubbled up around the photo from time to time. One detail of this photograph that was new to me is that the woman portrayed, Florence Thompson, was Native American – her father was Cherokee while her stepfather was Choctaw.
Most of Lange’s most famous work dates from these years of working with Taylor, and nearly all of it was done for the government. While this limited her income, because she never owned the rights to her photos, it helped build her reputation because this work has been in the public domain all along. Migrant Mother is ubiquitous, though Lange has never made any money off it.
When WWII broke out, Lange’s government work changed. As the most prominent government photographer on the west coast, she was hired to document the relocation of Japanese Americans to concentration camps. Gordon wonders about this hiring, since both Lange and Taylor had been vocal about their disagreement with the policy before the hiring. Taylor had been particularly explicit and active in denouncing its racism. Lange spent more than a year photographing Japanese American communities before the relocation, the process of moving, the physical conditions of the camps and the lives the relocated built there. These photographs were highly critical of the camps, but had no effect on the public perception of this episode because after years of work and thousands of photographs, the army impounded her work. It only became available recently. Gordon has edited a collection of those photos and her history of the entire program is brief but excellent.
Lange’s life and work after the war was dominated by health problems. Long term effects of polio affected her heart and energy level. She had developed severe esophageal ulcers. Gordon speculates that this was in part from the stress of working under very difficult conditions while raising a family of 6 children and step-children. In this case, the burdens of sexism are quite physical and Lange is debilitated for much of her last two decades – though she still completes a number of projects for Life Magazine and other publications.
In 1965, she is given a career retrospective by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. She was only the 6th photographer to be given such a show, and the first woman. She was also diagnosed with inoperable esophageal cancer. She spent a good deal of the year reviewing her work over the decades and putting together the show. She completed the work but died before it opened.
Lange was an important artist because of how powerfully she encountered the social and historical issues of her day. Linda Gordon has honored that career with a biography that explores Lange within her social and historical context, and produced a full life and an excellent history.
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