Dorothea Lange (Photography Art Ebook)

Sarah Bernhardt
Coco Chanel
Agnes de Mille
Dorothea Lange
Nina Simone
Virginia Woolf
Women in the Arts
Dorothea Lange
the ARTS
in
He who neglects the arts when he is young
has lost the past and is dead to the future.
Sophocles, Fragments
Dorothea
Lange
Kerry Acker
the ARTS
in
Introduction by
Congresswoman Betty McCollum
Minnesota, Fourth District
Member, National Council on the Arts
CHELSEA HOUSE PUBLISHERS
VP, NEW PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT Sally Cheney
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTION Kim Shinners
CREATIVE MANAGER Takeshi Takahashi
MANUFACTURING MANAGER Diann Grasse
Staff for DOROTHEA LANGE
EDITOR Patrick M.N. Stone
PRODUCTION EDITOR Megan Emery
PHOTO EDITOR Sarah Bloom
SERIES & COVER DESIGNER Terry Mallon
LAYOUT 21st Century Publishing and Communications, Inc.
2004 by Chelsea House Publishers,
a subsidiary of Haights Cross Communications.
All rights reserved. Printed and bound in the United States of America.
www.chelseahouse.com
First Printing
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Acker, Kerry.
Dorothea Lange/by Kerry Acker.
p. cm. (Women in the arts)
Includes index.
Summary: Discusses the life and work of the twentieth century
American photographer, Dorothea Lange.
ISBN 0-7910-7460-9 (Hardcover)
1. Lange, DorotheaJuvenile literature. 2. Women photographers
United StatesBiographyJuvenile literature. 3. Photographers
United StatesBiographyJuvenile literature. [1. Lange, Dorothea.
2. Photographers. 3. WomenBiography.] I. Title. II. Series: Women
in the arts (Philadelphia, Pa.)
TR140.L3A63 2003
770'.92dc21
2003009473
Table of Contents
Introduction
Congresswoman Betty McCollum 8
1. The Supreme Humanist 12
2. The Outsider 20
18951913
3. Learning the Craft 32
19131918
4. Portrait Photographer 44
19181929
5. Documentary Photographer 58
19291935
6. Documenting the Depression 76
19351940
7. Minorities and the War 100
19401956
8. Grandmother and World Traveler 110
19561965
Chronology 118
Works by Dorothea Lange 122
Bibliography 123
Further Reading 124
Index 126
8
I am honored to introduce WOMEN IN THE ARTS, a continuing
series of books about courageous, talented women whose work
has changed the way we think about art and society. The
women highlighted in this series were persistent, successful,
and at times controversial. They were unafraid to ask questions
or challenge social norms while pursuing their work. They
overcame barriers that included discrimination, prejudice, and
poverty. The energy, creativity, and perseverance of these
strong women changed our world forever.
Art plays a critical role in all our lives, in every culture, and
especially in the education of young people. Art can be serious,
beautiful, functional, provocative, spiritual, informative, and
illuminating. For all of the women in this series, their respective
forms of artistic expression were a creative exploration and
their professional calling. Their lives and their work transformed
the worlds perception of a womans role in society.
In reading this series, I was struck by common themes
evident in these womens lives that can provide valuable lessons
for todays young women.
One volume tells the story of Coco Chanel, the first fashion
designer to create clothing for women that was both attractive
and utile. Chanel was one of the first women to run a large,
successful business in the fashion industry. Today, it is hard
to imagine the controversy Chanel stirred up simply by
making womens clothing beautiful, comfortable, and practical.
Chanel understood that women wanted a sense of style and
professionalism in their fashion, as men had in theirs.
Chanels extraordinary success demonstrates that we
should not be afraid to be controversial. Even today, women
Introduction
Congresswoman Betty McCollum
Minnesota, Fourth District
Member, National Council on the Arts
9
of all ages worry far too much about stepping on toes or
questioning authority. To make change, in our own lives or in
our community, we need to stand up and speak out for our
beliefs. The women of this series often defied convention and
ruffled some feathers, but they never stopped. Nina Simone
sang beautifully, but she also spoke out against the injustice of
racism, regardless of how it affected her career.
It is equally important for us women to ask ourselves,
What do I want from my life? We all struggle to answer this
deceptively simple question. It takes courage to answer it
honestly, but it takes far more courage to answer the question
and then act on that answer. For example, Agnes de Mille
realized she had nothing to lose by being direct. She stuck
to her vision for Rodeo, insisted on the set and composer she
envisioned, and eventually produced her balletthe way she
wanted to. She believed in her vision, and the result was a great
success. Dorothea Lange, having decided she wanted to become a
photographer, asked for photography jobs, even though she had
no experience and it was a profession that few women pursued.
In our society, we expect that all people should be treated
with respect and dignity, but this has not always been true.
Nina Simone faced discrimination and overcame social norms
that promoted racial injustice. She confronted prejudice and
disrespect directly, sometimes refusing to perform when an
audience was unruly or rude. One evening, when she was only
eleven years old, she even delayed her performance until her
own parents were allowed to sit in the front rowseats that
they had been asked to vacate for white people. Her demand
for respect took courage.
Womens equality not only benefits women, but also
brings a unique perspective to the world. For example, the
brilliance of Dorothea Langes photography was in large part
due to her empathy for her subjects. She knew that to tell their
story, she needed to earn their trust and to truly understand
their lives.
Each of these women used her art to promote social
justice. Coco Chanel used her designs to make womens lives
easier and more comfortable, while Nina Simone was as
committed to civil rights as she was to her music. Dorothea
Langes photographs convinced Washington of the need to
establish sanitary camps for migrant families, and Virginia
Woolf s writing pushed the question of equal rights for women.
Because the women in these books, and so many others
like them, took risks and challenged society, women today have
more opportunity than ever before. We have access to equal
education, and we are making great strides in the workplace
and in government.
As only the second woman from Minnesota ever elected to
serve in Congress, I know how important it is to have strong
female role models. My grandmothers were born in a time when
women did not have the right to vote, but their granddaughter
is now a Member of Congress. Their strength, wisdom, and
courage inspire me. Other great women, such as Congresswoman
Barbara Jordan and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, also
inspired me with their leadership and determination to
overcome gender and racial discrimination to serve in
Congress with distinction.
Dorothea Lange once said, I have learned from everything,
and Im constantly learning. I know that I too am constantly
learning. I hope the women in this series will inspire you to
learn and to lead with courage and determination. Art, as a
profession or a hobby, can be either an expression or an agent
of change. We need to continue to encourage women to add
their voices to our society through art.
10 INTRODUCTION 10
The women profiled in this series broke barriers, followed
their hearts, refused to be intimidated, and changed our
world. Their lives and successes should be a lesson to women
everywhere. In addition, and importantly, they created lasting
and meaningful art. I hope that you will enjoy this series as
much as I have.
11 Women in the Arts
12
The Supreme
Humanist
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without
a camera.
Dorothea Lange, quoted in
The Los Angeles Times, August 13, 1978
Dorothea Lange was exhausted. It was early March of 1936,
and she had been on the road for a long, cold month. She
was finishing up her first significant trip in the field alone,
photographing migrant farm workers throughout California.
She had been working diligently, often up to fourteen hours
a day. In addition to finding subjects, talking with them,
and taking their pictures, Lange also was taking detailed
notes for captions, keeping track of money she spent on
film and mileage covered, and making sure her camera
equipment was clean and operating properly. It was a
rainy and dreary evening, but she was finally making her way
back home.
On assignment for the Farm Security Administration (FSA),
Lange was documenting the dreadful living conditions of
13
The activist with a camera. On the road with camera and film in hand,
Lange photographed the lives of migrant workers displaced by the Depres-
sion. Her work earned her a job with the Farm Security Administration
and eventually would jumpstart her career as one of Americas ground-
breaking documentary photographers.
the migrants, a continuation of the work that she had begun
earlier with the economist Paul Schuster Taylor (who would
eventually become her husband). The Great Depression
had disrupted the lives of people across the nation, but
American farmers were particularly devastated. Prices
for such crops as wheat, corn, and cotton plummeted, along
with the cost for livestock, forcing farmers and their
families to abandon their homes and search for work
elsewhere. The development of more modern agricultural
equipment and machinery was driving other farmers out of
work. And terrible dust storms had destroyed the topsoil on
farms in the Midwest, causing even more farm families to
flee. They were all heading to the West, where the land was
rich and fertile.
Thousands of migrant workers flooded into California,
looking for any agricultural jobs they could find. They
moved all around the state, picking fruits and vegetables,
barely making enough money to survive and feed their
families. They set up makeshift camps, living in huts made
of cardboard, tin, canvas, or anything else they could
scrape up. They were undernourished, and many of them
were sick due to the unsanitary conditions. The migrants
were desperately poor, and there appeared to be no relief
from their suffering.
The FSA employed Lange to take photographs of this
mass migration. The head of the organization had seen the
powerful report that Lange and Taylor had prepared while
they were working for the state of California, and he was
so impressed by her photographs that he hired her imme-
diately. (Lange took the pictures while Taylor compiled
facts and wrote analyses. Their study was so compelling
that the government set up temporary sanitary camps for
the families.)
This assignment, one of her first for the FSA, was an
especially grueling one for Lange. She photographed very
14 DOROTHEA LANGE
15 The Supreme Humanist
early in the morning and continued until the sun went
down. Lange had seen a lot of misery on this trip, and she
was drained. But now she had just seven hours left until she
was home.
As she drove along on the empty highway, surrounded
in her car by equipment and several rolls of unexposed
film, she glimpsed, from the corner of her eye, a sign on
the side of the road that read Pea Pickers Camp. She
continued ahead, not wanting to stop. But as she drove on,
she started to have an inner argument. Dorothea, how
about that camp back there? What is the situation back
there? Are you going back? Nobody could ask this of you
now, could they? To turn back certainly isnt necessary. Havent
you plenty of negatives already on this subject. . . . Besides,
if you take a camera out in this rain, youre just asking for
trouble. Now, be reasonable. (Partridge, 20)
About twenty miles later, Lange made a U-turn. I was
following instinct, not reason, she said later on. She drove
into the camp, where she saw several lean-to tents resting on
the bare, soggy ground. There were a few families living in
squalor there, yet she spotted one particular woman and
approached her as if drawn by a magnet. The exhausted-
looking woman was surrounded by four hungry, dirty
children. She didnt ask Lange any questions; she just told her
that she was 32 years old and that she and her family had
been surviving on the frozen vegetables they scavenged from
the field and birds her older children had killed with stones.
She was stranded in the dreary, desolate camp because she
had just sold her car tires to buy food. Lange later said, She
seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she
helped me. (Partridge, 20)
Lange spent less than ten minutes with the woman and
her kids, making just six exposures, moving closer and closer
with each shot. She didnt arrange anything or direct the
woman or children at all, relying instead on her intuition and
the strong connection she felt to the woman. When she was
done photographing the woman and her family, she didnt
take any pictures of the other pea pickers. She knew that she
had just found the subject she was looking for and fulfilled
the essence of her assignment.
When she got up the next morning, she made prints of
the photos and immediately went to the city editor of The
San Francisco News, telling him about the appalling condi-
tions she discovered at the pea pickers camp in Nipomo.
She said that the crop had been ruined and that thousands
were starving. On March 10, the News ran her story and
16 DOROTHEA LANGE
THE FSA
T
he Farm Security Administration (FSA), the government
agency that was employing Lange at this time, was part
of a larger series of programs sponsored by President
Franklin D. Roosevelt to combat the rural poverty of the
1930s. Crop prices had begun to drop at the end of World
War I. Throughout the 1920s, farmers had mechanized and
had worked the land aggressively to turn a profit on their
crops, but their efforts had only driven them into debt and
ruined the soil. Also, as cultivated fields replaced the natural
grasslands of the South, wind caused erosion; severe
drought followed in the early 1930s, and dried-up farms
actually began to blow away. President Roosevelt formed
the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in 1933 to
reduce production and stabilize crop prices, but some of
the programs reforms pushed smaller farmers out of business.
Many were already losing their land to their creditors,
and those ruined by the New Deal swelled the ranks of
the sharecroppers.
In 1935, as the situation became alarming, the
used some of her photos, and soon the piece was picked up
by newspapers across the country. The government reacted
immediately, sending twenty thousand pounds of food to
the migrants.
One of the images, which Lange called Migrant Mother,
went on to become not only the most famous photograph
produced by the FSA but a true symbol of the Depression. It
is one of the most widely reproduced and recognized images
in American photography. But it is just one of many
profoundly moving and powerful photos taken over the
course of Langes career. In addition to her work for the FSA,
Resettlement Administration (RA) was formed to give loans to
individual farmers and to plan communities for the displaced.
The RA recorded its work through its Historical Section,
employing a number of noted photographers. Its name
changed to the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937,
when it became a part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
The FSA established many communities for migrant workers,
especially in California, and these were the source of much
of Langes work.
By the early 1940s, the FSA was attracting criticism.
California businesses were reluctant to lose a cheap source
of labor, and citizens resented the cost of the camps and
what they saw as government sponsorship of communism.
In response, the FSAs focus shifted to the war, especially
after the shocking Pearl Harbor attack of December 7, 1941.
The FSA began to lose its budget in 1942, and in that year
it was incorporated into the Office of War Information. The
Historical Sections photographs were transferred to the
Library of Congress in 1944.
18 DOROTHEA LANGE
Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California. This captivating photo-
graph was taken in February of 1936 and later exhibited at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and reproduced
elsewhere. Migrant Mother became a symbol of the Depression.
This single photograph of an unemployed pea picker with her
children opened the nations eyes to the depth of human suffering
facing millions of Americans in these bitter years.
she also made memorable pictures of Japanese-Americans in
internment camps during World War II, black tenant farmers,
unemployed men on breadlines, and women and children
all over the world. Regardless of whom she photographed,
Lange created penetrating and insightful portraits that
managed to reveal her subjects suffering and their dignity.
She aroused such compassion for those she photographed
that she was called the Supreme Humanist. A pioneer in
the field of documentary photography, Dorothea Lange
remains one of the most admired and beloved American
photographers of all time.
20
The Outsider
The trouble with me is that Im an outsider. And thats a very hard
thing to be in American life.
Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, quoted in The Unknown
Wisdom of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, ed. Bill Adler
In photography, the smallest thing can be a great subject.
Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson
18951913
Hoboken, New Jersey, occupying just one square mile of land,
sits directly across the Hudson River from lower Manhattan in
New York City. In the mid-nineteenth century, the tiny town
bustled with activity, serving as a port for ocean liners that
carried throngs of European immigrants across the Atlantic
Ocean. While many disembarking passengers left to begin their
new lives in towns scattered throughout the United States,
others, including Dorothea Langes German grandparents,
decided to stay right in Hoboken. By the time Dorothea was
born in 1895, there were 45,000 people living in the immigrant
town. Half of them were of German descent.
Langes maternal grandmother, Sophie Vottler, came over
21
Martin and Dorothea, ca. 1905. An early portrait of the
photographer with her younger brother, Henry Martin.
Even at this early age, Lange began to withdraw from her
peers and family; she was embarrassed by the permanent
limp and the muscle atrophy in her right leg that had
resulted from her bout with polio at the age of seven. Her
withdrawn nature, as well as her disability, allowed Lange
later in life to identify with the displaced and destitute
families she photographed during the Great Depression.
from Stuttgart with her sister, brothers, and mother, Ottelia.
Langes great uncles, who were in their twenties when they
made the transatlantic trip, had been trained as printmakers
in Germany and quickly established businesses in the United
States. Sophies sister, Carolina, never married and eventually
taught seventh-graders. Sophie herself was a dressmaker, and
she married Frederick Lange. They had five childrenfour
boys and Joanna (Joan), Dorotheas mother.
Joan Lange was 21 years old when she married 25-year-
old Heinrich (Henry) Martin Nutzhorn on May 27, 1894.
Henrys parents, Bernhard and Dorothea, were also German
immigrants. Henry was a lawyer, with a successful practice in
Hoboken. Joan worked as a librarian before wedding Henry,
but she also sang soprano in local recitals. The couple rented
an attractive brownstone row house at 1041 Bloomfield, a
tranquil street a mere block away from the main thorough-
fare. This was the house where their first child, Dorothea
Margaretta Nutzhorn, was born on May 25, 1895. She was
named after her paternal grandmother. (Dorothea later
renounced the name Nutzhorn and took her mothers
maiden name, Lange.)
LIMPY
Six years after Dorotheas birth in 1901, her parents had
another child, a boy named Henry Martin. Just a year after his
birth, Dorothea experienced a traumatic event that was to
change her life forever. The seven-year-old girl was stricken
with polio, a dreadful, frightening disease that had no known
cure at the time. Lange was in physical pain for days; she had a
fever and her whole body ached. When the fever finally broke,
she was drained and weakened, and her right leg and foot were
permanently damaged. From then on, Langes foot was inflexible,
and her leg was thin and weak. She had to wear two different-
sized shoes because her right foot was a half size smaller than
her left. And Lange had a limp for the rest of her life.
22 DOROTHEA LANGE
23 The Outsider
Young Dorothea was deeply affected by the disease. She
could no longer run around, or participate in other physical
activities with children her age. Children often teased her,
calling her Limpy. She would attempt to walk as best she
could, but she never could get around or play like the other
children. To make things even worse, her mother, Joan, was
embarrassed by her daughters disability. Later on in life,
Lange remembered how, when she and her mother were
out for a stroll and a friend approached them, Joan would
whisper to her daughter, Now walk as well as you can! Her
mothers attitude saddened and embittered Dorothea. She
thought Joan was ashamed of her, and she grew to resent her
mothers concern for outward appearances.
But as an adult, Dorothea Lange would come to believe
that her bout with polio was perhaps the most important
thing that happened to me. It formed me, guided me,
instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me. All these
things at once. Ive never gotten over it, and I am aware of
the force and the power of it. (Meltzer, 6) Indeed, Langes
disability set her apart from her peers, and she felt a sense
of alienation and not belonging. Yet the pain and shame
that resulted from her limp also helped her to develop a
tremendous empathy for others suffering from ill fortune.
She could understand the plight of those who felt like
outsiders because she experienced those feelings herself.
And, years later, Lange would say, When I was working . . .
with people who were strangers to me, being disabled gave
me an immense advantage. People are kinder to you. It puts
you on a different level than if you go into a situation whole
and secure. (Meltzer, 7)
FAMILY LIFE
When Dorothea was twelve, she was confronted with yet
another calamity. Her father, Henry, suddenly and without
explanation, abandoned Joan, Dorothea, and Martin. The event
affected Dorothea so profoundly that she was unable to speak
about it, or about her father for that matter, for the rest of
her life. Still, she did retain one vivid memory. She recalled
that her father took her to see a performance of William
Shakespeares A Midsummer Nights Dream when she was
about ten years old. They went to the show in a horse-drawn
carriage, but found out that there were no more seats available
24 DOROTHEA LANGE
Daughter of a Migrant Tennessee Coal Miner. Langes limp often
made her feel like an outsider in her social circles, but she gained a
vast empathy from the experience. In later life, she was able to identify
with subjects who felt left behind or somehow on the outside of life as a
result of the difficult economic climate of the 1930s. She captured the
elements of despair and loneliness in the faces of ordinary Americans
and poignantly conveyed these emotions to mainstream audiences. This
photograph was taken in Sacramento in November of 1936.
25 The Outsider
when they arrived. So Henry lifted her up on his shoulders so
she could see the play, and she loved it. It was a magic thing to
do for me, to see that. Magic! (Partridge, 10)
But Lange never heard from her father after he left the
family. He sent neither letters nor money, so Joan was left to
support the children alone. Joan, Dorothea, and Martin
packed their belongings and moved in with Joans mother,
Sophie (who lived in Hoboken, too), so she could help Joan
take care of the family.
Langes grandmother was a small woman, yet she had a
powerful presence. Sophie was strong, moody, and had a
ferocious temper. Although Sophie was often difficult to get
along with and drank a lot, Lange absorbed much from her
grandmother. A gifted dressmaker, Sophie possessed a
refined artistic sensibility, something that Lange seems to
have inherited from her. Sophie once told her that of all the
things in the world, There was nothing finer than an orange,
as a thing. (Meltzer, 5) While Joan required an explanation
for what Sophie meant by that, Dorothea instinctively under-
stood exactly what she meant. Another time, when Dorothea
was about six, she overheard her grandmother say to her
mother, That girl has line in her head. Lange felt that this
meant that she had the sense very early of what was fine and
what was mongrel, what was pure and what was corrupted in
things, and in workmanship, and in cool, clean thought
about something. (Meltzer, 5)
Sophies assertive personality contrasted wildly with
Joans reticence and somewhat timid demeanor. Dorothea
and Martin nicknamed Joan the Wuz, as they thought she
was wussy and afraid to make decisions. Lange disliked
how her mother so often deferred to others in positions of
authority. When I had polio, Lange later recalled, she was
that way with the doctors, and although I was a little child, I
hated it. She was slightly obsequious to anyone in authority.
I never liked it. (Meltzer, 7) And Lange felt that Joan
depended too much on her. But she knew her mother to be a
compassionate person, and Lange was devoted to her.
THE LOWER EAST SIDE
After the family moved in with Sophie, Joan started working
as a librarian. She commuted to a branch of the New York
Public Library situated in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
She made about $12 a week, a very respectable sum for that
era. Five days a week, Lange boarded the ferry with her
mother in the morning and crossed the Hudson to the
landing at Christopher Street. The two of them would walk
across to the Lower East Side, a neighborhood teeming with
thousands of immigrants. The neighborhood was chaotic,
colorful, and crowded, and totally unlike relatively quiet
Hoboken. There were people speaking Yiddish, Chinese,
Italian, Hungarian, and Russian. Different scents infused
the streets garlic mingled with cabbage, pickles, and
other foods foreign to Lange. And the area was packed with
immigrant kids; at the time, more than half the children
in New York City didnt go to school. They were too busy
working so their families could survive.
Lange attended seventh and eighth grades at Public
School 62, located near the library where her mother
worked. The school was well known for its progressive
educational ideas and good teachers, but Lange continued
to feel like an outsider, lonely and isolated. She was one of
a few Gentiles in a school of almost all Jewish children.
Although she knew she was smart, Lange felt intimidated.
She didnt think that she could keep up with her classmates,
who were trying desperately to improve their lot. She later
said, They were too smart for me . . . aggressively smart.
And they were hungry after knowledge and achievement.
(Ohrm, 2)
But Lange was cultivating her own type of hunger. She
couldnt wait until the end of each school day, when she
26 DOROTHEA LANGE
27 The Outsider
would walk back to the library and pore over books in the
staff room. She was supposed to be doing her homework,
but instead she spent hours gazing at the pictures in the
books. She was beginning to act like a photographic
observer, as she later described. Shed peer out the windows
of the staff room, into the tenements around her. She would
watch families from cultures unlike her own go about their
daily lives. I could look into all those lives. All of a tradition
and a race alien to myself, completely alien, but I watched.
(Meltzer, 12)
As her interest in school life was waning, Lange was
becoming an increasingly astute and careful observer. She
was developing her own ideas about what was beautiful.
Once, when she was about fourteen, she and a friend of her
mothers were looking out a window. Lange was staring at
laundry, white sheets flapping in the breeze against a back-
ground of red brick houses and a late-afternoon sky. She said
to the woman, To me, thats beautiful. And the woman
replied, To you, everything is beautiful. This sentiment
resonated in Lange, for she had always imagined that every-
one else saw exactly what she saw. She gradually understood
that she had her own distinct way of seeing the world. She
said of this episode, It made me aware that maybe I had
eyesight. (Meltzer, 13)
Lange was also honing some other skills that were to
come in handy throughout her career as a photographer. Two
nights a week, Joan worked the late shift at the library and
Dorothea had to make the trek to the ferry back home on her
own. Sometimes she would walk south down to the ferry
landing at Barclay Street, but she preferred the longer and
more interesting walk north to the Christopher Street dock.
This journey included the Bowery, a stretch of Manhattan
that was known as Thieves Highway. The area was
notorious for its filth and foul odors, and for the robbers and
drunken men who often roamed about. It could be a scary
place, especially for a girl of just twelve or thirteen. Lange
later said, I remember how afraid I was each time, never
without fear. (Meltzer, 13) Because of her limp, she was
unable to walk very quickly. So she developed a technique
that enabled her to blend in with the background. She
learned to maintain a facial expression that would attract no
attention, so no one would look at her. She called this her
cloak of invisibility. She said, On the Bowery I knew how
to step over drunken men. I dont mean that the streets were
littered with drunken men, but it was a very common affair.
I know how to keep an expression of face that would draw
no attention. . . . I have used that my whole life in photo-
graphing. I can turn it on and off. (Meltzer, 13)
LANGE IN HIGH SCHOOL
By the time Lange started high school, things at home had
taken a turn for the worse. Her grandmother was drinking a
lot and arguing with the family. She even slapped Dorothea
and her brother when she was feeling especially frazzled.
Lange stayed away from home as frequently as possible, but
she wasnt especially interested in school, either.
Wadleigh High School for Girls, in Harlem in uptown
Manhattan, had a student body quite different from that of
Langes grammar school. Although she was no longer a
minority among her classmates, her loneliness persisted. She
ultimately remembered Wadleigh as a miserable place.
Lange was often truant. She usually barely passed classes
in her major, Latin, yet she received decent grades in her
music, art, and English classes. There were, though, a couple
of teachers Lange liked, people she believed left an imprint
on her. There was an English teacher who introduced her to
new poetic styles, and a physics teacher who was very kind
and generous to her. Lange never forgot those people who
touched her during her troubled adolescence.
And Lange did make one very good friend, someone with
28 DOROTHEA LANGE
29 The Outsider
whom shed maintain a lifelong relationship. When she
first saw Florence Ahlstrom, called Fronsie, pass by in the
hallways, Lange liked the way she swished her petticoat. She
and Fronsie would often skip school and walk around New
York City together. Theyd ramble through Central Park,
attend free concerts, and go to exhibits at the Museum of
Natural History and the Metropolitan Museum. But, more
often, Lange would wander around the city by herself. She
The more interesting way home. The Thieves Highway of the Bowery
was part of Langes route home from school as a young girl. She loved
to take this route, for it gave her a chance to hone her skills as an
observer and to blend into the background. It was here that Lange
developed what she called her cloak of invisibility, which became an
invaluable asset in her photographic career.
was unafraid and became proficient at navigating the streets
of Manhattan. She loved to observe and absorb the excitement
and energy of the city, preferring the freedom of the streets
to the company of her classmates and the dreariness of her
family household.
Langes mother didnt know that her daughter was
cutting classes. Dorothea said, I was essentially neglected,
thank God! But very neglected! Not deprived of love, but
they just didnt know where I was nor how I was living. . . . I
realize how enriched I am through having been on the loose
in my formative years. (Meltzer, 18)
When Lange graduated, barely, from Wadleigh in 1913,
she declared to her mother, I want to be a photographer.
30 DOROTHEA LANGE
LANGE AND ISADORA DUNCAN
A
s Langes elementary school years were coming to a close,
she witnessed something that profoundly moved her
that she described as like getting religion . . . an experience
that affected me throughout my life. She went to the
Metropolitan Opera House in New York City to see Isadora
Duncan dance, and she was so captivated by Duncans
performance that she attended many others that December:
I had never been taken into the upper reaches of
human existence before then. . . . It was something
unparalleled and unforgettable to many people, not
just to myself. But to me it was the greatest thing
that ever happened. . . . I still live with that, not as
a theatrical performance, but as an extension of
human possibility. I saw it there. This woman had a
quality that could electrify thousands of people at
once. (Meltzer, 14)
31 The Outsider
She had never owned a camera, but her years of observing
the city and watching people aroused in her a desire to take
photographs. Indeed, Lange believed that she was essentially
self-taught. I have learned from everything, and Im con-
stantly learning. Its part curiosity, I think, trying to discover
why things happen the way they do, watching everything, my
own activities included. (Meltzer, 18)
32
Learning
the Craft
As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is
unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they
are insecure.
Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)
There is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.
Attributed to Ansel Adams
19131918
When Lange made known her intention to become a photographer,
her mother responded, But you have to have something to fall
back on! (Meltzer, 22) She insisted that her daughter pursue a
practical vocation so she could make a steady living. Dorothea
later admitted that she disagreed with this whole premise,
feeling that it would interfere with her artistic goals. She
said, I knew it was dangerous to have something to fall
back on. (Meltzer, 22) But she was forced to continue with her
schooling anyway. Dorotheas mother believed that teaching
would be Langes ticket to economic security. So, in 1913, Lange
very reluctantly enrolled in the New York Training School for
Teachers, which specialized in elementary school education.
Located not too far from Wadleigh High School, the college
had a student body that was, not surprisingly, made up almost
entirely of women.
Langes wish to become a professional photographer
must have baffled her mother, and many of her other family
members and peers as well. Only one out of every four
women in the United States worked outside the home during
33
A restless spirit. At a time when few women worked outside the home
and even fewer pursued professional careers, Lange pressed on toward
her dream of becoming a professional photographer. She was used to
feeling like an outsider, so the pressures of society to conform to a womans
role did not faze her and she followed her mission relentlessly and
without caring what the world might think of her.
Langes young adulthood. And those who did work, out of
necessity or choice, had very scant options: Most women
who sought employment became typists, teachers, or servants.
The fact that Lange even considered a career in photography is
astounding, especially given the limited representation of
women in the field at the time.
But Lange was passionate about pursuing her goal, eager
to learn, and intent on acquiring the skills she would need to
operate a camera, master technique, develop film, and make
prints. She was determined to become a professional, and willing
to work for different types of studios and personalities, to do
all she could to understand the trade. I invented my own
photographic schooling as I went along, she said, stumbling
into most of it. (Partridge, 17)
And thats exactly how she landed her first position with
a photography studio. One day during the summer, Lange
was strolling along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan when she
noticed a striking collection of portrait photographs hung in
a display window. She had arrived at 562 Fifth Avenue, the
studio of Arnold Genthe, a rather well known and respected
photographer. Lange boldly walked upstairs and asked
Genthe for a job. Something about her must have impressed
him, for he immediately hired Lange, who had no training in
photography whatsoever, as an apprentice.
ARNOLD GENTHES STUDIO
In working for Arnold Genthe, Lange essentially was learning
from one of the best in the field. The German-born aristocrat
had moved his business from San Francisco, where hed
run a highly successful portrait studio. Genthe earned
his reputation largely from his turn-of-the-century street
photographs of the Chinatown section of San Francisco
and of his shots of the devastation following the 1906 San
Francisco earthquake and fire, yet his portrait business was
his bread and butter. Hed had an impressive clientele on
34 DOROTHEA LANGE
35 Learning the Craft
the West Coast; society families, musicians, actors, and writers
all sat for him. But when he moved to New York City,
his business grew even more. Genthes roster of subjects
expanded to include such luminaries as the actresses Mary
Pickford and Sarah Bernhardt, Presidents Roosevelt, Taft,
and Wilson, and the writer Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Every day after school Lange ventured to Genthes studio,
frequently working late into the evenings. She was the youngest
of three women on his studio staff, and she earned about $15 a
weeka respectable salary for the time. Lange often handled
receptionist duties, but she made proofs and mounted and
framed the images as well. She also learned such crucial tasks
as spottinghiding the tiny white spots on the negatives left
by bits of dust. And she retouched negatives, using an etching
knife to modify features on the subjects.
The studio introduced Lange to a totally new and exciting
world. In stark contrast to her Hoboken upbringing and the
crowded streets of the Lower East Side, Genthes studio was filled
with gorgeous Oriental rugs, fine art, and exquisitely beautiful
objects, and Lange found herself surrounded by people of
money, power, and influence. Working among such types
provided a look into a world I hadnt seen, a world of privilege,
command of what seemed to me the most miraculous kind of
living . . . very luxurious, everything of the highest expression.
(Meltzer, 24; Partridge, 18) Lange was receiving an excellent
education in how to do business with high-profile customers,
something that would prove to be very helpful to her when she
ran her own studio.
Although Lange absorbed a great deal during her
period with Arnold Genthe, she later claimed that most of
what she learned wasnt photography. By the time Genthe
hired her, he had already completed what is now considered
his finest workthe San Francisco street photographs. In
New York City, Lange said, Genthe was working within a
good commercial formula and making a lot of money.
(Ohrm, 25) Genthe showed her how to tackle the pragmatic
aspects of operating a successful portrait studio. And
Genthe gave her something else, tooto demonstrate his
appreciation for her assistance, he gave Lange what was
probably her first camera.
36 DOROTHEA LANGE
Arnold Genthe. The prominent New York City photographer
Arnold Genthe was the first to recognize Langes gift for
photography. Although she had no experience, Genthe
saw raw talent and passion in Lange and hired her on
the spot. As an apprentice in his studio, Lange got her
first taste of the technical and business aspects of the
photographic industry.
Lange was convinced by this time that teaching was simply
not for her. She came to this final realization soon after an
unfortunate incident that occurred in her classroom while she
was student teaching fifth-graders. One day her students,
clearly clued in to the fact that she lacked the ability to control
them, walked over to the window and climbed down the fire
escape to the schoolyard below. When her supervisor entered
the classroom, Lange was in tears. A few days later, Lange
confronted her mother and told her that she was unwilling to
continue with school, and then she quit the teaching program.
Joan had to accept Langes decision.
MORE MENTORS
Lange soon left Genthes studio, thirsty for even more experiences
and mentors. Her next employer was Aram Kazanjian, an
Armenian portrait photographer who ran a large studio on
57th Street. Like Genthe, Kazanjian photographed wealthy
and famous subjects, like the vocalist Enrico Caruso and the
esteemed Barrymore family. While she was working for
Kazanjian, Lange continued to gain invaluable lessons in
running a portrait photography business. Most notably,
she learned how to solicit customers. Shed call prospective
clients and follow a very specific protocol to win them over.
Additionally, Lange handled retouching and printing for
Kazanjian. Later on, she remembered one incident that stood
out in her memory. It involved a photograph of a woman
from the wealthy DuPont family. The woman was photo-
graphed surrounded by her grandchildren, and she held a large
book in her lap that was supposed to be the family Bible.
The book in the photograph was actually a telephone directory,
and Lange had to manipulate the picture to make the book
look like a Bible.
Lange worked for Kazanjian for a total of about six
months, yet she still hadnt any experience using a big camera.
So she left his studio and found work in the Fifth Avenue
studio of Mrs. A. Spencer-Beatty. In this job, for which Lange
was paid $12 weekly, she started out doing simple tasks. The
nature of Langes duties changed drastically, though, when
Spencer-Beatty found herself in a bit of a jam. Spencer-Beatty
had just one camera operator on staff (she contracted out the
retouching and printing). Shortly after Lange began working
for her, Spencer-Beattys operator quit. Faced with an expensive
commission to fulfill, the desperate Spencer-Beatty assigned
the job to Lange, sending her out to photograph the rich
Irving Brokaw family.
It was the first big job I ever did. . . . But I had enough
insight by that time to know how professionals
behaved on these jobs. I was scared to death . . . not
scared of the people, but that I wouldnt be able to do
the pictures that would be acceptable to them, hard-
boiled pictures, the formal, conventional portrait.
There I was, this obscure little piece, with a great big
8 x 10 camera . . . but I did it! It was sheer luck and
maybe gall. (Meltzer, 26)
Langes first foray into professional photography was
a success. Everyone agreed that her portraits of the family
were excellent. Her career as a portrait photographer
had begun, and Spencer-Beatty sent her out on several
more assignments.
During these formative years in New York City, Lange
picked up advice and insights from other photographers she
befriended. She described some of them as lovable old hacks.
. . . unimportant people from anyone elses point of view.
(Ohrm, 4) Charles Davis, who photographed actors, society
folk, and opera singers, met Lange after his glory years. By
the time he and Lange became friends, he was a broken-down
fellow (Meltzer, 27) with a studio above a saloon, struggling
to recapture the success he had lost. From Davis, Lange
learned about posing subjects. Davis would position the sitter
38 DOROTHEA LANGE
in front of a posh, elaborate background, often with heavy
drapery and ornate furniture, and hed set the subjects face
carefully, exactly where he wanted it, then position each finger.
Sometimes he would spend up to two hours trying to achieve
just the right pose. With Davis, as with some other of her
teachers, Lange was also figuring out what not to do. She
felt that his portraits all looked exactly alike, that they lacked
character. She thought his photographs were perfect, and
completely empty. (Meltzer, 27)
SECESSION AND PICTORIALISM
T
hroughout this period, photography was undergoing a kind
of renaissance. Lange was reading and hearing about
photographers who were seeking to transform the entire way in
which photography was perceived. A group of mostly American
photographers, organized by Alfred Stieglitz in 1902 and calling
themselves the Photo-Secession, rejected the conventions that
previously had confined photography to a limited formula.
They wanted to establish a new definition for photography and
to raise it into the realm of fine art. Prior to this movement,
photography was viewed as simply a mechanical way of keeping
a visual record. But the new photographers, including Edward
Steichen and Gertrude Kasebier, wanted to bring more artistic
elements to the medium. Some of them incorporated tenets
of Pictorialismthey applied techniques to their photographs
that were similar to the techniques that painters used in their
work. Theyd use a soft focus and special printing processes to
achieve a painterly effect. But most of the group eventually
rejected such manipulations and veered away from the Pictorialist
aesthetic, opting instead to rely not on equipment or technique
but on their own distinct visions.
Another of Langes mentors came to her under strange
circumstances he literally arrived at her doorstep. One day
an old traveling photographer came to the door at her
mothers house, offering to snap some shots of her family.
They started talking, and Lange discovered that he had no
place to develop his pictures. So the two of them turned an
abandoned chicken coop in her backyard into a darkroom.
They cleared the area of old feathers and chicken droppings,
and hung heavy black paper on the walls to keep out the
light. They became friends, and Lange learned that he had
traveled all around Europe, selling both his postcard-sized
portraits and large tinted ones. He taught her how to develop
photographs in the darkroom, and he also gave her a rack,
used for drying wet negatives, from Italy. In this unexpected
guest (she never named him in any of her interviews or
writings), Lange found another instructor, one who introduced
her to some useful, though probably old-fashioned, techniques
that surely helped her along the way.
CLARENCE WHITE
In February of 1917, Lange attended a photography course at
Columbia University, taught by Clarence White, a member
of the Photo-Secession, whose work by that time had been
exhibited at almost every major photography show. White
had taught in New York since he moved there in 1906, and
Lange remembered him as a great teacher. Although she
described him as an inarticulate man, almost dumb
(Meltzer, 30), Lange felt that he had a clear, absolute sense of
beauty. Her experience with White was markedly different
from her experiences with the commercial photographers.
I dont think he mentioned technique once, how its done,
or shortcuts, or photographic manipulations. It was to him a
natural instrument and I supposed he approached it some-
thing like a musical instrument which you do the best you
can with when its in your hands. . . . He had an uncanny gift
40 DOROTHEA LANGE
of touching peoples lives, and they didnt forget it. (Ohrm, 7)
Lange gleaned invaluable lessons just from witnessing
Whites instinctual approach to his work.
But Lange later said that she had no designs on becoming
an artist. To be an Artist was something that to me was
unimportant and I really didnt know what it meant.
(Ohrm, 7) Her focus at the time was strictly on portrait
photography. It was a good trade, I thought, one I could do.
It was a choice. I picked it. But I never picked the role of
artist. (Meltzer, 31)
So when her class with White ended, Lange bought a
large camera and two lenses and, for the first time, began
to take her own portraits in earnest. She photographed her
family and other people she knewfriends and acquaintances,
and many, many children. She worked rigorously, often
persisting all day and night, but she still had her fear. She
never felt entirely comfortable in the darkroom, and she
constantly worried that shed make a mistake. She later said
that she was terrified to develop [her photographs]. The fear
of failure, those darkroom terrors they still remain. Its a
gamblers game, photography. (Meltzer, 32) But she loved
the game.
By the end of 1917, Lange believed that she had attained
the skills she needed to support herself completely as a
photographer. She had a solid command of the business
side of running a studio, knew how to find customers,
and had developed an ability to relate to her subjects. But
she knew she had to get away to really prove herself. Not
that I was bitterly unhappy at home, or doing what I was
doing. But it was a matter of really testing yourself out.
(Partridge, 20)
So Dorothea Lange, 22 years old, decided that she was
ready for a big change. She and her childhood friend Fronsie
were convinced that they could make their way around
the world, finding employment in their respective trades
42 DOROTHEA LANGE
Clarence H. White, The Mirror (1912). This is a work by
one of Langes early mentors. White was the sort of man who
worked best when he was creating art, not explaining it. Following
him to shoots and watching him work, Lange learned valuable
lessons on how to capture a subject without imposing or making
the subject feel uncomfortable. In her own work, she helped her
subjects to feel at ease; it was only in this way that she could
capture their uniqueness.
(Lange would photograph people, and Fronsie, who had
been a clerk for Western Union, would find similar work
abroad). So in January of 1918, the two friends pooled
together their money ($140 in all) and set out for their trip
around the world. First they traveled by boat to New Orleans,
and then they headed west by train, stopping in Texas and
New Mexico. On May 18, they arrived in San Francisco
and checked in at the YWCA. They went into their room,
counted their money, and then left to go out to eat. At the
cafeteria, when they reached into Fronsies purse to retrieve
some money to pay for their meal, they discovered that
almost all of their money had been stolen. Between them,
they had a little over $4. They decided to stay there and find
jobs right in California.
44
Portrait
Photographer
It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer. You need less
imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things. But in
photography everything is so ordinary; it takes a lot of looking before
you learn to see the ordinary.
British photographer David Bailey,
quoted in Face, December 1984
19181929
The day after Fronsie and Lange were robbed of most of their cash,
both of them found work. Fronsie took a position at Western
Union sending telegrams, and Lange landed a job at the photo-
finishing counter at Marshs department store. Lange actually
preferred this arrangement to employment in a studio, as she
wanted to sense the life of the city. (Ohrm, 10) She was hoping
to interact with the people of San Francisco, a city that appeared
to embrace the artists and individualistic types that populated it.
And she did. Lange almost immediately became immersed
in the thriving arts community there. On the very first day
of her job, she met Roi Partridge, an etcher, and his wife,
Imogen Cunningham, a photographer. The two of them and
45
Lange in the 1920s. No subject can hold for a long time anything
that is false for them. It cant be done. You can try, but its ghastly.
Believing photography to be the intersection of what the photographer
wanted to take and what the subject wanted to give, Lange captured
the true nature of her subjectsincluding herself. Her passion
for the raw, unadulterated expressions of people and places drove
her to create some of the most compelling photographic images
of her time.
their extended group of friends were integral figures in San
Franciscos free-spirited bohemian scene. Lange recalled
these people as free and easy. They were people who lived
according to their own standards and did what they wanted
to do in a way they wanted to do it. (Meltzer, 56)
Roi had just started working for an advertising agency,
and the company occasionally asked Imogen to take photos
of some of their billboards. Roi often would take the film
to Marshs to be developed, and one day he started talking
with the new girl behind the counter, who clearly knew a lot
about photography. Lange went on to cultivate a lifelong
friendship with Roi and Imogen, and they introduced her to
many others in their lively and artistic circle of friends. Lange
also decided to join a camera club, specifically because she
needed access to a darkroom. Through the club, she met
other contacts and friends, including Consuelo Kanaga, who
was a photographer for The San Francisco News, and also a
man named Sidney Franklin.
Franklin, a wealthy young investor, offered Lange
assistance in setting up her portrait photography business.
Lange, thrilled and eager to open her own studio, gladly
accepted his help. She searched around for a good location
and soon found one that perfectly suited her. Situated at 540
Sutter Street, it was a lovely spot, complete with a courtyard
and fountain. Langes rented space consisted of a large, open
room with a fireplace and French doors, and a downstairs
area where she would build a darkroom.
Langes good fortune continued when she and Fronsie
became acquainted with a wealthy Irishman named Jack
Boumphrey who took a liking to them both. He offered Lange
a loan of $3,000 to help her in starting her business. She
couldnt refuse, and she and Franklin severed their contract
without ado. Under the new arrangement with Boumphrey,
Dorothea would pay him back the money she borrowed;
but she wouldnt have to share income from her business, as
46 DOROTHEA LANGE
47 Portrait Photographer
she would have had to with Franklin. Boumphrey was yet
another example of someone who was immediately
enchanted by Dorothea (like Arnold Genthe and others),
going so far as to lend her money without really knowing
her. As Langes son Dan later wrote, He didnt care that she
was young and inexperienced, only that she was rare and
remarkable. (Partridge, 163)
THE STUDIO
The new tenant went straight to work preparing her studio
for business. She purchased a big, dark velvet plush sofa filled
with soft pillows and placed it in front of the fireplace. She
set a phonograph on a nearby table next to a large stack of
records. She hired an elegant young assistant to help her
out with everything from secretarial duties to retouching
negatives to serving cookies and tea. And she also did some-
thing that emphatically asserted the beginning of a new
phase in her life: she gave up her fathers surname, Nutzhorn,
and adopted her mothers maiden name, Lange. (Her mother
had divorced Dorotheas father in 1919.) None of her new
friends knew that shed ever been named Nutzhorn.
Almost immediately Langes business prospered. She started
to photograph some of the most prominent personalities
and families in the city. Many people who visited the
Hill-Tollerton Print Gallery (located right next door to her
studio) wandered around the building and noticed Langes
work. Impressed by her portraits, theyd walk into her
studio and request to have their own photographs taken.
Her clients were very pleased with the results, and word
spread throughout the city and Bay Area.
Most of Langes clients werent celebrities or performers
(as many of her previous employers clients had been).
Rather, they were what she called the San Francisco
merchant princes. People who came into that building and
bought original etchings and original prints were the kind of
people who, if your work had any quality, would notice it.
She described them as being from large families who knew
each other, and had a very strong community sense and
that warm responsive love for many things children and
education and buildings and pictures, music, philanthropy.
(Ohrm, 11)
Langes sitters must have appreciated her singular style
of working. She would meet with each of her subjects, often
a few times, to try to get to know them and somehow
connect with them. Shed attempt to engage them by asking
questions and creating an atmosphere that allowed them to
feel comfortable. Then when she was ready to shoot, shed set
up soft, subtle lighting. Unlike many of her contemporaries
(including some of her former employers and informal
instructors), she didnt drape her sitters or use strong lighting.
She wanted her subjects to look natural, so she avoided
dramatic and theatrical props.
In fact, most of her work from this period showed no
background at all. Lange concentrated mainly on the face,
especially the sitters eyes. Her portraits would frequently
feature just the subjects head, and sometimes the shoulders.
Lange was working with a cumbersome 8-by-10-inch camera
then, so every shot had to be taken slowly and carefully. The
camera demanded the patience of the photographer and the
sitter, but Lange felt that this made for a more intimate
portrait. She said, No subject can hold for a long time
anything that is false for them. It cant be done. You can try,
but its ghastly. You have to wait until certain decisions are
made: first by the subject what hes going to give to the
camera, and then by the photographer what hes going to
choose to take. (Meltzer, 49)
Lange has said that during this time she wasnt trying to
do anything groundbreaking. She considered her photography
at the studio to be a practical job. She just did what she could
to make her work as good as it could be. To her that meant
48 DOROTHEA LANGE
Langes portraits. This image, which Lange created in the
1920s, illustrates the work of her early studio period. Her
technique differed significantly from that of more established
photographers it was based less on Langes own goals
than on her subjects comfort level. Lange went to great
lengths to put her sitters at ease in order to avoid all theatrical
elements and to capture them in a natural way. Her emphasis
on the sitters eyes would become characteristic of her
portrait photographs.
being useful, filling a need, really pleasing the people for
whom I was working. . . . My personal interpretation was
second to the need of the other fellow. (Meltzer, 49)
All of her portraiture at the time was done on commission;
Lange did no personal photography for years. She said, People
like Imogen Cunningham, whom I knew very well by that
time, worked for name and prestige, and sent to exhibits.
But I was a tradesman. At least I so regarded myself. Lange
thought of herself as a professional photographer who had
a product that was more honest, more truthful, and in some
ways more charming. At any rate, there was no false front to
it. I seriously tried, with every person I photographed, to
reveal them as closely as I could. (Meltzer, 49)
Although Lange shot some of her sitters in their homes
around the Bay Area, most of her time was spent in the studio.
She worked day and night, and occasionally throughout
weekends. And the studio was also the focal point of Langes
social life. Soon after she opened her business there, it
evolved into a meeting place for friends and all kinds of
artists and bohemian types. That place was my life, she
said. Every day at five oclock, people would drop by and
drink tea from the coal-heated samovar and eat teacakes.
Playwrights, writers, musicians, and others filled her studio
with lively discussions about art and politics as jazz music
played on the phonograph.
One night while she was downstairs working in her studio
darkroom, she heard some very peculiar sharp clicking foot-
steps. For a while I was very much afraid of those footsteps,
Lange said, and when I heard them I wouldnt go upstairs.
(Partridge, 25) She soon found out that those steps belonged
to the Western wilderness painter Maynard Dixon, a friend of
Roi Partridge and Imogen Cunningham.
Dixon was a popular character who loomed large in the
San Francisco bohemian crowd. Decked out in his signature
outfit of Western clothing and finely crafted cowboy boots,
50 DOROTHEA LANGE
and often smoking his kinnikinnick (rolled cigarettes of
manzanita bark, pipe tobacco, and sagebrush), Dixon was
awfully intriguing to Lange. He was charismatic and famous
for his colorful stories of Western loreincluding tales of
posses and stagecoach robbers and Native American raids.
He also was articulate, highly individualistic, and had a great
sense of humor, reflected in the caricatures and sketches
he made for many friends. Lange once said of him, He was
the kind legends cluster about, without his making any
particular effort. (Meltzer, 52) The two fell in love, and six
months later, on March 21, 1920, they were wed in her studio.
Langes friend Fronsie served as the maid of honor, and Roi
was the best man. Dixon was 45 years old; Lange was 24.
LIFE WITH MAYNARD DIXON
They rented a small house on Russian Hill, situated between
their two studios. The little house was reached by climbing up
a flight of stairs and walking along a brick walk surrounded by
daisies, nasturtiums, and geraniums. The rent was cheap, so
Lange could pay back the loan for her studio, and Dixon could
pay alimony to his ex-wife and also help support his daughter
from that marriage, Constance.
Dixon often went away for long stretches of time to sketch
and paint his big, sweeping canvases of rugged mountains and
desert landscapes. He would also visit many of his friends on
these tripsthe cattlemen and Native Americans he often
included in his art. In the beginning of their marriage, Lange
accompanied him on a few of the sketching trips.
In the summer of 1922, the couple traveled to the Navajo
reservation in Arizona. While he sketched, Lange went out and
took some photographs. This was one of her first photographic
journeys outside her studio. She was thrilled with the colors
and the vastness of the West. She said later, We went into a
country which was endless and timeless, and way off from the
pressures that I thought were part of life. The earth and the
heavens, even the change of seasons, Id never really experi-
enced until that time. Then I became aware. (Partridge, 106)
The following summer, in 1923, Lange and Dixon took
another trip, this time to Navajo and Hopi country. They
had been invited by Anita Baldwin McClaughrey, who was a
millionaire and a collector of Dixons paintings. Lange and
Dixon didnt have to supply a cent all expenses were paid
by Anita. They camped at the base of the Walpi mesa. Anita,
intending to compose an opera about Native American life,
52 DOROTHEA LANGE
MAYNARD DIXON
D
ixon, born in California in 1875, was a self-taught artist
who started drawing at a very young age. As a child, he
used to take camping trips to the Southwest, where he developed
a lifelong interest in and friendships with the rapidly vanishing
American Indian tribes. His work was influenced by Frederic
Remington, one of the most prolific and best-known illustrators
of the Old West. When Lange met him, Maynard was designing
billboards for an advertising firm, Foster and Kleiser (where Roi
Partridge also was employed), mostly to pay the bills. He also was
illustrating Western-themed subjects for such popular journals
as Harpers Weekly, Scribners, and McClures. But by the time
he and Lange were married, he was determined to be a full-time
painter, not an illustrator. The two made a fascinating, colorful
couple. He was tall and walked with a cane; she was short and
wore heavy, primitive silver jewelry. She also often wore long
skirts, perhaps to hide her limp. She admired him and his work
greatly; his dedication to his art and his populist sensibilities
surely rubbed off on Lange. She once said, I have never
watched any persons life as closely as I watched his, what it
held, how he lived it. (Meltzer, 55)
studied their music while Dixon painted and Lange took
photographs. One of Langes images from around that time,
Hopi Indian, New Mexico, c. 1923, shows the face of a
Native American in extreme close-up. His large pores, shiny,
sun-worn skin, and deeply carved wrinkles bring the viewer
right into his world. Lange stayed in the area for about a
month, but Dixon remained for about four months.
In the beginning of their marriage, Lange and Dixon each
maintained their own separate studios, and continued to enjoy
their active social lives. But there were some difficulties, one
of which was Langes relationship with Constance (called
Consie). Consie, who was ten years old when her father
married Lange, lived with the newlyweds while her mother
was going through rehabilitation for her alcoholism. She and
Lange had problems from the beginning, and Dixon left the
care of his daughter totally in Langes hands. Consie must
have suffered a lot during her early life, as her mother was
ailing and her father totally committed to his work. But
Lange, still a very young woman herself, had little patience
for the girl. She taught Consie to cook, clean, sew, and iron,
and (as Langes grandmother had done) lashed out if the
tasks werent done exactly according to instructions. She
became so frustrated with Consie that shed often slap her.
The two fought all the time. Lange would feel terrible after
she exploded at the child and would beg Consie not to tell her
father. This conflict continued throughout Langes and Dixons
marriage, and Consie was sent for long periods of time to
stay with close family friends, the Wilsons.
CHILDREN
On May 15, 1925, Lange gave birth to her first child, Daniel
Rhodes Dixon. John Eaglefeather Dixon was born three years
later, on June 12, 1928. She adored her children, but after
their births her work and life began to change. There was
never any question about who would assume responsibility
for their day-to-day upbringing; Lange would tend to them
and to all the household chores. She usually performed her
chores in the morning, arranged for the boys meals, and
then went to her studio. Juggling work with her familial
duties proved to be difficult, but she also viewed her
business as crucial to the financial security of the family.
Dixon and she believed that her studio enabled him to pursue
his painting. When a newspaper reporter interviewed her
about how she handled being married to an artist, Lange
replied, Simple. Simple, that is, when an artists wife accepts
the fact that she has to contend with many things other
wives do not. She must first realize that her husband does
not work solely to provide for his family. He works for the
sake of his workbecause of an inner necessity. To do both
of these things successfully, he needs a certain amount of
freedomfreedom from the petty, personal things of life. . . .
As Maynards wife, it is my chief job to see that his life
does not become too involvedthat he has a clear field.
(Meltzer, 61) She didnt seem to have a problem then with
living in Dixons shadow.
Later on in life, Lange recalled about that era, I continued
to reserve a small portion of my life . . . and that was my
photographic area. But the most of my life and the biggest part,
the largest part of my energy, my deepest allegiances, were to
Maynards work and my children. (Partridge, 97)
But Dixons and Langes problems escalated with her
increased responsibilities. As the years passed, Dixon continued
to go away on his long sketching trips. Usually hed say hed
be back in four to six weeks, but typically he spent at least
four months away at a time. To keep her business going,
Lange felt she had to place the children with other families
for months. She sometimes left them with the Wilson family
(whom Consie was living with), and other times they stayed
with Langes brother, Martin, who lived in nearby San Jose.
This separation from her children pained her, but she felt
54 DOROTHEA LANGE
Mothers Day, While We Were Living at Virginia St. Although
she spent much of her time traveling and documenting the troubles
of American people, Lange seems to have enjoyed the domestic
side of life. This photograph stands in strong contrast to her
documentary work; it is light and almost whimsical. (The hand
belongs to John Dixon, Langes son with Maynard Dixon.) In her
later years, Lange was able to explore domestic life even more fully.
that it was necessary. And the couple had other difficulties,
too. Lange and Consie were still not getting along, and Dixon,
with his defiantly populist ideals, often teased Lange about
what he considered her elitism.
Yet Lange managed to maintain an active clientele for her
portrait studio, and her business was thriving. Late in the
summer of 1929, business was going so well that she thought
she could afford to take a vacation with the family. So she
closed the studio, and she, Dixon, and the boys took a trip to
the Sierra Nevada. Lange shot some pictures of the landscape
and some of her sons in the natural environment.
Most of the personal photographs Lange had taken
during these years were images of her children. These shots
incorporated aspects of her professional portraiture, yet
they responded to the childrens spontaneity. Still, she did
experiment with other subjects. For example, she snapped
some shots of plants, perhaps influenced by the work of
her friend Imogen Cunningham (Imogens studies of
plants were featured in an exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929).
But Lange wasnt very happy with the results. After she
spent time on a friends estate in the mountains, where she
made some photographs, she said, I tried to photograph
the young pine trees there and I tried to photograph some
stumps, and I tried to photograph in the late afternoon
the way the sunlight comes through some big-leafed plants
with a horrible name, skunk cabbage, with big pale leaves
and the afternoon sun showing all the veins. I tried to
photograph those things because I like them. But I just
couldnt do it. (Ohrm, 21)
One day during the Sierra Nevada trip, while Lange was
enjoying some tranquil moments alone outside, she had
something of an epiphany, spurred on by nature. She was
contemplating some of her recent work involving landscapes
and feeling demoralized, when she noticed a thunderstorm
stirring. She explained years later to her son Daniel, When it
56 DOROTHEA LANGE
broke, there I was, sitting on a big rock and right in the middle
of it, with the thunder bursting and the wind whistling, it
came to me that what I had to do was to take pictures and
concentrate upon people, only people, all kinds of people,
people who paid me, and people who didnt. (Meltzer, 63)
This realization represented a crucial turning point in
Dorothea Langes work.
58
Documentary
Photographer
Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face,
the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited and the
wealth and confusion man has created.
Edward Steichen, quoted in Time, April 7, 1961
[The] benefit of seeing . . . can come only if you pause a while, extricate
yourself from the maddening mob of quick impressions ceaselessly
battering our lives, and look thoughtfully at a quiet image. . . . [T]he
viewer must be willing to pause, to look again, to meditate.
Dorothea Lange
19291935
When Lange and her family returned to San Francisco after
their vacation in the Sierra Nevada, her life and her attitude
toward her photographs began to undergo a transformation.
She was gradually growing dissatisfied with her commercial
portrait work and had made up her mind to make photographs
that she considered more serious, although she wasnt exactly
sure how she would go about it. She later said, when speaking
about her portrait business, I could have gone on with it,
and enlarged it, and had a fairly secure living, a small personal
business, had I not realized that it wasnt really what I wanted,
not really. I had proved to myself that I could do it, and
I enjoyed every portrait that I made in an individual way. . . .
I wanted to work on a broader basis. . . . I was still sort of
aware that there was a very large world out there that I had
entered not too well. (Ohrm, 22)
And there was much happening in the larger world around
her. On October 24, 1929, the stock market crashed, and the
entire country was thrown into chaos. Banks failed, factories
closed, and unemployment skyrocketed. (At the height of the
Great Depression, in 1933, about 33 percent of the total work-
force was unemployed.) The whole nation was in crisis. People
couldnt afford to spend money the way they used to, even the
wealthy, so Lange lost commissions and Dixon had difficulty
selling paintings. And as their economic challenges mounted,
the tension between the couple increased.
In the summer of 1931, Lange and Dixon purchased a
secondhand Model A Ford, their first car, and the family
drove to Taos, New Mexico. Lange said later, We werent there
because of the Depression, but because Dixon wanted to paint
and there was enough money to see us through. The outside
world was full of uncertainty and unrest and trouble and we
went and we stayed there. (Partridge, 33) So the two of them,
along with Dan and John, found an old Mexican adobe house
on a hill, with just two rooms and no plumbing or telephone.
IN TAOS
While Dixon painted, Lange occupied herself with such chores
as cooking and pumping water from the well. This period was
the most time the children had ever spent with their mother.
They even bought a pony, and Daniel and John learned how to
59
ride. Lange took photographs occasionally, mostly of towns-
people and children, yet her familial obligations prevented her
from totally concentrating on her work. But every morning in
Taos she would watch this very sober, serious man driving
with a purpose down the road. (Meltzer, 66) She thought he
must be an artist, and soon found out that he was Paul Strand,
60 DOROTHEA LANGE
Dixon, cowboy/artist. Langes first husband, Maynard Dixon,
at his easel around 1920. Dixon, usually seen smoking
hand-rolled cigarettes and sporting cowboy outfits, was an
intriguing juxtaposition to Lange, a bohemian photographer
of the city. The two made a dynamic duo, though, and
inspired and motivated each other in their respective careers.
61 Documentary Photographer
a photographer whose work she had seen. She said, It was
the first time I had observed a person in my own trade who
took his work that way. . . . He had private purposes that he
was pursuing, and he was so methodical and so intent on it that
he looked neither to the right nor left. . . . I didnt until then
really know about photographers who went off for themselves.
(Meltzer, 66)
She pondered all the time she spent caring for her children,
tending to the chores, and helping her husband, and she
became acutely aware of the difficulties facing the female
artist. I have to hesitate before I say that I was too busy. Maybe
I kept myself too busy. But that thing that Paul Strand was
able to do, I wasnt able to do. Women rarely can, unless
theyre not living a womans life. I dont know whether I was
temperamentally sufficiently mature at that time to have done
it. . . . I photographed once in a while when I could, but just
a little. (Meltzer, 67)
After six months in Taos, the winter arrived and they were
all ready to go home. On their drive back, the family witnessed
firsthand the terrible havoc the Great Depression wrought.
Life in Taos somehow had seemed removed from the crisis that
consumed the nation at large. They saw homeless men walking
aimlessly along the roads and teenage boys who had been sent
away by their own families to fend for themselves.
When they arrived back in San Francisco in 1932, Lange
and Dixon made an extremely difficult decision. She recalled
later that, coming back to California, we were confronted with
the terrors of the Depression. Not that we didnt have enough
to eat, but everyone was so shocked and panicky. No one knew
what was ahead. (Meltzer, 68) They placed the boys, then just
four and seven years old, in a boarding school in nearby San
Anselmo, and lived apart in their respective studios. Lange
moved into hers (then located at 802 Montgomery Street), and
Dixon into his about half a block away. They thought that this
would help them economizetheyd save the expenses of
renting a house and running a household. On weekends, Lange
and Dixon visited the boys, often taking them for picnics in the
countryside and target shooting. But the arrangement was
painful for all of them. Lange later said, This was very, very
hard for me to do. Even now when I speak of it I feel the pain.
I carry these things inside and it hurts me in the same spot that
it did then. (Meltzer, 68)
Back in her studio, Lange couldnt help feeling the absence
of her children. But the strain somehow fueled her work.
Although my mind was over in San Anselmo most of the time
and I didnt like to be separated from the children, it drove me
to work. And I worked then as I would not have done, I am
sure, if I had gone back to my habitual life. (Meltzer, 69) Her
personal anguish gave her even more empathy for the growing
legions of homeless men that she saw wandering along the
sidewalks right outside her studio door. She became very
conscious that the discrepancy between what I was working
on . . . and what was going on in the street was more than I
could assimilate. (Rosenblum, 172)
One fall day, as Lange was making proofs in her second-
floor studio (a few clients could still afford such luxuries
as portraits), she watched as an unemployed young man
walked up the street. She said, He came to the corner,
stopped, and stood there a little while. Behind him were
the waterfront and the wholesale districts; to his left was
the financial district; ahead was Chinatown and the Hall
of Justice; to his right the flophouses and the Barbary
Coast. What was he to do? Which way was he to go?
(Heyman, 14)
WHITE ANGEL BREADLINE
Lange couldnt close her eyes to the social turmoil all around
her. She was overwhelmed by the need to act. Near her studio,
on Market Street, a woman named Lois Jordan had set up a
soup kitchen/breadline to feed starving and out-of-work
62 DOROTHEA LANGE
people. She was a working-class widow, nicknamed the
White Angel. Lange said, I looked down at the line as long
as I could, and then one day I said to myself, Id better
make this happen. (Heyman, 24) She loaded her 3-by-
4-inch Graflex camera and walked down to photograph
the breadline.
Lange was a little nervous to go alone, and she didnt know
what to expect, so she took her brother Martin along with her
for protection. She set up her camera and took shots of some
of the men eating stew and drinking weak coffee. Then she took
several others of the breadline. She moved with trepidation at
first. She said, I wasnt accustomed to jostling about in groups
of tormented, depressed and angry men, with a camera.
(Partridge, 17) But then Lange recalled what she learned as a
girl walking along New York Citys Bowery. She summoned
her cloak of invisibility, her singular ability to blend in and
remain unassuming.
Camera in hand, she neared an elderly man who was
hunched over a railing. He was looking down at his clenched
hands and holding a tin cup between his arms. He was
unshaven and his mouth was turned down. Behind him was
a line of men, most of them better dressed. (His hat was
markedly more soiled and worn than many of their crisp
hats; most of them appeared to be newly unemployed.) He
was facing away from them. Touched by the scene, Lange
took two photos of the man, from different angles and
distances. He didnt look up.
Later, when she was asked what she had felt about what she
saw before her, Lange said, I can only say I knew I was looking
at something. You know there are moments such as these when
time stands still and all you do is hold your breath and hope it
will wait for you. And you just hope you will have enough time
to get it organized in a fraction of a second on that tiny piece
of sensitive film. Sometimes you have an inner sense that you
have encompassed the thing generally. You know then that you
64 DOROTHEA LANGE
White Angel Breadline. This photograph started Lange on her
crusade to record the essence of peopleall kinds of people
including those who had been ignored or forgotten by the rest
of society. White Angel Breadline hung in Langes studio for a
long time as her inspiration for documenting the emotion and
trauma of the Depression matured into a passion that would
shape the rest of her career. I had struggled a lot for months
and months with this material, she said. . . . But I saw some-
thing, and I encompassed it, and I had it.
are not taking anything away from anyone, their privacy, their
dignity, their wholeness. (Ohrm, 24)
When she was done, she went back to her studio and
developed the film in her darkroom. She also handed the film
magazine holder to her assistant so he could reload it later,
but she hadnt realized that a film was still inside. When her
assistant discovered the film the next day, he developed it and
brought it back to her. It was the photo of the man with the
soiled, crinkled hat and the tin cup. She made a print of it and
then examined it. She said, I had struggled a lot for months
and months with this material. . . . But I saw something, and I
encompassed it, and I had it. (Ohrm, 24)
At the time, Lange didnt know what to do with the
picture. She hung the image on the wall of her studio,
interested to see how her customers would react to it. Most
of them just glanced at or asked her, What are you going to
do with that sort of thing? She had no idea, and she didnt
know that this style and approach to photography would
WHITE ANGEL BREADLINE
T
his image is striking in that it reveals both the mans
suffering and his dignity. Its discreet, and very noticeably
made with respect and compassion. Lange took this shot from
a higher angle, pointing the camera down toward the man.
Compositionally speaking, he is at the center of a distinctly
triangular shape formed by the rails against which he is leaning
and the angled hats worn by the men behind him. His hat is
one of the most prominent shapes in the image. The photograph
eventually received nationwide recognition and praise. Titled
White Angel Breadline, it went on to become one of the
most memorable images of Dorothea Langes career and a
classic photo of the Great Depression.
consume the next twenty years of her life. But she did know
that she had to continue to photograph those people who
couldnt afford to pay her. She knew that she had to do
more to show the human consequences and devastation of
the Great Depression.
PICTURES OF THE PEOPLE
Lange became single-minded in her quest, entirely switching
gears in her photographic work. She sent out to her studio
clients a note declaring her intentions, that she was now a
maker of Pictures of People. She started taking her camera to
more dangerous areas. At first, she was tentative with shooting
these starving and often angry men, but she soon turned
fearless. She took images of soup lines, and people sleeping
outside in the streets, and makeshift camps.
She felt intense compassion for these people whose
lives had been wholly disrupted by circumstances beyond
their control. Perhaps she identified with them so strongly
because she, too, knew what it was like to feel like an outsider.
And her sympathy for the common man must have also
been influenced by her husbands populist sensibilities, and
probably, too, by the political beliefs of the new president,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR).
FDR was inaugurated as president of the United States in
early March of 1933. Like Lange, Roosevelt had contracted
polio when he was a child, but he had lost the use of his legs as
a result of the disease. The new president proposed a New
Deal, designed to rehabilitate the economy and provide relief
for the country through government-sponsored programs. In
a speech that he had delivered on April 7, 1932, he said, These
unhappy times call for the building of plans . . . that put their
faith once more in the forgotten man at the bottom of the
economic pyramid. (Partridge, 68) The phrase Forgotten
Man had served as a defining part of FDRs campaign, and it
became a motif in much of Dorothea Langes work.
66 DOROTHEA LANGE
Under Roosevelt, Congress passed legislation that helped
to ease the suffering of those affected by the Great Depression.
In March of 1933, the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) was
established. About 250,000 teenagers and young men were
employed to do construction and conservation work. Their
provisions included housing and meals, and they were paid
about $30 a month. In May, Congress passed another law
setting aside $500 million in aid to the Federal Emergency
Relief Administration (FERA).
In 1934, as Lange spent more time photographing on the
streets, she and Dixon once again tried to make their marriage
work. Lange decided to give up her studio space, but she
maintained her portrait business in their new house at 2515
Gough Street. (They moved Daniel and John back home with
them, and the boys were thrilled.) Although Lange didnt really
want to make portraits of the privileged anymore, the money
from her business still helped fund Dixons painting trips.
She managed to keep her business afloat, though she had to
continue the practice of placing the boys with other families.
The boys hated being away from their parents, but Lange was
committed to her photography.
Despite Roosevelts sweeping, ambitious changes, millions
of Americans remained unemployed. And many of those who
were employed were paid extremely low wages and labored
long hours. In May of 1934, the Longshoremens Union went
on strike at the docks. These were the men who loaded and
unloaded the cargo from the ships that came into port in San
Francisco. They were exhausted from their many hours of hard
labor, which often meant 24- to 36-hour stretches. They wanted
better wages and improved conditions. Lange took photos of
them while they were striking, even though tensions were
running high and people were, understandably, very angry and
desperate. Once the strike began, the ship owners hired strike-
breakers to transport the cargo, with the police protecting them
as they worked. The situation turned violent, and hundreds of
people were injured in the clashes. It culminated on July 5,
1934, known as Bloody Thursday. Governor Frank Merriam
declared a state of riot and called in the National Guard, which
sprayed tear gas and struck some of the men with clubs. In the
end, two strikers were left dead. Laborers were furious and
declared a general strike, throughout the city, on July 16.
Langes photos of the strike were very different from those
of other photographers. Many of the pictures in the news-
papers featured shots of bloodied strikers and the violence. But
Langes images had more nuances. She always approached her
subjects discreetly, and she seemed to be especially attentive to
their gestures. Like the photos Lange had taken in the May
Day demonstrations at San Franciscos Civic Center in 1933,
her pictures often revealed something of their personality
or state of mind through their hands, lips, or legs. (Street
Demonstration, San Francisco, 1933,a well-known photograph,
featured a policeman facing a group of picketers; his feet are
spread wide apart and his fingers are laced together over his
belly, showing his authority.) Throughout her career, Lange
was a keen observer of how powerfully the body reflects
emotion and character traits.
One day in the summer of 1934, a friend of Langes
suggested that she exhibit some of the photos she had taken
outside her studio. She had her first show at a small gallery
in Oakland, in the studio of Willard Van Dyke, a well-known
photographer who greatly admired Langes work.
In a piece Van Dyke wrote for Camera Craft, he said,
[The people in Dorothea Langes photos] are in the midst of
great changescontemporary problems are reflected on their
faces, a tremendous drama is unfolding before them, and
Dorothea Lange is photographing it through them. . . . She is
not preoccupied with the philosophy behind the present
conflict. She is making a record of it through the faces of the
individuals most sensitive to it or most concerned in it. Her
treatment of this type of human subjects shows her in turn
68 DOROTHEA LANGE
sensitive and sympathetic to the uncertainty and unrest at the
present time. (Heyman, 20)
Langes way of photographing people, unposed in their
natural surroundings, was nothing short of groundbreaking.
Street Demonstration, San Francisco, 1933. One
of Langes many photographs of the 1933 May Day
demonstrations in San Francisco. Lange always managed
to capture a subject or moments personality and emotion
through simple or discreet gestures or movements. This
piece shows the policeman asserting his authority over
the situation by lacing his hands in front of him and
adopting a strong stance.
She was one of the earliest pioneers in the United States of
a style of photography known as documentary photography.
When explaining herself later as a documentary photographer,
she said: Hands off! I do not molest what I photograph, I do
not meddle and I do not arrange. (Heyman, 16) Langes
photos are factual and unflinchingly direct. She said,
The documentary photograph carries with it another thing,
a quality [in the subject] that the artist responds to. It is a
photograph, which carries the full meaning of the episode or
the circumstance or the situation that can only be revealed
because you cant really recapture it by this other quality.
There is no real warfare between the artist and the documentary
photographer. He has to be both. (Meltzer, 84) Her photo-
graphs have an urgency to them, yet they also reveal astonishing
emotional depth. She connected on a real level with her
subjects and conveyed their suffering while revealing their
resilience and perseverance, and, always, their dignity.
Some of Langes photographer friends also were recording
the drastic social changes occurring around them, but none of
them did it with her high degree of determination and personal
involvement. Some of them had joined togetherincluding
Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams, Willard
Van Dyke, and othersand called themselves Group f64.
They advocated what they called straight photography; this
meant that they never manipulated their images in any way.
The f64 movement was very progressive for the era. Although
Lange counted many of the groups members as her friends, and
she often discussed her work with them, she never exhibited
her work with them. Ansel Adams said, Although she did
participate in a few informal discussions, I dont think she
shared in our objectives. (Meltzer, 75) Lange ardently believed
that her photographs had to fill a social need.
At the gallery show, Langes photos were seen for the first
time by lots of people. Viewers, unaccustomed to seeing such
direct, blunt images of social protests, were amazed. Her work
70 DOROTHEA LANGE
provoked strong responses. In fact, Van Dyke himself was
so affected by her photos that he soon stopped working on
still photography and moved east, eventually becoming a
documentary filmmaker. But perhaps no viewer was quite so
taken by Langes work as Paul Schuster Taylor.
PAUL TAYLOR
Taylor, a sociologist and economist at the University of
California, was so impressed with what he saw that he
telephoned Lange and asked if he could use one of her images
to illustrate an article he had worked on. He had written a piece
on San Franciscos general strike for a magazine called Survey
Graphic, a social-science magazine with a populist bent. Taylor
was a New Deal progressive who specialized in agricultural issues
and migratory labor. He thought her visuals would complement
his text, and she agreed to let him use the picture. (The article,
with her photo, was published in September 1934.)
Then, when Taylor was studying some of Californias self-
help cooperatives (small groups of unemployed people who
exchanged their labor for supplies), he convinced Willard
Van Dyke to invite some photographer friends to shoot one of
the communities. That summer, Lange, Imogen Cunningham,
Van Dyke, and Mary Jeanette Edwards ventured to Oroville in
the Sierra foothills to photograph the Unemployed Exchange
Association (UXA), a group of families that ran an old sawmill
together. There, Lange and Paul Taylor met for the first time.
She admired how Taylor spoke to people at the UXA; he
talked with them gently, unobtrusively, and casually, and his
lack of presumption helped him to draw out honest personal
observations from them. His understated manner never made
them feel self-conscious. Lange said about this trip, I knew
about people going and asking questions and filling in
questionnaires, but an interview I had never heard. And I
was very interested in the way in which he got the broad answers
to questions without people really realizing how much they
were telling him. Everybody else went to bed while he was still
sitting there in that cold miserable place talking with these
people. (Ohrm, 42)
Their statements made Taylors studies more compelling,
and they supported the larger issues he was addressing in
his reports. And Taylor observed Lange with interest, too. He
recalled later that the first thing he saw Lange do when she
arrived at the site was photograph a man leaning on his ax
and looking up at trees. He liked the fact that she chose an
72 DOROTHEA LANGE
A collaborative documentary. In 19341935, Lange teamed up with the
economist Paul Taylor to document the plight of Californias migratory workers.
Taylor felt it crucial to use Langes subtle and poignant photography to
complement the written report the government had requested of him.
He felt Lange could adequately and appropriately capture the true grit
and severity of the situation. Lange, similarly, was intrigued by the
manner in which Taylor went about documenting the emotions of
subjects through interviews and the written word. A lasting friendship
was building that would eventually lead to marriage.
angle most other photographers wouldnt consider: She
photographed the man from behind. He thought her work was
subtler than that of other photographers.
In the winter of 19341935, Californias federally funded
State Emergency Relief Administration (established as part
of Roosevelts New Deal) asked Paul Taylor to create a report
on the states increasingly serious migratory labor problem.
Indigent workers, numbering in the tens of thousands, were
streaming into the state, looking for jobs. They were destitute
and hungry. SERA needed to find out who these people were,
where they came from, why they were in trouble, and what the
government should do to remedy the situation.
Farmers across the United States were in terrible shape.
The Depression had caused prices for cattle, pigs, and chickens
to plunge, and crops were similarly affected. Plus, machines
such as harvesters and tractors were eliminating the need for
human labor. Then thousands of farmers from Kansas, Texas,
Arkansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico were forced to leave
their farms because a terrible drought destroyed their crops.
Their land was dried out, and fierce winds destroyed the
topsoil. The area encompassing these states became known as
the Dust Bowl. Desperate, farmers migrated to California,
hoping to find better conditions; but there were too many
workers and not enough jobs.
Paul Taylor, well known for his studies on migratory
labor, was the perfect choice to prepare the report. He agreed
to work for SERA, part-time, as a consultant. He would study
who came to California, why they were in distress, and deter-
mine how the state could best serve their needs. He would
aim to make people aware of the dire living conditions suffered
by migrants and believed that the government should sponsor
emergency camps to help out the migrants. Taylor would
gather statistics and compile data, but he thought his reports
needed something to bring his words to life. He wanted Lange
to take photos, so the administration could see how severe
the situation was. He said, My words wont be enough to
show the conditions visually and accurately. (Meltzer, 94)
In the beginning of 1935, Lange joined Paul Taylors staff,
placed on the SERA payroll as a typistbecause no provision for
a photographer had existed. Lange said later, My papers were
made out as a typist because theyd just roar back if you
mentioned photographer. (Partridge, 50) She was able to
procure photographic materials by calling them office supplies.
In February that year, Lange placed the boys with some
friends yet again and went to work with Taylor. They traveled to
Nipomo for the pea harvest and then went down to Imperial
Valley. Lange was shocked by what she saw.
The pair visited the makeshift camps set up by migrants,
where she observed overcrowded huts, cobbled together with
scraps of wood, canvas, twigs, and anything else the poor families
could find. She saw how these workers and their families were
forced to live in squalor and scrape together meals. They also
desperately needed adequate clothing and had no access to
clean water. Lange and Taylor worked tirelessly, and they found
that they worked exceptionally well together. Taylor would
interview people while Lange photographed. Another member of
Taylors team, Tom Vasey, recalled Langes first days in the field:
She was a small person with a slight limp. The characteristic
pose was with the Rollei on her left shoulder, held by her
left hand. From here it always seemed least distracting to the
subject as she brought it down for use after a bit of talk. She was
particularly adept in getting close-up cooperation with the
women and children. (Meltzer, 95)
As Lange had learned to do when she began her studio
business, she used her extraordinary ability to make people feel
at ease. She never used her camera to intrude on peoples
privacy, and she would never photograph people if they
refused to be photographed. And, after watching and learning
fromTaylor, Lange was asking questions, too. She found that in
the migrant camps they were always talkers. This was very
74 DOROTHEA LANGE
helpful to me, and I think it was helpful to them. It gave us a
chance to meet on common groundsomething a photog-
rapher like myself must find if hes going to do good work.
(Meltzer, 97)
Together, Taylor and Lange gathered the information they
thought they needed to convince the government to establish
sanitary camps for the families. They made a great team. Clark
Kerr, a young social scientist working with them in Californias
Central Valley in 1934, recalled that they had complementary
skills but contrasting personalities. She was always moving,
mostly talking, reacting in a flash, living in the moment,whereas
Paul thought carefully about everything, spoke seldom, and
then softly. (Partridge, 39)
The Taylor Lange reports were scientifically driven
documents, complete with Taylors carefully collected statistical
figures, detailed analyses of the conditions they witnessed,
and compelling quotes from the migrant workers. Langes
photographs were powerful, and they provided the ideal visual
counterpart to Taylors writing. Their reports scientific
information combined with compassionate and moving
photographybecame the paradigm for similar documentary
projects for decades to come.
The TaylorLange reports were read in the SERA office,
where they were well received, then handed on to the Federal
Emergency Relief Administration in Washington, D.C. Lange
and Taylors efforts persuaded the government to build sanitary
camps where the migrant families could live while they
harvested the crops. FERA immediately gave SERA $20,000 to
construct the first two emergency migrant camps in California,
in Marysville and Arvin. The camps provided tent platforms,
stoves, toilets, and a community building.
Dorothea Lange was realizing that her photographs not
only could document human suffering but also ultimately
help alleviate it. Her work played a major role in changing
thousands of peoples lives.
76
Documenting
the Depression
I think the best pictures are often on the edges of any situation. I dont
find photographing the situation nearly as interesting as photographing
the edges.
William Albert Allard
Photography is a major force in explaining man to man.
Edward Steichen,
quoted in Time, April 7, 1961
19351940
By the spring of 1935, Lange and Taylors professional relationship
had grown, and their personal relationship had intensified,
too. They spent more time together out in the field, traveling
all around California, interviewing and photographing the
migrants. While on assignment in the Imperial Valley, Lange
came to a realization: She was deeply in love with Paul Taylor.
Her marriage to Dixon had been troubled for years, and she
found Taylor to be an attractive man of great integrity. She
admired the tenacity with which he stood by his convictions,
and she found him to be a solid and loyal man. Taylor, too,
was in love with Lange. He had tremendous respect for her, and
his marriage to Katherine Page Whiteside had also been failing.
Taylor and Lange divorced their respective spouses, both
mostly amicably, and were married on December 6, 1935, in
Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Taylor had three children from his first marriage
Katherine, thirteen; Ross, ten; and Margot, sixand his wife
left them with him while she worked on her doctorate in New
York City. So Taylor, Lange, Daniel, John, and the three Taylor
kids all moved into a redwood, two-story house on Virginia
Street in Berkeley. It sat over a canyon, and the family had
beautiful views of the San Francisco Bay in the distance. Lange
continued to struggle with the conflicting demands of family and
work, and again sent the children to stay with three different
families while she worked away from home for stretches. She
would often spend her week out in the field, but on week-
ends she and Taylor tried to gather the kids together at their
home. Of course, the children werent very pleased with living
away from them. And even when she was with them, Lange was
very picky about maintaining an orderly, pristine household.
The kids never knew what to expect from her she was a
perfectionist, and she could get angry suddenly and quickly, as
she had done earlier with Constance Dixon. And Taylor
always deferred to Lange, even if the target of her rage was
one of his own children. The children loved her, but they also
feared her, even nicknaming her Dictator Dot.
Lange, now forty years old, felt more committed to her work
than ever. She closed down her portrait studio operations and
became totally devoted to documenting the serious social
changes that were happening all around her. Lange had a strong
sense of mission. The country was in the midst of a major trans-
formation. The nation was shifting from an agriculture-based
77
society to an industrialized one, and she wanted to record how
it affected the people who were caught up most directly in the
turmoil. When she was in Imperial Valley, on the same trip on
which she realized she would marry Taylor, Lange witnessed
this event:
There was a car full of people, a family there at that gas
station. . . . They looked very woebegone to me. They
78 DOROTHEA LANGE
Dictator Dot. At home, Lange ran a tight ship, and her
children affectionately nicknamed her Dictator Dot. In
the field, though, Lange believed in getting to know her
subjects and becoming comfortable with them before
making a photograph. Langes free spirit and her person-
first methodology enabled her to shoot some of the
nations most insightful photographs.
79 Documenting the Depression
were American whites. . . . I looked at the license plate. . . .
[I]t was Oklahoma. . . . I approached them and asked
something about which way they were going, were they
looking for work. . . . And they said, Weve been blown
out . . . and then they told me about the dust storm.
They were the first arrivals that I saw. All of that day,
driving for the next . . . three or four hundred miles, I
saw those people. And I couldnt wait. I photographed it.
I had those first ones. That was the beginning of the first
day of the landslide that cut this continent. (Heyman, 24)
The Great Depression had tarnished almost every sector
of the American economy, but the farming industry felt the
biggest impact. The massive western migration across the
United States, which had started in the 1920s when farm prices
were driven down and farmers were forced into poverty, was
gaining even more momentum. As the Depression wore on,
farmers had to flee their homes, pushed out by drought and
dust storms. Between 1935 and 1940, more than a million
people left their farms and headed for California. These people
were called Okies, short for Oklahomans, though they came
from many other states as well.
Lange photographed the Okies, but she also was becoming
interested in other types of migrants. As she learned more
about Californias labor history, she began to investigate the
racism that was so ingrained in the system. She photographed
Mexican migrants, black pickers, and Filipinos laboring in
the fields.
Langes work was taking on new urgency and broadening
in scope. Now she could channel her enthusiasm and passion
into a new projectone that shed participate in for several
years and that would bring her nationwide attention and praise.
Roy Stryker, the head of the Historical Section of
FDRs newly created Resettlement Administration (RA) in
Washington, D.C., had noticed Langes photographs in the
TaylorLange reports. He was so affected by them that he had
her transferred immediately from the SERA to the RA, on
September 1, 1935. Ben Shahn, another photographer who
worked for Stryker, recalled that he was present when Stryker
first saw Langes work. Shahn said, This was a revelation . . .
what this woman was doing. (Meltzer, 104) Her title was
now Photographer-Investigator, and shed earn about
$2,300 a year. Around that same time, Paul Taylor was
appointed regional labor adviser to the RA, assigned to the
same office as Lange.
The Resettlement Administration (eventually renamed the
Farm Security Administration, or FSA) had been established
to provide financial relief and aid to the rural populations
devastated by the Great Depression. Their programs
included soil conservation projects, experimental communal
farms, loans that enabled farmers to purchase good land at
low interest rates, and, of course, sanitary camps for migrant
farm workers. As head of the Historical Section, Stryker and
his staff were to record anything of historical importance to the
RA/FSA. His goal was to help the RA/FSA receive financial
support from Congress; he needed to show Americans how
desperate rural Americas situation was so more money
would be set aside to ease the suffering of the families.
STRYKERS FSA
As soon as Stryker arrived in Washington, he began assembling
a talented team of photographers. By the end of that year, his
photographic staff included Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Shahn,
Walker Evans, and Carl Mydans. In addition, Esther Bubley,
Pauline Ehrlich, Russell Lee, Gordon Parks, Marion Post
Wolcott, Jack Delano, and Jon Collier, Jr. would all eventually
work for the RA/FSA at some point during its existence.
The photographers were supposed to document images
of the plight of farm families across the country, but
Stryker saw that he had an opportunity to oversee something
80 DOROTHEA LANGE
unprecedenteda sweeping visual examination of the United
States. He instructed his staff to shoot as much as they could
of both the landscape and its people. They were creating a
record of the Great Depression, but the end result was the most
highly acclaimed photographic collection ever compiled in the
United States. By 1942, Strykers staff had taken more than
270,000 photographs of the country.
When Stryker gave his photographers their assignments,
he would first brief them, then provide background material,
including maps, pamphlets, and economic, historical, and
sociological studies about the region they were covering. Then
he sometimes drafted shooting scripts. The photographers
would be sent out on shooting trips, usually lasting months
at a time. Stryker would write them long assessments about
the work they were sending him and about additional
photos he needed. (These letters were especially significant in
Langes case, since she was based on the West Coast.) Then the
ROY STRYKER
R
oy Stryker had been an economics instructor at Columbia
University in New York City before he was assigned to the
RA/FSA post. He had handled the photography research for
American Economic Life and the Means of Its Improvement
(1925), a book written by Rexford Tugwell, Strykers mentor
at Columbia who became the head of the new Resettlement
Administration. Through his research on the book, Stryker had
become familiar with the work of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine,
two early photographers who used their cameras to encourage
social reform. So Stryker was well aware of photographys
ability to effect change, and he had been using photographs
in his economics classes for years. He had the experience
and sensibility to recognize the power of Langes work.
photographers would develop their film, draft brief accom-
panying text, and post the materials back to Strykers office
to be edited, printed, and published.
Although sometimes the shooting scripts listed specific
RA-sponsored projects Stryker wanted his staff to shoot, Lange
recalled that, more often, You were turned loose in a region,
and the assignment was more like this: See what is really there.
What does it look like, what does it feel like? What actually is
the human condition? (Partridge, 111) Stryker wanted his
82 DOROTHEA LANGE
Ross Taylor When Young, Ten Years Old. This photograph
was taken in 1935, when Langes relationship with Paul
Taylor was becoming a potent force in her life. (She married
Taylor later in that same year.) Lange herself later described
the picture: This is that special photograph, which reveals
the boy, at that particular time. Which was a hard one for
him. But shows the drive and sharp sense of direction,
also the anger. How he threw those rocks
photographers to develop their own ideas as they went along
and construct their own themes out of those ideas.
Stryker trusted Langes artistic sense implicitly. She would
set out on field trips using his general suggestions, but without
a specific plan of what to shoot. She and Taylor both believed
that their best work came from experiences that were
unplanned and unexpected. The job with the RA granted Lange
a lot of freedom, and it was, in many ways, ideal for her; she
could express both her artistry and her social activism. She had
the following to say when she first visited the RA offices:
I found a little office, tucked away, in a hot, muggy early
summer, where nobody especially knew exactly what
he was going to do or how he was going to do it. And this
is no criticism, because you walked into an atmo-
sphere of a very special kind of freedom; anyone who
tells you anything else and dresses us up in official light
is not truthful, because it wasnt that way. That free-
dom that there was, where you found your own way,
without criticism from anyone, was special. That was
germane to that project. Thats the thing that is almost
impossible to duplicate or find. (Partridge, 18)
But Lange had difficulties with Stryker. Although the
two had enormous respect for each others artistic sense,
their long-distance relationship was fraught with conflict.
They were always professional with one another in their
correspondence, but tension simmered beneath the surface.
Each was stubborn in his or her own way. The biggest
source of the frustration between them was the issue of
Langes negatives. Lange wanted to print them herself, but
Stryker required his staff to send their rolls of film to the
D.C. office as soon they were exposed. Lange couldnt see
the pictures themselves until weeks later, after they had
been printed by government employees.
Since her photographs were considered government
property, Lange had to ask to borrow a negative from the D.C.
office when a museum or publisher wanted to reprint one of her
images. When she first asked the agency to loan her a negative for
a major exhibit, she was told that they would make the print for
her instead. But Lange wanted to see the print herself. She said,
This show is the most important photographic show we have.
It tours the country. It tours Europe. I couldnt afford to show
prints, unsigned, which I have never seen. Ill send the negative
right back. (Partridge, 20) And she wanted to keep her
negatives as a personal record of her work. She said to Stryker,
It is not too much for a photographer to ask that he have one
set of proofs, if only to have some sort of record of what he has
been doing. It guides him, in how the work is building up,
whether or not it is taking form. (Ohrm, 101)
Lange and Stryker continued to clash about the issue of her
negatives for the duration of her time on the RA/FSA payroll.
(And, eventually, this conflict would contribute to her being
permanently cut from the FSA roster at the end of 1939.)
IN THE FIELD
One of Langes first assignments for the RA, at the end of 1935,
was documenting how the emergency sanitary camps she and
Taylor had helped to establish were actually aiding the migrant
families. The migrants in the new camps paid just a dollar a
week, and they were given access to showers, toilets, stoves,
and tents, and they could even gather together in a central
recreation hall. If the family had no money at all, its members
could work in exchange for services and food.
Lange and Taylor promoted the establishment of these camps
throughout the country. Lange took pictures of the migrants
cooking and washing in the camps, of nurses working with
some ill children, and of people talking and playing
music. She wanted to show the government and the country
how the camps had improved the lives of the families. But
84 DOROTHEA LANGE
many nonmigrants were against the camps from the beginning.
They didnt want the migrants children going to school with
their kids, and they objected to the migrants getting free
medical care. Others were afraid that the migrant workers
would gather together in the recreation hall, form a coalition,
and demand higher pay.
In the early months of 1936, Lange carried on her investi-
gation into migrant conditions in California. Occasionally,
Dorothea in the field, 1938. Lange had an uncanny ability to put a
subject at ease and record the essence of that subjects being in that
moment in time. She especially was able to gain the cooperation of
women and young children, like this young boy in a migrant worker
camp. Her policy was to make sure her subjects knew her before she
asked anything about them. She even allowed children to play with her
cameras, believing that generosity on her part would lead to generosity
on theirs.
Ron Partridge, the teenage son of Imogen Cunningham and
Roi Partridge, would accompany her on trips and act as her
assistant. Typically, Lange would simply go out in the general
direction of her assignment and drive until she saw something
that drew her. And she always tried to go in with an open
mind. As Willard Van Dyke wrote in Camera Craft, Her
method is to eradicate from her mind before she starts, all
ideas which she might hold regarding the situationher
mind like an unexposed film. (Van Dyke, 461)
Ron Partridge described: Id be going twenty miles an
hour and shed say, Slow down, Ron, slow down. Her eyes
would go from one side to another, taking in every little
thing. When we saw somethinga broken car, a camp of
migrants, a farm machine, a field boss we would stop.
(Partridge, 59) The sights they saw always moved her.
Migrant workers set up small shantytowns along rivers or
irrigation ditches, constructing shelters with anything they
could find, like cardboard, tin, twigs, or grass. The makeshift
camps were overcrowded and filthy, and there was never
enough food, and what the people ate usually lacked any
nutritional value. There werent any facilities, so people
would go to the bathroom in the fields, and theyd bathe in
the same places where they got their water. Many of the
children were sick with stomachaches and diarrhea, due to
their poor diets and the unsanitary conditions.
Lange did whatever she could to make the people she
photographed comfortable with her and her camera. Some-
times shed sit on the ground and let the children touch the
camera. She said, You let them because you know that if
you behave in a generous manner youre very apt to receive
it . . . and I have told everything about myself long before I
asked any questions. (Partridge, 59) Lange felt that just
speaking and spending time with them was what she needed
to do. So often its just sticking around and remaining
there, not swooping in and swooping out in a cloud of dust,
86 DOROTHEA LANGE
she said. Lange explained to some of them that the govern-
ment wanted a record of what was happening so they could
help. She also believed that her limp made people feel that
she, too, knew what it was like to suffer and to feel like an
outsider. It gets you off on a different level than if you go
into a situation whole and secure. . . . My lameness as a child
and acceptance finally of my lameness, truly opened gates
for me. (Partridge, 59)
When she felt that she had gained their trust, Lange
would set up either her Rolleiflex or her 4-by-5-inch Graflex,
which she mounted on a tripod. Lange liked working with these
large-format cameras and wide-angle lenses. Even though
these cameras were larger and clunkier than the 35-millimeter
cameras other photographers were using, she preferred them
because of the interesting angles she could achieve. She held
her Rolleiflex at her waist, not at eye level as a 35-millimeter
camera would be held. This allowed her to look up at the
people she shot, and this perspective seemed to bring out
her subjects strength, even heroism. Those qualities were
highlighted by the vast expanse of sky behind them. Regardless
of how much the people suffered, Lange always recognized
and revealed their determination and spirit.
After shooting, Lange would go back to her car to write
down some of what her subjects said to her. When Ron
Partridge was with her, they each selected one subject and
focused on what that person had said. They searched their
memories for every possible detail; then each wrote down
what he or she remembered and shared it with the other to
create as complete a story as possible.
Lange had remarkable instinct and an uncanny ability to
be in the right place at the right time. On a cold, wet evening
in March of 1936, that rare talent helped her create the most
famous image made by anyone on the RA/FSA staff, and one
of the most widely praised and reproduced photos in all of
American photography.
MIGRANT MOTHER
Lange was driving back to San Francisco alone one night in the
rain when she passed a sign that read Pea Pickers Camp. She
was utterly exhaustedshed been on a grueling schedule,
photographing migrant workers for a monthso she didnt
want to stop. I didnt want to stop and I didnt, Lange later
said. But twenty miles later, a strong feeling seized her. She felt
compelled to return to that camp. Almost without realizing
what I was doing I made a U-turn on the empty highway. . . .
I was following instinct, not reason; I drove into that wet
and soggy camp and parked my car like a homing pigeon.
She walked straight over to a distressed and desperate-looking
woman, who was surrounded by her hungry and dirty children.
She said she was drawn to the woman like a magnet.
(Ohrm, 19)
Lange found out that the woman was 32 and had seven
children and that her family had been surviving on the peas
that had frozen in the surrounding fields and birds that her
children had killed. The family was stranded because she had
sold tires from her car to buy food. Lange spent just about ten
minutes photographing the woman. She took six shots, and
with each shot she moved in closer. Lange said that the woman
seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she
helped me. There was sort of an equality about it. Although
there were many other stranded pea pickers in the nearby tents
and huts, Lange took no other photographs that evening. She
said, I knew I had recorded the essence of my assignment.
(Meltzer, 132133)
When she got home, she developed her film and went
straight to the city editor of The San Francisco News. She told
him that the pea pickers in Nipomo were starving. The editor
quickly passed on the news to the United Press. The headline of
the March 10, 1936 edition of the News declared Food Rushed
to Starving Farm Colony. The U.S. government quickly
shipped twenty thousand pounds of food to the migrants.
88 DOROTHEA LANGE
Although Migrant Mother didnt accompany the article, two
of Langes other images did. The famous migrant photo was
first published in The San Francisco News and Survey Graphic.
The Migrant Mother photo was soon reprinted and
exhibited again and again in newspapers across the country.
Its easy to see why the photo caused such a ruckus. Although
The Okie migration. Midwestern farmers, termed Okies because
so many were from Oklahoma, came to California by the hundreds of
thousands in the late 1930s, seeking employment after years of crop
failure and drought. Lange was there to capture their movement and,
more importantly, how their movement affected them, their families,
their way of life, and their hope for the future. It was Langes work, with
the work of other RA/FSA photographers, that drew public attention to
the plight of migrant workers.
Lange connected purely with the woman, the photograph she
created seemed to capture the suffering of an entire country,
while at the same time conveying its indomitable spirit. The
mother is looking off into the distance; her hand is close to
her mouth, showing her worry and concern. Her children
are hiding their heads and leaning on her. The baby sleeping
in her lap is filthy. It is an astonishing, powerful, and deeply
compassionate image.
ON THE ROAD
The photo also was exhibited five years later at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York City, and it became the quintessential
photograph of the era. It was so widely seen and famous that
Lange started to insist, I am not a one-picture photographer.
(Meltzer, 136) Lange wanted to be known for more than
having taken just Migrant Mother.
After Lange completed the trip that culminated in
Migrant Mother, she traveled to Utah to photograph some
RA rehabilitation projects. Later that spring, Paul Taylor was
transferred to the Social Security Board, and in May he and
Lange made a trip east to Washington to meet with Roy Stryker
for the first time. There she also met some of her colleagues,
including Ben Shahn and Arthur Rothstein.
From Washington, Lange went to New Jersey, where she
documented the Hightstown project. New York City garment
workers had lost their jobs when the Great Depression hit. The
Hightstown project aimed to resettle families of those workers
on four hundred acres in New Jersey. Lange photographed the
people in their homes in New York City slums and also in the
area where they worked in Manhattan.
In the summer, Taylor and Lange headed for the South,
where they would study tenancy, another one of the RAs most
significant concerns. The Washington, D.C. office had received
countless requests from magazines and newspapers for more
photos on the subject.
90 DOROTHEA LANGE
Lange had spent most of her time with the RA/FSA
studying the families that had left their homes, but she and
Taylor now turned their attention to the ones that stayed
behind. Farmers in the South and Southwest were hit hard by
Company housing. Lange photographed these shacks, company housing
in a small town in Utah, in March of 1936. One of her missions with
the Resettlement Administration was to document the living conditions
in shantytowns like this one, as well as in the emergency migrant camps
she herself had helped to establish. Although many Americans were
against the formation of the FSAs camps, Lange worked to demonstrate
through her photographs how the camps drastically improved the lives of
thousands of destitute laborers.
the Depression, but the sharecropping system that had been
in place long before had left millions of farmers, both white
and black, in poverty. At the time, up to 75 percent of all
farms in the South were operated by tenant farmers. Tenant
farmers and sharecroppers raised crops on land they didnt
own. They either paid their rent in cash or gave 50 percent
of their harvests to their landlords, who in many cases were
direct descendants of plantation owners. They couldnt
afford to buy their own tools, seed, or farm animals, so they
had to borrow from those who could. They almost never
earned enough to pay them back, so they often were stuck in
a miserable cycle of poverty.
Lange and Taylor traveled first to North Carolina, where
she shot poor white laborers hoeing crops. They then went to
Birmingham, Alabama, where she photographed some iron
and steel mills. Right down the road, Lange and Taylor spoke
with an African-American tenant family of seven. They said
that they only earned $150 a year for the combined labor
of the adults and all five children. When they stopped in
Georgia, they encountered peach pickers who said they earned
just 75 cents a day.
Soon Taylor and Lange made their way to the Delta, where
she took several photographs of African Americans praying.
In July, in northwestern Mississippi, she and Taylor visited
Dixie Plantation, an RA project. They found that the tenant
farmers there had been cheated by the RA agent, just as private
plantation owners had been cheating sharecroppers and
tenants elsewhere. Lange sent a long letter to Washington
reporting this travesty.
But Lange always found and photographed extraordinary
people and places, too. In Arkansas, they spent time at a
fascinating place. A socialist minister named Sherwood Eddy
founded a cooperative whose members raised cotton and ran a
sawmill and a poultry farm. What made this place so interesting
was that it was integrated, with blacks and whites working and
92 DOROTHEA LANGE
living harmoniously in the same community. The Deep South
that Lange and Taylor had been studying was deeply segregated,
so this cooperative was truly inspiring. Lange photographed
the members working and learning side by side, and blacks and
whites celebrating together.
One of Langes most famous photographs was taken
around this time, in nearby Clarksdale, Mississippi. It seems to
symbolize the rampant racism that pervaded the Deep South at
the time. The photo features a white plantation owner in the
foreground presiding over black field hands who are probably
Racism in the Deep South. As Lange moved from photographing
Californias migrant workers to documenting the Depressions effect on
the Southern states, she ran into strict racial segregation and anti-black
prejudice. This photograph of a white plantation owner and his farm
hands clearly demonstrates this sentiment. The well-fed white mans
presence with his status symbol an automobiledominates the piece.
It towers over the poorer, slim workers, whom he reduces by turning his
back on them.
patrons of his store. Lange shot this from a low angle, so the
white man is clearly dominating the scene. His hand is placed
proudly and confidently on his knee and his body is leaning
possessively into his shiny automobile, a symbol of his power
and wealth.
Then Lange and Taylor headed west, through Oklahoma
and Texas, ultimately arriving back in California at the end
of August. In October, the Historic Section of the RA was in
trouble, and Lange received some bad news. Due to drastic
budget cuts, she was dropped from the payroll. Although she
and Stryker continued to have their misunderstandings, and
her geographical distance from Washington was a source of
bureaucratic difficulty for him, he respected her ideas and her
work immensely. So in January of 1937, she was hired back,
and she immediately got to work on the Lubin report, a Senate
document on migratory labor.
Life in the field was sometimes dangerous. In February,
Lange wanted to return to the Imperial Valley, which at the
time was teeming with displaced and angry migrant workers.
Lange wrote in a letter to Stryker that people continue to
pour in and there is no way to stop them and no work when
they get there.
She wrote, Down there it is too uncomfortable to be alone,
and she said that she was taking Ron Partridge to accompany
her. If the vigilantes and Associated Farmers dont like you
they shoot at you and give you the works. Beat you up and
throw you into a ditch at the county line. (Heyman, 28) But
she and Ron went, photographing from morning until evening,
staying in cheap cabins all along the way.
BACK TO THE SOUTH
In May of 1937, Lange and Taylor set off for another extended
trip through the South. They took Taylors twelve-year-old son
along with them and drove south through Californias rural
valleys, then into Arizona, where they encountered more
94 DOROTHEA LANGE
migrants searching for work. They met a family who had lost
two babies to typhoid. They talked to families in New Mexico
and farmers in Texas.
As Lange and Taylor met more people, they were discovering
that the mass exodus of farmers was the result not only of
drought, dust storms, and crop failure, but also of the gradual
mechanization of agriculture. In a letter she wrote to Stryker
in June, Lange said that in Childress and Hall Counties in
Texas she found people put off farms, tenants, often of years
standing and establishedwith tractors coming in purchased
by the landowners with Soil Conservation money. Not just
a few cases. Its the story of the county. The ex-tenants are
homeless and landless. How far across Texas the same story
holds we do not yet know. (Ohrm, 76)
Lange and Taylor found that mechanized farming was
forcing farmers out and putting them on relief. A group of
seven young tenant farmers in Hardeman County, Texas told
Lange and Taylor that they were all on WPA relief, trying to
support their families on $22.80 a month. Although the men
were hesitant at first, they eventually talked for a while.
Lange, in her usual manner, recorded some snippets of their
conversationThe landlord on this place bought a tractor
and put five families of renters off, for example, or He has
two families on day labor, at from 75 cents to $1.25 a day.
They all felt hopeless and powerless. If we fight, who we
gonna whup? (Ohrm, 78) Lange photographed these
men, standing in a row in front of a house, and it was another
especially striking and memorable shot.
Lange said later, What I see now is the mechanization
has brought about enormous problems. There is no place
for people to go to live on the land any more. . . . We have,
in my lifetime, changed from rural to urban. In my lifetime,
that little space, this tremendous thing has happened.
(Partridge, 114)
Lange and Taylor moved through Arkansas and Mississippi,
96 DOROTHEA LANGE
The feet of a sharecropper. Lange had an affinity for the details and
nuances of people. This photograph suggests the hardships of the
Southern sharecroppers by focusing simply on an elderly womans
scarred and shoeless feet. It was by capturing details such as these
that Lange and the other FSA photographers hoped to deliver the
bigger picture of the working poor.
seeing both refugees of the drought and tractor refugees.
(Meltzer, 176) She made all sorts of portraits of a wide variety
of Southern peoplechildren, elderly people, ex-slaves, poor
white tenant farmers, and plantation owners. She seemed to
have a particular sympathy for black farmers. She photo-
graphed emaciated fieldworkers and ramshackle homes with
collapsing roofs. She continued to train her eyes on small
gestures, and on such details as their worn hands and feet,
weathered skin, and ragged clothing. Sharecroppers (1937)
shows an African-American family hoeing the land.
Lange and Taylor had by that time established an effective
way of working together. While they were visiting an ex-slave
living in Texas, Lange photographed while Taylor spoke with
the man about his childhood as a slave. Taylor said that he
would usually start a conversation with his subject, and then
out of the corner of my eye, I would see that [Lange] had got
out her camera, so I would just keep the talk going. I had
their attention. . . . Keeping out of range [of the camera]
generally wasnt a problem. She worked pretty close to them
for the most part. If I thought I was interfering I would
just sidle out of her way as inconspicuously as possible,
talking to them all the time. My purpose was to make it a
natural relationship, and take as much of their attention
as I conveniently could, leaving her the maximum freedom
to do what she wanted. (Ohrm, 57)
As Lange was working in the Deep South, she asked
Stryker if she should concentrate on white farmers. Stryker
advised her to Take both black and white but place the
emphasis on the white tenants, since we know that these will
receive much wider use. (Heyman, 28) And after the RA had
been transferred to the FSA earlier that May (and put under
the jurisdiction of the Department of Agriculture), Stryker
wanted his staff to photograph not only poor families, but to
widen their focus to include more positive aspects of rural
life. This wasnt difficult for Lange, as she always found
hopeful places or people, wherever she went. He specifically
wanted them to document the culture of small-town American
life before it disappeared entirely. Lange took some photo-
graphs of North Carolina parishioners cleaning their church.
She took images of schools, grocery stores, and street corners
where farmers congregated. And she photographed some
more government-established communities. For instance, she
went back to Hill House in Mississippi, and she also snapped
shots of people on their way to found the Matanuska
settlement all the way up in Alaska.
At the end of 1937, Lange again was cut from the FSA
payroll due to budget difficulties. But she concentrated on
working on her own projects, traveling throughout California,
the West, and back into the South in 1938, until she was
rehired by Stryker in September. In 1939 she visited the
Northwest and North Carolina, and she did yet more work
in California. Still, she and Stryker continued to disagree
about the control of her negatives, and there were other
problems, too. Stryker was furious when Lange hired her
friend Ansel Adams to make some prints of her work for the
Museum of Modern Art; he didnt like her using working
documents as art. While he never questioned the quality
and integrity of Langes work, he found her to be demanding
and difficult to work with. In January 1, 1940, Lange was
dropped by the FSA for the last time. I had to get rid of one
photographer and I got rid of the least cooperative one, he
said. (Partridge, 22)
Lange was terribly hurt by this. Although many of her
colleagues at the FSA protested her firing, and friends wrote
letters on her behalf, reminding Stryker of how much Lange
and Taylor had done for migrants, she was never reinstated.
At the end of the FSA project, Stryker was asked what he
believed was the greatest lesson to be learned from the massive
collection of photographs his staff had created. He answered,
Dignity versus despair. I believe dignity wins out. Perhaps
98 DOROTHEA LANGE
more so than any of the other FSA photographers, Dorothea
Lange understood this sentiment and reflected it in her work.
Even Roy Stryker had said that, of all the work produced by
his staff, Lange had the most sensitivity and the most rapport
with people. (Meltzer, 104)
100
Minorities
and the War
In America, the photographer is not simply the person who records the
past, but the one who invents it.
Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)
All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
Photographer Richard Avedon
19401956
During her last few years with the FSA, Lange, together with
Taylor, began to compile An American Exodus: A Record of Human
Erosion. This was an expansion of the ideas they had developed
while working in the field. American Exodus was one of a few
books of the Depression era that blended text and pictures to
depict the sweeping social and economic changes that cut across
rural America. Many of Langes pictures also had been used in
Land of the Free, a collection of photographs illustrated by a
poem written by Archibald MacLeish. (Meltzer, 184)
American Exodus examined how slavery, tenancy, and
the invention of the cotton gin caused the depopulation of
the rural South and West, and how the steady migration to
California was linked to a nationwide crisis. What set this
101
Lange in 1937. The love of photography dominated every
phase of Langes adult life. As life took its twists and turns
around her from social upheaval and economic collapse to
ups and downs in her personal lifeLange returned again
and again to her camera to find her voice. The 1940s and
1950s marked the start of a series of new projects for her;
she photographed in shipyards and in Ireland and, perhaps
most importantly, documented the anti-Japanese racism that
surged in the United States after Pearl Harbor.
book apart from others of the period was that the subjects
direct quotations formed the foundation of the text. Lange
said, So far as possible we have let them speak to you face
to face. (Ohrm, 112) But American Exodus was not well
received by the American public at the time of its publication
in fall 1939. German forces were tearing through Europe, and
Americans were losing interest in the plight of migrants and
the Great Depression. They now turned their full attention
to what their role would be in World War II.
Yet Langes FSA photographs were reaching a wider
audience and garnering more acclaim. Some of her work was
used as part of an FSA exhibit in New York City, and she had
a major portfolio in U.S. Camera. Lange achieved another
milestone in 1940, when Migrant Mother was displayed at
the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. And in March of
1941, she became the first female photographer to win the
prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. (She also was the third
photographer ever to receive the scholarship.) This opportu-
nity provided her with the funds to begin her next project:
Lange hoped to photograph some cooperative religious
settlements in the West, including the Mormons in Utah, the
Hutterites in South Dakota, and the Amana Society in Iowa,
but when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on
December 7, her work on that series came to an abrupt end.
A new chapter in her career was beginning.
THE RELOCATION OF JAPANESE-AMERICANS
Before Japanese forces bombed the American naval base in
Pearl Harbor, Americans had been hesitant about entering
the war. Yet when their country was attacked on their own
soil, most citizens rallied behind President Roosevelt and his
declaration of war on Japan and its allies, Germany and Italy.
But the U.S. government and many Americans were afraid
that the Japanese would invade the Pacific Coast. And they
believed that the Japanese-Americans living on the coast
102 DOROTHEA LANGE
103 Minorities and the War
might be spies who would help plan the attack. Anti-Japanese
sentiment spread, and it soon ballooned into hysteria. Many
Japanese-Americans, to prove that they were loyal to the
United States, even burned their photos of ancient Japanese
relatives and other symbols of their Japanese heritage.
Still, on February 19, 1942, President Roosevelt issued
Executive Order #9066, which called for all people of
Japanese descent living on the West Coast 110,000 men,
women, and childrento be moved to detention camps for
the remainder of the war. Lange and Taylor were adamantly
against this measure, believing that the Japanese-Americans
were victims of prejudice, stripped of their civil rights simply
because of their racial background.
Even though Lange was outspoken about her opposition
to the evacuation, the War Relocation Administration (WRA)
hired her to document it. The work that she completed for
the WRA760 photographs in all is some of the most
humane and poignant of her career, but it quietly evoked her
outrage, too. And her images, as usual, revealed Langes
tremendous respect for her subjects. Lange took pictures of
the evacuees from April through September of 1942. She
spent time with them as they packed their belongings and
closed their businesses. She snapped shots of them while they
were registering with the government, and she photographed
the children in schools. She went to bus stations and
train stations with them and then accompanied them to
temporary assembly centers. (One of these was located at an
old racetrack, and detainees were held in stalls in which
horses used to be kept.) When the detainees were moved to
permanent centers a few months later, Lange continued to
record their activity.
Most Americans at the time supported the relocation of
the Japanese-Americans, so Lange and Taylor were in the
minority. (In the spring of 1942, Taylor published one of the
first articles sympathetic to the Japanese-American detainees
to appear in a national magazine.) Lange was horrified by
what was happening. Christina Gardner, who accompanied
Lange on several shoots, said that one night in May 1942,
Dorothea was in some sort of paroxysm of fear. . . . She
realized that this was such an erosion of civil liberties, she
had gotten so consumed by it and realized the import of it
so heartily that it was something that I cannot explain to this
day. (Partridge, 50)
104 DOROTHEA LANGE
Executive Order #9066: Japanese-American relocation. Adamantly
opposed to the forced government relocation of Japanese-Americans
during World War II, but paid to document it, Lange was determined
to do some good in this new phase of her career. Working for the War
Relocation Administration (WRA), she recorded what she felt was a
blatant violation of human and civil rights on film. The results were some
of the most deeply personal works of her career. This photograph was taken
in San Francisco on April 6, 1942, as Japanese-Americans assembled
for relocation to an assembly center camp. Lange can be seen in the
background with her camera.
By December of 1945, all the camps except one were
closed. But many of the Japanese-Americans returned to find
themselves with no homes or businesses. Forty years later,
the government issued an apology and gave $20,000 to each
surviving Japanese-American who had been detained during
the war. Langes photographs for the WRA werent released
officially to the American public until 1972.
RICHMOND SHIPYARDS
When Lange wrapped up her work for the WRA, she began
taking pictures of various minority groups working on the
West Coast. Hired by the Office of War Information (OWI),
she photographed Mexican-Americans, Italian-Americans,
African-Americans, and Hispanic-Americans, among others.
MANZANAR DETENTION CAMP
L
ange took three trips to Manzanar, a detention camp in
Owens Valley, California. Located in the middle of the barren,
desolate desert, the camp was surrounded by armed guards and
high barbed wire. Lange recalled the visits years later with a
kind of national remorse: They had the meanest dust storms
there, and not a blade of grass, and the springs are so cruel;
when those people arrived there they couldnt keep the tar
paper on the shacks. Oh, my. There were some pretty terrible
chapters of that history. . . . I was employed a year and a half to
do that, and it was very, very difficult. This is what we did. How
did it happen? How could we? (Partridge, 121) At Manzanar,
Lange, who always was accompanied by armed guards, photo-
graphed the people in the stuffy, uncomfortable barracks and in
the long lines waiting to eat in the dining hall. Other photographers
had been assigned to record this event, including Langes friend
Ansel Adams, but none of them so reflected the unfairness and
inhumanity of the situation in their work.
Many of these pictures appeared in OWI publications abroad.
Then she and Ansel Adams were employed by the magazine
Fortune to record 24 hours in the lives of workers at the
Richmond shipyards, a place that created job opportunities
for thousands of ex-migrant farmers, African-Americans, and
women when the war started. The small industrial town was
booming. Before the war, Richmond had a population of about
twenty thousand; in 1944, more than one hundred thousand
people were employed at the yards. (Among those working in
the yards were Langes brother, Martin, who was a foreman, and
her son, Daniel.)
Lange and Adams worked in entirely different ways.
Adams arrived at the yards loaded with equipment; Lange just
brought her usual Rolleiflex camera and notebook. Adams, who
created beautiful panoramic vistas of the West, took the wider
view, photographing the grander aspects of the huge shipyards.
Lange quietly insinuated herself into the crowd, focusing, in
her typical way, on individuals and details. Christina Gardner
said of Langes method in the yards, She had a peculiar
facility for just melting away and for not seeming to be
photographing at the same time that she was sticking a camera
in somebodys face. People ignored the cameras presence for
her. (Meltzer, 249)
In addition to taking pictures of workers in the yards
themselves, Lange also took her camera into the workers
neighborhoods. She photographed the lively main streets and
laughing children. Adams and Lange labored on this project
from early morning until late at night, and they found that they
worked very well together.
But all this time, Lange was suffering from increasingly
poor health. In the early years of the war, she had developed
severe stomach pains, often accompanied by vomiting and
nausea. Additionally, she was worried about her son, Daniel,
then twenty years old. He had quit his job at the shipyards and
seemed to be drifting about, unsure of what to do with his life.
106 DOROTHEA LANGE
He joined the army, but that didnt ease his inner turmoil, as he
was often absent without leave (AWOL). In August, when Lange
had finished documenting the founding of the United
Nations in San Francisco, her illness took a turn for the
worse. She was hospitalized and had her gall bladder removed,
but she continued to experience intense pain. (It was later
found out that the doctors had misdiagnosed her; she actually
had stomach ulcers.) Lange was so consumed by the pain and
the frequent hospitalizations over the following years that
she stopped actively photographing until around 1950.
One Nation Indivisible, April 6, 1942. Langes work with the WRA took
her into the personal lives of Japanese-Americans, where she discovered an
astonishing degree of loyalty and patriotism in a dispossessed and misunder-
stood people. This photograph of Japanese-American schoolchildren reciting
the Pledge of Allegiance suggests Langes opinion of the blindness and
intolerance that the U.S. government and the American people were
showing toward their fellow countrymen.
BACK TO WORK
Langes battle with her ailing stomach persisted, and at one
point she hemorrhaged so severely that she nearly died. For
long periods of time she was too depleted and aching to work
at all; but slowly she started using her camera again. She photo-
graphed the graduation at the University of California
Berkeley in 1950, and she shot James Roosevelts campaign for
California governor. She also started photographing her family
more. In 1951, Langes first grandchild, Gregor Dixon, was
born to her son John. And there was more good news: After an
especially difficult periodduring which he had been dis-
charged from the Army, had been homeless for some time, and
had been banned from the TaylorLange household following
heated arguments Dan had decided he wanted to be a writer.
He wrote his first article for Modern Photography. It was a piece
about Lange, accompanied by her images.
In 1953 Lange felt healthy enough to commit herself whole-
heartedly to photography again. She went back to Utah, finally
resuming the investigation that she had started before the war,
but this time she was with Ansel Adams and accompanied by
her son Daniel. They produced a photo essay for Life titled
Three Mormon Towns. Adams shot landscapes, while Lange
photographed the people in the villages of Gunlock, St. George,
and Toquerville.
In 1954, Lange and Daniel traveled to Ireland to complete
another photo essay for Life, this one called The Irish Country
People. Lange had been inspired to produce this piece after
she read The Irish Countryman, a book by the anthropologist
Conrad N. Arensberg. She wanted to capture the people of
County Clare, as she was intrigued by their strong connection
to the land and to Irish customs. She also began two other
pieces for the magazine. In The Public Defender, she followed
the quest of a young lawyer, Martin Pulich, to defend people
who couldnt afford to pay for their own legal services.
Although Life ultimately did not use her work, in time her
108 DOROTHEA LANGE
photos from that series were seen in several newspapers and
other publications. Death of a Valley, created in 1956 with her
photographer friend Pirkle Jones, examined a rural community
in California that was being destroyed by the creation of the
federally funded Berryessa Dam.
Lange was in her sixties during the Death of a Valley
project, and her health was slowly deteriorating, but her
commitment to making photographs with an eye toward social
justice was as strong as ever.
The Irish Country People, 1954. Inspired by Conrad Arensbergs
The Irish Countryman (1937), Lange traveled to County Clare with
Daniel Dixon to document the life of Irish farming communities. Her
work was published as a photographic essay in the popular magazine
Life later in the year.
110
Grandmother
and World
Traveler
Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion. . . . [T]he subject must be
something you truly love or truly hate.
Dorothea Lange
No place is boring, if youve had a good nights sleep and have a pocket
full of unexposed film.
Robert Adams
19561965
In 1955, Taylor and Lange acquired a little wooden cabin on
Californias coast in a place called Steep Ravine. Although it was
a very small, rustic two-room structure, it became the center of
their family life. One room was a living room and kitchen area;
the other was a bedroom. As Langes health declined, she
turned more and more to her family, especially the grand-
children, who became her favorite photographic subjects.
[Steep Ravine] became our special place to be together, and to
be with the children. (Meltzer, 310) Her camera lens was now
trained on the tender gestures of the small children, friendships
between family members, and intimate moments shared with
close friends.
There was no electricity, no phone, and no hot water at
Steep Ravine, but Langes grandchildren, and many of her
extended family (including Ron Partridges children), thought
the place was magical. In the cold months, the children would
111
Paul Taylor carrying Lisa. As Langes health deteriorated,
she began to settle more into family life. In 1955, she and
Taylor acquired Steep Ravine, a two-room cabin on Californias
coast where she could focus on her favorite new photo-
graphic subject: her grandchildren. Some have suggested
that the affection she lavished on the grandchildren was
an atonement for the attention she had not given to her
own sonsthat once the initial intensity of photography
was past, she could relax into the role.
help gather firewood while Lange prepared meals and tended
to the outside chores. At night, by the light of kerosene lamps
and warmed by the heat of the fireplace and the wood-burning
stove, they played Parcheesi, or Taylor read to the children.
Often Dee Taylor played her flute or Greg Dixon his clarinet.
During the day, Lange took the kids for walks along the beach,
always with her camera in hand. One friend of Langes
remembered watching Lange collecting driftwood with one
of her grandchildren: I thought how she was giving this
child the time and attention her own boys did not get from
her. When she was starting out as a photographer, she was
so intense about her work she could not give the children what
they needed. Its taken for granted that a man has to go off
and do his work. Lange knew that, of course. Still, I think she
felt guilty about what she had doneor not doneand was
atoning for it with the next generation. (Meltzer, 10)
TRAVELING ABROAD
In 1958, Paul Taylor started working as a consulting economist
for the U.S. government and other private foundations. He
advised officials in poor countries about such issues as health
and agriculture. He was most interested in community devel-
opment, figuring out ways that members of the community
could work together to address concerns like sanitation and
family planning. Although he had taken other trips by himself,
Taylor knew that a journey he had planned through Asia would
keep him away for at least six months, so he wanted Lange to
accompany him.
Lange wasnt very excited about the prospect of leaving her
grandchildren behind for so long. And she also worried about
the state of her health. But when she asked her doctor, Should
I go? he replied, Whats the difference whether you die here
or there? Go! (Partridge, 130)
So Lange and Taylor left for Asia in June of 1958. Lange had
no specific agenda for her photography during this trip; she
112 DOROTHEA LANGE
113 Grandmother and World Traveler
simply shot whatever caught her eye. During their eight-week
stay in Korea, she photographed people in the city streets and the
country. She was particularly drawn to the children; one series
of photographs focuses on the eyes of some Korean children.
Lange took an extremely close-up shot of the face of a young
Korean boy; the photo is cropped to reveal his innocence. His
face is rounded, with a wide forehead and closed eyes.
Still, she found it difficult to work in Asia. She said,
I cannot go out into the streets unaccompanied. I am
surrounded, my clothes examined, my hair stroked. I am a
novelty, and the camera just tops it off. (Meltzer, 320) She was
often frustrated, but she still managed to make some inspired
pictures. She photographed a man walking on his hands down the
street in Saigon and shot three generations of a family planting
onions near Panmunjom. In Bali, she found it easier to photo-
graph, as the Balinese people didnt seem to pay much attention
to the tourists. There she photographed dancers, honing in
on their legs and hands. She also visited Japan, Indonesia,
Thailand, Nepal, Singapore, India, and Pakistan.
Lange often was overwhelmed by the misery and variety
of what she saw in Asia. She said, The tropics, and it may be
Asia, cannot be photographed on black and white film. I am
confronted with doubts as to what I can grasp and record on
this journey. The pageant is vast, the pageant is vast, and I
clutch at tiny details, inadequate. (Partridge, 132)
In 1960, Taylor was hired by the United Nations to study
some community development programs in South America. So
he and Lange took another trip, spending two months in Ecuador
and Venezuela. As always, Lange loved observing, discovering,
and learning about the different cultures and peoples she saw, but
she missed home, and she was feeling weaker and weaker.
In 19611962, Lange was in very poor health, spending
much of the year in the hospital. But her work continued to gain
more exposure and considerable praise. She was a nationally
known photographer, and she was lauded internationally as
well. Langes photographs were included in the Museum of
Modern Arts FSA survey, titled The Bitter Years. Her work also
was seen in Aperture, and exhibits at the San Francisco Museum
of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and galleries in Boston,
Louisville, and France and Italy.
Lange and Taylor took their last trip abroad together in
1963. She met up with Taylor in Alexandria, Egypt, where he
was a visiting professor at the university. She photographed
now and then, finding it difficult to work in Alexandria. She
was surrounded by crowds, followed by begging children, and
114 DOROTHEA LANGE
Two Women. This curiously titled image was made in
Nepal in 1958, during Langes trip through Asia with Paul
Taylor. Just as she had done in the 1930s in the United
States, Lange strolled through the streets of the areas she
visited, creating scores of street scenes, such as this
one, that capture both the subject and the subjects world.
Lange attributed her success in this medium to her
cloak of invisibility, which may really have been a talent
for putting people at ease.
often harassed. She thought Alexandria was a dirty, crowded,
noisy place with the splendor gone. The narrow streets and
alleys are filled with people buying selling pushing hauling
arguing squatting eating sewing hammering hawking their
wares and drinking their delicious sweet black coffee out of
dirty glasses. (Meltzer, 334) But she still made some beautiful
photographs in Egypt, and she often found pleasure
looking quietly and intently at living human beings going
about their work and duties and occupations and activi-
ties as though they were spread before us for our pleasure
and interest. A huge opera. A huge arena. And also to be
only dimly self-aware, a figure who is part of it all, though
only watching and watching. This is an exercise in vision,
and no finger exercise, either. For a photographer it may
be closer to the final performance. (Meltzer, 335)
After a long trip into the desert, where she encountered
some enchanting images for her photographs, Lange contracted
dysentery. She lost so much weight that she had to hold her
clothes up with safety pins. She also had trouble sleeping. She
felt like she was gradually getting betterbut then, one night
in June, during a trip to Iran, Taylor was awakened by her
moaning and incoherent speech. He took her temperature;
she was running a fever of 103F. She was seriously ill, so they
flew to Switzerland, where they learned that she had malaria. She
recuperated for three weeks at a hospital where she felt very well
cared for, and her condition slowly improved. But their travels
were over, and they finally flew home in September.
DOROTHEA LANGES LAST DAYS
In August of 1964, Lange, her immediate family, extended
family, and her vast network of friends received some devastating
news. She wrote to a friend, In the last two weeks time
has stood still. I now know that I shall not recover as I have
been able to so many times before, for I have an inoperable
and incurable cancer of the esophagus, and the way ahead is
unchartable. (Partridge, 107)
Lange was terribly sick; her diagnosis was definitive.
Although she was tempted to recover quietly and perhaps
return to the hospital in Switzerland where she had received
such excellent care, she opted instead to plunge into her work.
The photographic director of the Museum of Modern Art,
John Szarkowski, had wanted to exhibit a retrospective of
Langes work. This would cover a lifetime of her photography.
It was an ambitious, daunting project, and for the first time in
her life, Lange had access to almost all her FSA work. She said,
Im now faced with a really tremendous and dangerous job.
I would very much like to avoid it. On the other hand, I feel
I must do it. (Partridge, 107)
116 DOROTHEA LANGE
LANGE AND THE HOLIDAYS
T
he holidays were a particularly special time for Lange.
Regardless of the nature or the number of projects she
was involved in, every year she would stop her own work
before Thanksgiving and not resume until after the Christmas
season. This was a time she kept just for family, and she
spent weeks preparing for the festivities. Langes famous
Thanksgiving celebrations typically included Dan Dixon, his
wife, Mia, and their daughter; John Dixon, his wife, Helen, and
their children; Ross Taylor, his wife, Onnie, and their children
(Margot and Katherine had moved back East with their husbands);
Roi Partridge and his whole family; and many other friends from
faraway places. The Thanksgiving gathering was an elaborate,
joyful affair that culminated in Paul Taylors ceremonial reading
of Abraham Lincolns Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1863.
Langes meals were delicious and beautifully presented. She
was just as meticulous and careful with these preparations
as she was with her photographic work.
So, helped by many of her friends, family, and colleagues,
Lange got straight to work reviewing her career output and
developing themes for the show. Szarkowski flew out, and
the two of them concentrated on selecting two hundred images
for the show. Then she pored over all of her field and travel
notes to cull material she could use for drafting captions. She
became obsessive about her work in her final months. On
top of this enormous undertaking, she was also the subject of
interviews and two documentary films about her life and
career. And she finished a collection of portraits of American
rural women as well. (The book was not published until 1967,
after her death). She once said, Im always pushing in many
directions at once, always trying to overreach myself. It keeps
me constantly restless, and probing and fractured. . . . However
that way of working engenders a very good kind of fatigue,
because it keeps you alive. You may be exhausted by the
complexities of your existence, but there is no retreat in it.
You are right out on the thin edge all the time, where you are
unprotected and defenseless.(Partridge, 134)
And Lange worked almost right up to her last breath. A
few days before she died, she saw the first prints for her
retrospective. While she was in the hospital and knew she
was dying, she said to Taylor, This is the right time. Isnt it a
miracle that comes at the right time? (Partridge, 111)
Lange died peacefully on October 11, 1965, surrounded by
her family.
The tiny woman from Hoboken, who walked with a limp
and rose to the top of her field when few other women worked
outside of the home, had become one of the premier American
photographers of the twentieth century. Once called the
greatest documentary photographer in the United States by
Edward Steichen, Dorothea Lange was a pioneer in socially
committed photography. Her work remains a lasting tribute to
the power and resilience of the American spirit.
118
Chronology
1895 Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn is born in Hoboken,
New Jersey, on May 25.
1902 Contracts polio, resulting in a lifelong limp.
1907 Father, Henry Nutzhorn, abandons the family; Dorothea
and her younger brother Henry, along with their mother,
Joanna, move in with their grandmother in Hoboken.
19071909 Attends school at P.S. 62 in the Lower East Side of
Manhattan; feels lonely and isolated at home and in
school; pores over books and observes city life; develops
her cloak of invisibility, an ability to blend in without
attracting attention.
19101913 Attends Wadleigh High School in Manhattan; spends
much of her time cutting classes and wandering around
New York City.
19131914 After graduation from high school, announces her
intention of becoming a photographer; at her mothers
insistence, enrolls at the New York Training School for
Teachers; works in portrait studios around Manhattan,
including that of Arnold Genthe.
19151917 Works in the studios of Aram Kazanjian and A. Spencer-
Beatty; attends a photography class taught by Clarence H.
White at Columbia University.
1918 With childhood friend Fronsie, leaves New York City
to travel around the world; after they are robbed in San
Francisco, the two decide to stay and work there; Lange
works at the photo-finishing counter at Marshs, joins a
camera club, and befriends Imogen Cunningham, Roi
Partridge, and other artists.
1919 Opens her own portrait studio at 540 Sutter Street; drops
her fathers name and assumes her mothers, Lange;
meets Western wilderness painter Maynard Dixon.
119
1920 Is married to Maynard Dixon on March 21.
19221923 Travels with Dixon to the Southwest on two separate
occasions; Dixon paints while Lange photographs.
1925 First child, Daniel Dixon, is born on May 15; Lange
maintains an active clientele for her studio while raising
her family.
1928 Second son, John Dixon, is born on June 12.
1929 Travels with family to the Sierra Nevada in California;
returns with family in the fall, just after the stock market
crash of October 24.
1931 Travels with family to Taos, New Mexico; lives there for
several months; photographs while Dixon paints.
1932 The Dixons return from Taos; decides with Dixon to save
money by living in their respective studios and placing
the boys in a nearby boarding school; unsatisfied by her
studio work, Lange takes her camera into the streets and
creates White Angel Breadline and other pictures of
people affected by the Great Depression.
1934 Photographs the general strike in San Francisco and
exhibits her work for the first time, at Willard Van Dykes
studio; Paul S. Taylor, a respected economics professor,
notices her work and uses one of her images to accompany
an article for Survey Graphic.
1935 Joins Paul Taylors staff at Californias State Relief Adminis-
tration; photographs destitute migrant farmers throughout
California. The TaylorLange reports successfully convince
the government to establish sanitary camps for the migrants.
Impressed by Langes work, Roy Stryker, the new head of
the Resettlement Administration (RA) in Washington, D.C.,
has her transferred from the SERA to the RA. Lange divorces
Maynard Dixon and marries Taylor in December.
120
Chronology
1936 Photographs migrants in California; makes Migrant
Mother in March and travels to Washington to meet
Stryker for the first time; investigates the South with
Taylor, studying tenancy; is dropped from the RA
payroll in October due to budgetary cuts.
1937 Is rehired by Stryker in January; travels with Taylor
through the South and the Southwest, where Lange
photographs sharecroppers, tenant farmers, and Okies.
The RA is renamed the Farm Security Administration
(FSA), and at the end of year Lange is cut from the
payroll again.
1938 Works on her own, photographing in California and the
South; Stryker rehires her in September.
1939 Photographs more in California, then in the Northwest
and North Carolina; American Exodus, a collaboration
between Taylor and Lange, is published at the end of
the year.
1940 Is permanently dropped from the FSA rolls; Migrant
Mother is displayed at the Museum of Modern Art
(MOMA) in New York City.
1941 Becomes the first female photographer to win the
prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship; begins photograph-
ing religious settlements in the West but does not finish
the project.
1942 Photographs Japanese-American detainees for the War
Relocation Authority.
19431945 Photographs minority groups for the Office of War
Information; collaborates with Ansel Adams on a piece
for Fortune on the Richmond shipyards.
121
19461951 Photographs the founding of the United Nations in San
Francisco; stops actively photographing due to stomach
illness; some of her images are included in MOMAs
Sixty Prints by Six Women Photographers in 1949.
19531956 Lange and Ansel Adams, assisted by Langes son Daniel,
produce Three Mormon Towns for Life; Lange and
Daniel travel to Ireland to photograph The Irish Country
People, also for Life; Lange works on The Public
Defender and Death of a Valley, a collaboration with
Pirkle Jones, for the same magazine, although the editors
ultimately do not use Langes photographs.
19581960 Accompanies Taylor through Asia, Europe, and South
America, photographing intermittently.
19611962 Spends months in the hospital; her work is included in
MOMAs survey of FSA photography, The Bitter Years,
and in galleries in Chicago, Boston, Louisville, and San
Francisco and also in France and Italy; Lange photographs
her family and friends around her beloved cabin in Steep
Ravine, California.
1963 Travels through Egypt with Taylor, photographing
occasionally; contracts dysentery and malaria; after
recuperating in Switzerland, returns home in September.
1964 In August, is diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the
esophagus; works with John Szarkowski, director of
photography at MOMA, in selecting photographs for
a retrospective of her work.
1965 Completes a collection of portraits of American rural
women, published posthumously as Dorothea Lange
Looks at the American Country Woman (1967). On
October 11, Dorothea Lange dies.
122
Works by Dorothea Lange
As Published in Books
Dorothea Lange: Farm Security Administration Photographs, 19351939.
Text-Fiche Press, 1980.
Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman. Amon Carter
Museum at Fort Worth and Ward Ritchie Press, 1967.
Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime. Essay by Robert Coles.
Aperture, 1982.
Dorothea Langes Ireland. Text by Gerry Mullins; essay by Daniel Dixon.
Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1998.
Lange, Dorothea, and Ansel Adams. Three Mormon Towns. Life,
September 6, 1954, pp. 91100.
Lange, Dorothea, and Margaretta Mitchell. To a Cabin. Grossman, 1973.
Lange, Dorothea, and Paul Schuster Taylor. An American Exodus:
A Record of Human Erosion. Reprinted from 1939 edition. Arno Press,
1975.
Lange, Dorothea, and Pirkle Jones. Death of a Valley. Aperture,
1960, Volume 8:3, pp. 511.
Photographing the Second Gold Rush: Dorothea Lange and the Bay Area
at War, 19411945. Introduction by Charles Wollenberg. Heyday
Books, 1995.
The Photographs of Dorothea Lange. Text by Keith Davis. Hallmark Cards
in association with Abrams, 1995.
Collections
Farm Security Administration Collection, Prints and Photographs
Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum, Oakland, California.
123
Bibliography
Adler, Bill, ed. The Unknown Wisdom of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
Citadel, 1994.
Heyman, Therese Thau. Celebrating a Collection: The Work of Dorothea
Lange. Oakland Museum, 1978.
Meltzer, Milton. Dorothea Lange: A Photographers Life. Farrar Strauss
Giroux, 1978.
Ohrm, Karin Becker. Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition.
Louisiana State University Press, 1980.
Partridge, Elizabeth, ed. Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life. Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1994.
Rosenblum, Naomi. A History of Women Photographers. New York:
Abbeville, 2000.
Van Dyke, Willard. The Photographs of Dorothea Lange: A Critical
Analysis. Camera Craft, October 1934, Volume 41, pp. 461467.
124
Further Reading
Books
Borhan, Pierre. Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer.
Bulfinch, 2002.
Browne, Turner, and Elaine Partnow. Macmillan Biographical Encyclopedia
of Photographic Artists and Innovators. Macmillan, 1983.
Dixon, Daniel. Dorothea Lange. Modern Photography, December 1952,
Volume 16, pp. 6877, 138141.
Dorothea Lange: American Photographs. Essays by Sandra Philips, John
Szarkowski, Therese Thau Heyman. Chronicle Books, 1994.
Fisher, Andrea. Let Us Now Praise Famous Women: Women Photographers
for the U.S. Government 1935 to 1944. Pandora Press, 1987.
Hirsch, Robert. Seizing the Light: A History of Photography. McGraw-Hill,
2000.
Lange, Dorothea, and Daniel Dixon. Photographing the Familiar.
Aperture, 1952, Volume 1:2, pp. 415.
Partridge, Elizabeth. Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange.
Puffin Books, 1998
Riess, Susan. The Making of a Documentary Photographer. University of
California, Bancroft Library, 1968.
Sandler, Martin W. Against the Odds: Women Pioneers in the First Hundred
Years of Photography. Rizzoli, 2002.
Turner, Robyn Montana. Dorothea Lange. Little Brown, 1994.
Websites
Library of CongressAmerican Memory Collection: America From the
Great Depression to World War II, Black and White Photographs From
the FSA-OWI, 19351945
memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fahome.html
Library of CongressDorothea Langes Migrant Mother Photographs
in the Farm Security Administration Collection: An Overview
www.loc.gov/rr/print/128_migm.html
The Oakland Museum of California: The Dorothea Lange Collection
www.museumca.org/global/art/collections_dorothea_lange.html
Index of Online Resources for Dorothea Langes Photographs maintained
by Artcyclopedia
www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/lange
125
Interview with Dorothea Lange, conducted by Richard K. Doud for the
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
artarchives.si.edu/oralhist/lange64.htm
Dorothea Lange: Photographer of the People
www.dorothea-lange.org
126
Index
Adams, Ansel, 70, 98, 106, 108
Ahlstrom, Florence (Fronsie)
as Langes girlhood friend, 29
and Langes marriage to Dixon,
51
in San Francisco with Lange,
41, 43, 44, 46
American Exodus: A Record of
Human Erosion, An, 100-102
Aperture, Langes works in, 114
Arensberg, Conrad N., 108
Arkansas, Lange documenting
tenant farmers in, 92-93, 95, 97
Art Institute of Chicago, Langes
exhibits in, 114
Arvin, California, emergency
migrant camps in, 75
Asia, Lange photographing people
in, 112-113
Associated Farmers, 94
Barrymore family, Kazanjians
portraits of, 37
Bernhardt, Sarah, Genthes
portrait of, 35
Berryessa Dam, 109
Bitter Years, The (Museum of
Modern Art), 114
black tenant farmers, Lange
documenting, 19, 90-95, 97
Bloody Thursday, 68
Boumphrey, Jack, and loaning
Lange money for studio, 46-47,
51
Bowery, Lange working in, 27-28,
63
breadlines, Langes photographs
of unemployed men on, 62-63,
65-66
Brokaw, Irving, Langes portraits
of family of, 38
Bubley, Esther, 80
California
Lange documenting James
Roosevelts campaign for
governor in, 108
Lange documenting migrant
farm workers in, 12-17, 19,
73-75, 76, 77-79, 84-90
Lange documenting University
of CaliforniaBerkeley
graduation in, 108
Langes cabin in, 110-112
See also San Francisco
camera club, Lange joining, 46
cancer, Lange suffering from,
115-116, 117
Caruso, Enrico, Kazanjians
portraits of, 37
Civilian Conservation Corp
(CCC), 67
Clarksdale, Mississippi, Lange
documenting tenant farmers
in, 93-94
Collier, Jon, Jr., 80
Columbia University, Lange learn-
ing from White in, 40-41
commercial photographers, Lange
learning from, 32-40
Cunningham, Imogen, 70
Dixon as friend of, 50
and Group f64, 70
as Langes friend, 45-46
and Langes plant shots, 56
and personal photographs,
50
and son as assistant to Lange,
86
and Unemployed Exchange
Association, 71
darkroom
Lange constructing with travel-
ing photographer, 40
127
Lange joining camera club for,
46
Langes discomfort with, 41
in Langes first studio, 46
Davis, Charles, as Langes mentor,
38-39
Death of a Valley, 109
Delano, Jack, 80
Dictator Dot, as Langes nick-
name, 77
Dixie Plantation, tenant farmers
on, 92
Dixon, Constance (Consie), 51,
53, 56, 77
Dixon, Daniel Rhodes (son), 47,
53, 56-57, 59-60, 61-62, 67, 74,
77, 106-107, 108
Dixon, Gregor (grandson), 108,
112
Dixon, John Eaglefeather (son),
53, 59-60, 61-62, 67, 74, 77,
108
Dixon, Maynard (first husband),
51-52
and appearance, 50-51
and children with Lange, 53-
54, 56
and daughter from first
marriage, 51, 53, 56, 77
and divorce from Lange, 76-77
and first meeting with Lange,
50-51
and Great Depression, 66
Langes life with, 51-54, 56,
59-62, 67
and living in separate studio
from Lange, 61-62
as Western wilderness painter,
50, 51-53, 67
DuPont family, Kazanjians
portraits of, 37
Dust Bowl, 73, 79
dysentery, Lange suffering from,
115
Eddy, Sherwood, 92
Edwards, Mary Jeanette, 71
Egypt, Lange photographing
people in, 114-115
Ehrlich, Pauline, 80
Evans, Walker, 80
Farm Security Administration.
See Resettlement Admini-
stration
Federal Emergency Relief
Administration (FERA), 67
and Taylor-Lange reports on
migrant farm workers, 75
Ford, Lange and Dixon purchas-
ing, 59
Forgotten Man, as Langes motif,
66
Fortune, Lange documenting
minorities in Richmond
shipyards for, 106
Franklin, Sidney, and Langes first
studio, 46, 47
f64 movement. See Group f64
Gardner, Christina, 104, 106
Genthe, Arnold, as Langes
mentor, 34-37, 47
Georgia, Lange documenting
tenant farmers in, 92
Germany, Langes family from,
20-22
Graflex camera, Lange using, 63,
87
Great Depression, Lange docu-
menting, 12-17, 59, 61-75,
76-95, 97-99
and black tenant farmers, 19,
90-94
128
Index
book compiling photographs
on, 100-102
and Hightstown project, 90
and Longshoremens Union
strike, 67-68
and May Day demonstrations
in Civic Center, 68
and migrant farm workers, 12-
17, 19, 73-75, 77-79, 84-90
and Okies, 79
and RA rehabilitation project
in Utah, 90
with Resettlement Administra-
tion (RA), 12-17, 19, 79-95,
97-98
Association, 71-73
and unemployed men on
breadlines, 62-63, 65-66
Group f64, 70
Guggenheim Fellowship, Lange
winning, 102
Hightstown project, Lange docu-
menting, 90
Hill House (Mississippi), Lange
documenting, 98
Hoboken, New Jersey, Langes
family in, 20-22, 25-26, 35
Hopi Indian, 53
Hopi reservation, Langes photo-
graphic journeys to, 52-53
Imperial Valley, Lange document-
ing migrant farm workers in,
74, 76, 78-79, 94
Irish Countryman, The (Arensberg),
108
Irish Country People, The,
108
Irish people, Langes documen-
tation of, 108
Japanese-Americans in internment
camps, Lange documenting, 19,
102-105
Jones, Pirkle, 109
Jordan, Lois (White Angel),
62-63, 65-66
Kanaga, Consuelo, as Langes
friend, 46
Kazanjian, Aram, as Langes
mentor, 37
Kerr, Clark, 75
kinnikinnick, 51
Land of the Free (MacLeish),
100
landscape, Langes shots of, 56
Lange, Dorothea
and adolescence, 28-31
and assuming mothers name,
22, 47
on becoming artist, 41
and Berryessa Dam, 109
birth of, 21, 22
and boarding school for
children, 61-62
and cabin in California, 110-
112
and cessation of photographing
due to health problems, 107,
108
childhood of, 22-28
children of, 47, 53-54, 56-57,
59-60, 61-62, 67, 74, 77,
106-107, 108
and cloak of invisibility, 28,
63, 68, 106
death of, 117
and decision to become photo-
grapher, 30-31, 32-34
and decision to travel around
world, 41, 43
129
and developing own photo-
graphs, 40, 41, 46, 65
as documentary photographer,
58-63, 65-75, 76-95, 97-99,
100-109
and early jobs, 44, 45, 46
education of, 26, 27, 28-30,
32-33, 35, 37
family of, 20-26
and first camera, 36
and food sent to migrant farm
workers, 17, 88-90
and friends, 29, 44-46, 50, 51,
70
and grandchildren, 108, 110-
112
and Great Depression, 12-17,
59, 61-75, 76-95, 97-99
and Guggenheim Fellowship,
102
and health problems, 106,
107-108, 109, 110, 113,
115-117
as humanist, 12-17, 19
and interviews and docu-
mentary films about her
life, 117
and Irish people, 108
and Japanese-American
relocation in World War II,
102-105
and joining camera club,
46
and learning photography,
32-41, 43
legacy of, 75, 98-99, 117
and Life photo essays, 108
and Limpy as nickname,
23
and marriages. See Dixon,
Maynard; Taylor, Paul
Schuster
and migrant farm workers,
12-17, 19, 73-75, 76, 77-79,
84-90
and minorities, 19, 79, 105-106
and Mormons in Utah, 102,
108
and move to San Francisco,
43, 44
and need to photograph all
kinds of people, 56-57, 58-
59, 63, 65-66
and nicknames, 23, 77
as outsider, 26-28, 29-30
and personal photographs, 50,
56, 60-61, 98
and polio, 22-23, 28, 35, 87
as portrait photographer, 34,
35-36, 37-39, 41, 43, 44-51,
54, 56, 59, 67, 77
and Pulich, 108-109
and James Roosevelts
campaign for governor,
108
and rural women, 117
and sanitary camps for migrant
farm workers, 75, 84-87
and shows and exhibits, 68, 70-
71, 90, 98, 102, 114, 116-117
and Sierra Nevada trip, 56-57
and sketching trips with Dixon,
51-53
and skills useful for photo-
grapher, 26-28, 29-31
and studio, 35, 46-48, 50, 51,
54, 56, 62, 67, 77
and style for documentary
photographs, 15-16, 28, 63,
68-70, 72-73, 74-75, 86-87,
98-99, 106
and style for portraits, 48, 50
and Taos, New Mexico trip,
59-61
130
Index
and training to be teacher,
32-33, 35, 37
and United Nations, 107
and University of California
Berkeley graduation, 108
as world traveler, 19, 112-113
Lange, Frederick (grandfather), 22
Lange, Joanna (Joan) (mother),
22
and husband abandoning, 23-
25
and Lange adopting name, 22,
47
and Lange as teacher, 32-33,
37
and Langes decision to become
photographer, 30, 32-33
and Langes polio, 23, 25
Langes relationship with, 25-
26
as librarian, 26, 27
and marriage, 22
Lee, Russell, 80
Life
Langes photo essay on Irish
people for, 108
Langes photo essay on
Mormons in Utah for, 102,
108
lighting, Langes use of, 48
Limpy, as Langes nickname, 23
Longshoremens Union strike,
Lange documenting, 67-68
Lower East Side, Langes child-
hood in, 26-28, 35
MacLeish, Archibald, 100
malaria, Lange suffering from,
115
Marshs department store, Langes
job at photofinishing counter
at, 44, 45, 46
Marysville, California, emergency
migrant camps in, 75
Matanuska settlement (Alaska),
Lange documenting,
98
May Day demonstrations at San
Franciscos Civic Center, Lange
documenting, 68
McClaughrey, Anita Baldwin,
52-53
mechanized farming, Lange
documenting, 95, 97
Merriam, Frank, 68
Midsummer Nights Dream, A
(Shakespeare), Lange attending
with father, 24-25
migrant farm workers
food sent to, 17, 88-90
Lange documenting, 12-17,
19, 73-75, 76, 77-79
sanitary camps for, 75, 84-87
Taylor-Lange report on, 73-75,
79-80
Taylors studies of, 17, 73-75,
76, 79
Migrant Mother, 17, 87-90,
102
Millay, Edna St. Vincent, Genthes
portrait of, 35
minorities, Langes documentation
of, 79, 105-106
Mississippi, Lange documenting
tenant farmers in, 92, 93-94,
95, 97, 98
Modern Photography, Daniels
article about Lange in,
108
Museum of Modern Art
(New York City), Langes
photographs in, 90, 98, 102,
114, 116-117
Mydans, Carl, 80
131
Native American reservations,
Langes photographic journeys
to, 51-53
Navajo reservation, Langes photo-
graphic journey to, 51-52
negatives
Lange learning to retouch, 35
Langes conflict with Stryker
over, 83-84, 98
New Deal, 66, 73, 102
New Jersey, Hightstown project in,
90
New York City
Langes education in, 26, 27,
28-30, 32-33, 35, 37
Lange training as photographer
in, 32-41
New York City garment workers,
and Hightstown project, 90
New York Public Library, Langes
mother as librarian in, 26, 27
New York Training School for
Teachers, 33, 35
Nipomo, California, Lange docu-
menting pea pickers camp in,
15-17, 74, 88-90
North Carolina, Lange document-
ing tenant farmers in, 92, 98
Nutzhorn, Heinrich (Henry)
(father), 22
and abandoning family, 23-25
and Lange renouncing name,
22, 47
and marriage, 22
Nutzhorn, Henry Martin
(brother), 22, 23, 25, 28, 54, 63,
106
Office of War Information (OWI),
Lange documenting minorities
for, 105-106
Okies, Langes photographs of, 79
Oroville, and Unemployed
Exchange Association, 71-73
Parks, Gordon, 80
Partridge, Roi
as Dixons friend, 50
as Langes friend, 45-46
and Langes marriage to Dixon,
51
and son as assistant to Lange,
86
Partridge, Ron, 86, 87, 94, 111
pea pickers camp, Lange docu-
menting, 15-17, 74, 88-90
Photo-Secession, 40
Pickford, Mary, 35
pictures of people, Lange as maker
of, 56-57, 58-59, 63, 65-66
plants, Langes shots of, 56
polio
Lange having, 22-23, 25, 28, 87
Roosevelt having, 66
portrait photographer
Davis as, 38-39
Genthe as, 34-36
Kazanjian as, 37
Lange as, 37-39, 41, 43, 44-51,
54, 56, 67, 77
Langes first experience as, 38
Langes training as, 34, 35-36,
37
Spencer-Beatty as, 37-38
posing subjects, Lange learning,
38-39
props
Lange avoiding, 48
Lange learning to manipulate,
37
Public Defender, The, 108-109
Public School 62, Lange attending,
26
Pulich, Martin, 108-109
132
Index
racism, and Langes documenta-
tion of black tenant farmers,
19, 79, 90-94
Resettlement Administration (RA)
(renamed Farm Security
Administration), 79-80
books collecting photographs
from, 100-102
and conflict between Stryker
and Lange, 83-84, 98
Lange documenting Hight-
stown project for, 90
Lange documenting migrant
farm workers in Depression
for, 12-17, 19, 79-95, 97-98
Lange documenting Utah
rehabilitation project for, 90
Lange dropped from payroll of,
94, 98
Lange fired from, 98-99
Lange rehired by, 94, 98
Langes salary from, 80
and Museum of Modern Art
show, 114, 116-117
and Stryker, 79-84, 90, 94, 95,
97, 98-99
Taylor with, 80, 84
Richmond shipyards, Lange docu-
menting minorities working in,
106
Rolleiflex camera, Lange using, 74,
87, 106
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano
and New Deal, 66-67, 73, 102
and polio, 66
and relocation of Japanese-
Americans, 102, 103
Roosevelt, James, and Lange
documenting campaign for
governor, 108
Roosevelt, Theodore, Genthes
portraits of, 35
Rothstein, Arthur, 80, 90
rural women, Langes portraits of,
117
Russian Hill, Langes house on, 51
San Anselmo, Langes children in
boarding school in, 61-62
San Francisco
Genthes street photographs of,
34, 35
Lange documenting May Day
demonstrations in Civic
Center in, 68
Lange robbed in, 43
Langes move to, 43, 44
Langes portraits of merchant
princes in, 47-48
Taylors article on general
strikes in, 71
San Francisco Museum, Langes
exhibits in, 114
San Francisco News, The
Kanaga as photographer for,
46
Langes photos of pea pickers
camp in, 16-17, 88-90
self-help cooperative, Unemployed
Exchange Association as, 71-72
Shahn, Ben, 80, 90
shooting scripts, and Stryker, 81-
83
Sierra foothills, and Unemployed
Exchange Association, 71-73
Sierra Nevada, Lange family trip
to, 56-57
Social Security Board, Taylor with,
90
South, Lange documenting black
tenant farmers in, 19, 90-94,
97-98
South America, Lange photo-
graphing people in, 113
133
Spencer-Beatty, A., Mrs., as
Langes mentor, 37-38
spotting, Lange learning, 35
State Emergency Relief Adminis-
tration (SERA)
Lange transferred to Resettle-
ment Administration from,
79-80
Taylor-Lange report on
migrant farm workers for,
73-75, 79-80
Steep Ravine, Langes cabin in,
110-112
Steichen, Edward, 117
straight photography, and Group
f64, 70
Strand, Paul, 60-61
Street Demonstration, San
Francisco, 1933, 68
Stryker, Roy, 79-84, 90, 94, 95,
97, 98-99
Supreme Humanist, Lange as,
12-17, 19
Survey Graphic
Migrant Mother in, 89
Taylors article for, 71
Sutter Street, Langes first studio
on, 35, 46-48, 50
Szarkowski, John, 116, 117
Taft, William Howard, 35
Taos, New Mexico, Lange-Dixon
family trip to, 59-61
Taylor, Dee (grandson), 112
TaylorLange report, 73-75,
79-80
Taylor, Paul Schuster (second
husband)
and admiration for Lange,
71, 72-73, 77
and Asian trip, 112-113
and cabin in California, 110-112
and children from first marriage,
77
and divorce from first wife, 77
and first meeting with Lange,
71
Langes admiration for, 71-72,
76-77
and Langes death, 117
and Langes photo for Survey
Graphic, 71
and marriage to Lange, 77, 78
and migrant farm workers, 14,
73-75, 76, 84
as professor in Egypt, 114-115
and relocation of Japanese
Americans, 103-104
with Resettlement Admini-
stration (Farm Security
Administration), 80, 84
with Social Security Board,
90
as sociologist and economist
at the University of Cali-
fornia, 71
and tenant farmers, 91-95,
97-98
and unemployed Exchange
Association study, 71-73
and world travel as consultant,
112-113
tenant farmers, Lange document-
ing, 19, 90-94, 95, 97-98
Texas, Lange documenting tenant
farmers in, 95, 97
Three Mormon Towns, 108
traveling photographer, and Lange
developing photographs in
darkroom, 40
Unemployed Exchange Association
(UXA), Lange documenting,
71-73
134
Index
United Nations
Lange documenting founding
of, 107
Taylor as consultant for, 113
University of CaliforniaBerkeley,
Lange documenting graduation
at, 108
U.S. Camera, Langes portfolio in,
102
Utah, Lange documenting RA
rehabilitation project in, 90
Van Dyke, Willard
and admiration for Lange, 86
and Group f64, 70
Langes show in gallery of, 68,
70-71
Association, 71
Vasey, Tom, 74
Vottler, Caroline (aunt), 22
Vottler, Ottelia (great-grandmother),
22
Vottler, Sophie (grandmother),
21-22
and alcohol, 25, 28
and influence on Lange, 25
Langes family moving in with,
25-26
Wadleigh High School for Girls,
Lange attending, 28-30
War Relocation Administration
(WRA), Lange documenting
Japanese-American relocation
for, 102-105
West, Langes photographic
journeys to, 51-53
Weston, Edward, 70
White Angel Breadline, 62-63,
65-66
White, Clarence, as Langes
mentor, 40-41
Wilson family, Langes children
staying with, 53, 54
Whiteside, Katherine Page, 77
Wilson, Woodrow, 35
Wolcott, Marion Post, 80
World War II, Lange documenting
Japanese-Americans in intern-
ment camps in, 19, 102-105
YWCA (San Francisco), Lange
robbed in, 43
135
Credits
13: Library of Congress, digital ID
3c289444u
18: Library of Congress, digital ID
3b41800u
21: Credit unknown, photo courtesy
Elizabeth Partridge
24: CORBIS
29: Museum of the City of NY/CORBIS
33: Rondal Partridge and Elizabeth W.
Partridge
36: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-118636
42: Stapleton Collection/CORBIS
45: Credit unknown, photo courtesy
Elizabeth Partridge
49: The Dorothea Lange Collection,
Oakland Museum of California, City
of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor
72: Imogen Cunningham Trust
Partridge
Partridge
89: Library of Congress,
LC-USF34-009870-E
LC-USF34-009043-E
LC-USF34-T01-009599-C
LC-USF34-017111-C
Partridge
page:
Cover: The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City
136
Contributors
Kerry Acker is a freelance writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New
York. Some of her other books include Chelsea Houses MAJOR WORLD
LEADERS: Jimmy Carter and WOMEN IN THE ARTS: Nina Simone.
Congresswoman Betty McCollum (Minnesota, Fourth District) is the
second woman from Minnesota ever to have been elected to Congress.
Since the start of her first term of office in 2000, she has worked
diligently to protect the environment and to expand access to health
care, and she has been an especially strong supporter of education and
womens health care. She holds several prominent positions in the House
Democratic Caucus and enjoys the rare distinction of serving on three
House Committees at once. In 2001, she was appointed to represent the
House Democrats on the National Council on the Arts, the advisory
board of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Dorothea Lange (Photography Art Ebook)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Dorothea Lange (Photography Art Ebook)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Sarah Bernhardt

You might also like