by Linda Gordon
It was hard for women to break into many of the arts, but they were leading a revolution in dance. Isadora Duncan, proclaiming that ballet deformed the sacred natural female body, put on a toga, took her shoes off, and became the darling of New York’s female arts patrons. It is difficult to appreciate that enthusiasm today. In photographs and drawings, she seems hokey. Dance critic Elizabeth Kendall tactfully calls her dancing “quaint.”19 Today’s dancers of every style employ rigorous ballet training, great athleticism, and thin bodies, while Isadora appears in photographs as fleshy, her limbs and torso lax, her movement vague. As Dorothea recollected many years later, “She was rather sloppy-looking, rather fat, with very heavy upper legs, yet with a peculiar grace, not grace as I had preconceived it. . . .”20 Duncan left audiences awestruck. Although influenced by dancers Ruth St. Denis and Loïe Fuller, she drew most from her extraordinary mother, a San Francisco free spirit, musician, and progressive educator. Mrs. Duncan separated from her husband while Isadora was a baby and supported her four children alone. She taught them romantic poetry, Robert Ingersoll’s atheistic romanticism, feminist dress reform, California’s pantheistic worship of nature, and a gestural system developed by French acting and singing teacher François Delsarte. Isadora was a product of precisely the San Francisco subculture that Lange, eighteen years younger, would soon enter.
Duncan was very much a partisan and an exemplar of the “new woman” ideology that thrived among modernists and radicals in New York. “Duncan’s dances were events through which her viewers recognized themselves as modern,” one scholar wrote.21 Whether the “new women” were feminists or not, all were in high rebellion against Victorian prudery and its double standard. They were assertively feminine even as they dressed in comfortable, bohemian clothing. Duncan affirmed women’s sexual desire and sexual rights, even unwed motherhood, and advocated companionate marriage and freedom from household drudgery. She danced in an imagined classical habitat in which women’s sexuality was “free.”22 In throwing off Victorian restraints, her sexuality emulated that of the pagan, not the coquette. By wrapping her free spirit in the costume veneer of classicism, she signaled that her performances were high art, avoided the taint of prurience, and maintained the separation of the genteel from the vulgar. Duncan’s feminism was the sort that glorified women’s difference from men, especially women’s alleged instinctiveness, intuitiveness, and “naturally” gentle, earthbound, maternalist nurturing. Duncan signified all these with her physical presence. She bared her body, exalted nature—her California heritage—and celebrated freedom by enacting it in her movements.
DESPITE THEIR HERO WORSHIP, Duncan’s young admirers could not glean from her persona any advice on how to proceed, how to become a “new woman.” But upon high school graduation in 1912, that was the question Dorothea faced. Her mother expected a plan: a job or more education. Her better-off relatives offered to pay for a teacher-training course. Joan was nothing if not practical at this point, having been a single mother supporting three others now for six years, and she wanted Dorothea to be able to support herself.
To Joan’s astonishment, the girl said she wanted to be a photographer. The Nutzhorns did not own a camera and Dorothea had never held one. Amateur photography was booming, especially since Eastman had introduced its lightweight Kodak box camera in 1888; by 1900, you could buy one for five dollars. But Joan could not imagine photography providing economic security—a matter that seemed to her crucial. “ ‘You have to have something to fall back on,’ ” Joan said. But Dorothea “knew it was dangerous to have something to fall back on.”23 “A detestable phrase for a young person,” she remarked later.24
Why such strong words? What dangers was she worried about? One could read a protofeminism in these words, a refusal of the safe path for a middle-class woman, of the job stamped female, and of the straight and predictable road it would put her on. They also might imply defiance of the pressure on young people to choose safety at the expense of growth. One could also read a protoartistic commitment here, a desire not to be tempted into a search for security that would make an artistic vocation impossible.
Despite her lack of enthusiasm, she enrolled, together with Fronsie, in the New York College for the Training of Teachers. Founded in 1887 as a direct response to the influx of immigrants, the school was funded by Grace Dodge and George Vanderbilt. Columbia University president Nicholas Murray Butler brought it into alliance with Columbia in the 1890s and moved it uptown to 119th Street. Its curriculum, like that at PS 62, was influenced by progressive educational ideas, including those of John Dewey, also a professor at Columbia. But the quality of what it offered made no difference to Dorothea. Uninterested, she remained a mediocre student and soon dropped out.
From then on Dorothea Lange designed and executed her own education. Her choice of an employer is one indication of just how ambitious and self-confident Dorothea was. The first photographer she approached for a job was the most prestigious of all, Arnold Genthe. The photographs in his studio window were those of Isadora Duncan, for which he was famous.25 That he was German helped her find the audacity to ask.
Genthe had been the most famed portrait photographer in the West. He had emigrated to San Francisco in 1895, taught himself photography, and became the “darling of Nob Hill,” where the first railroad barons and bonanza kings built their mansions, high above the rowdy, bawdy waterfront. A master pictorialist, he specialized in soft-focus portraits of society women and cultural celebrities. He said of his work: “I believe I was the first professional photographer to give people portraits that were more than mere surface records—pictures that . . . showed something of a real character and personality of the sitter. . . .” Producing what came to be called the Genthe style, he achieved it in part by clicking the shutter when the sitter did not expect it—as Lange would do in her own early studio work.26 He also made photographs of California’s natural beauty, of San Francisco in ruins after the 1906 earthquake, and, most originally, of Chinatown and its residents. Sharing the perspective of so much photography of nonwhites in this era, his take on the Chinese was Orientalist in the extreme—images of dark, sordid, and mysteriously beautiful aspects of pre-earthquake Chinatown, projecting its characteristics as a natural emanation of Chineseness.27
He moved to New York in 1911 and quickly developed a similar studio there. Sometime in 1912 or 1913 Dorothea, probably with Fronsie’s encouragement, walked in, told him she wanted to learn photography, and offered to do any work at all. The shop was large for a photographer—three women worked there, Dorothea being the youngest. She functioned as general assistant and fill-in person. She answered the phone and received clients, but soon he trained her to change the glass plates quickly, to make proofs, to spot photographs (cover dust flecks or white spots with India ink), to retouch the plates with an etching knife, and to mount pictures. She was also trained to say he wasn’t there when he was—that is, to distinguish between those he wanted to see and those he did not. Personal relationships with his clients were central to his success. “Arnold Genthe was an unconscionable old goat,” she recalled, “in that he seduced everyone who came in the place. Yes, he was a real roué. But . . . very properly a photographer of women because he really loved them. He wasn’t at all a vulgar man; he loved women. He understood them. He could make the plainest woman an illuminated woman.”28 (Except for the “roué” comment, this, too, described Lange’s work fifteen years later.)
Dorothea could not know then that a direct line extended from Genthe to her future husband, Maynard Dixon. Back in San Francisco, Genthe had made a portrait of Dixon: elegantly dressed, his long, delicate fingers holding a cigarette. In return, Dixon had done a cartoon drawing of Genthe photographing a young woman.29 Just before Genthe left for New York, his friends had given him a farewell party and, as a gift, “amusing caricatures” by Dixon.30
From Genthe Dorothea received a view into the world of fineness. “That was a look into a world I hadn’t seen .
. . a world of privilege . . . command of what seemed to me the most miraculous kind of living . . . everything of the highest expression. A world of Oriental art was in that place”—art Genthe had collected in Chinatown. Once again, Dorothea impressed her teacher, so he began deliberately to educate her. She offered one example: Once “he looked at me and he said, ‘I wish you’d take those cheap red beads off. They’re not any good.’ . . . And I can see them now. They were red cut glass beads. I [had] thought they were nice. I took them off. . . . He was absolutely right. . . .” Lange’s interviewer remarked, “Most young girls would weep at that point.” To which Dorothea responded, “Not I. Because I knew. Why, my grandmother had taught me better than that. I never [again] wore any costume jewelry. . . .”31
The most momentous of Genthe’s gifts was a camera—not only the first she had owned but also the first she had held. We can surmise, since Lange did not specify, that it was a used Graflex. First produced in 1907, this was a single-lens reflex camera, in which the photographer, looking down through a black leather hood, is actually seeing through the lens that will expose the film; the image is projected upward by a mirror, which flips out of the way when the shutter is pressed. The shutter speed was adjusted by rotating a ring on the lens, and the aperture was selected by moving a wheel. The Graflex was the camera typically used in portrait studios, and Lange used it throughout her studio career.
After Genthe, Dorothea apprenticed herself, in varying capacities, to seven other photographers. Most lacked his status, and she referred to them in retrospect as “lovable old hacks.”32 But they taught her, or made it possible for her to learn. She worked for six months for Aram Kazanjian’s studios, as one of a battery of telephone-solicitation girls repeating “ ‘Good morning, Mrs. DuPont, this is the Kazanjian Studios calling. Mr. Kazanjian is so interested in making a portrait of you and your son together, and we will be in Baltimore on Saturday morning. . . .’ ” She was able to see the studio process from beginning to end, learning business as well as photography. She learned about people’s vanities and how to arrange a bridal veil.33 Another employer, Madame A. Spencer-Beatty, had lost a photographer right after receiving a well-paid commission, so she sent Dorothea on the assignment “out of sheer desperation.” Dorothea’s response was characteristic: “I was scared to death . . . certainly not prepared. . . . It was sheer luck and maybe gall. But I had enough insight, you see, by that time to know how professionals behaved on these jobs and what people wanted and didn’t want . . . what was the commercial product.”34
There was a remarkable apprenticeship to an itinerant photographer who actually moved into her Hoboken household. On his door-to-door rounds, he had knocked at the door when Dorothea was home alone, offering a dozen photographs with easel mounts for $2.50 or, for slightly more, photographs hand-colored—distastefully, Dorothea thought. But she found out that he had no darkroom, “and a week later he was ensconced in a little outbuilding that was in back . . . once a chicken coop.” From him, she learned how to build a darkroom. He had lived in Italy for three years and introduced her to Italian folding negative-drying racks—he gave her one that she used until glass plates went out. She discovered that “he had been all over Europe, this old fellow, and he had a much better, much richer background that I had expected.”35 The story encapsulates Lange’s complex attitudes: snobbish but at the same time open to a down-and-out stranger.
Her last boss, Charles H. Davis, was a celebrity photographer.36 He did opera singers and fashion, and made a lot of money. After his third or fourth wife sued him for divorce and won everything from him—studio, house, equipment—he had to move downtown to a shabby studio over a saloon, where Lange worked for him, and she could still remember, in the 1960s, “the smell of the beer coming up through the floor.” But he draped the room with style and “all his leftover grandeur.” He taught her how to pose the model: “the head is placed, and then . . . each finger is positioned. The fingers were very important to him, and he said, ‘The knees are the eyes of the body.’ . . .” People posed this way, Dorothea saw, “thought they were getting much more for their money than people who nowadays are photographed without knowing it! . . . he would spend two hours and work with every fold. . . .”37 Another commercial lesson.
In her reminiscence about him, there is a hint of a flirtation. “I became a sort of pet of his; he was very lonely, and he used to take me out to dinner . . . always to the same place, the Lion D’Or, where he would order a very fine dinner and sometimes some of his theater people and his opera people would be there and then I saw how he carried it off.” Here was one more way in which she glimpsed the “fine.” He did not consider her a talented photographer, and the reason why is telling. “I remember his saying to me, ‘You don’t know what it is to make a good negative!’ ” To him, the negative was everything, and making the print was completely mechanical. And already, Dorothea realized “he felt that I didn’t like the kind of photography that he did.”38 A remarkable state of affairs—the master aware that the apprentice has her own aesthetic and sense of the craft.
Dorothea also did a stint as a proper photography student, and here too she went to the top: to Clarence H. White, who taught a course under the auspices of Columbia University’s Teachers College. She knew his work by then, and “he stood for a certain kind of a photograph that no one else had produced . . . a good deal of poetry and luminosity and a fine sense of the human figure.”39 A contemporary of Stieglitz and a master portrait photographer, he was central to the Photo-Secession group. White was a romantic socialist, of the sensibility of Whitman and the British Edward Carpenter, another poet of democracy. White’s studio, decorated with fabric hangings, Japanese prints, Chinese ceramics, and bamboo window screens, was a visual statement of the Arts and Crafts renunciation of the mass-produced. His “first lesson to his students was that art begins with one’s everyday surroundings.” He rented his Greenwich Village studio from the famous bohemian church, St. Mark’s-in-the-Bouwerie, a center for modern dance, of which White was a connoisseur.40
White raised pictorialism to high technical standards. He emphasized composition and subjectivity, never representation of the external world, and in this respect his pictorialism, like Stieglitz’s, represented a modernist aesthetic. White’s influence shows throughout Lange’s documentary work, for she made images including large amounts of information legible through easy-to-read composition.
By the mid-1910s, Stieglitz began to reject the pictorialist style and, with his usual controlling temperament, required his colleagues to follow him. White refused and continued to work with soft focus.41 But he transcended his own style in his teaching. His supreme pedagogical values, like those of John Dewey, insisted that students must explore, finding their own styles and meaning; that a teacher must never impose or assign but should be open to all that is authentic; that there is beauty in the ordinary, in the products of the “folk”; that the artist must honor the natural, the free. Nothing could have suited Dorothea better. “Why he was extraordinary has puzzled me ever since. . . . He was an inarticulate man . . . and he’d hesitate, he’d fumble. He was very gentle and had a very sweet aura. . . . You walked into that dreary room knowing that something was going to happen.”42
Dorothea did not then recognize how unusual White was in taking women seriously, far more than any male art photographer of his time. His association with Columbia’s Teachers College brought him many female students, and his open-minded, nonjudgmental teaching made them comfortable. He taught western landscape photographer Laura Gilpin; the pioneer photographer of African Americans and Appalachians Doris Ulmann; and photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White. In 1924 he wrote an article for American Photography—later reprinted and distributed by the Women’s Bureau of Vocational Education—encouraging women to enter photography.43
White’s assignments focused on observation and composition, rather than on darkroom skills.44 Abstract still life became the foundation of his classes—like th
e “five finger exercises and scales of composition,” Laura Gilpin recalled.45 He sent his students to photograph a wrought-iron gate at Columbia, because it was nearby and because they saw it every day but never saw it. But he would accept whatever students brought in, which was lucky for Dorothea because she decided “there was no use my photographing that gate, none at all.” In fact, she made herself marginal to the class, never bringing in assigned work, refusing to join in the group experience. She later thought she had reacted this way because White was teaching photography as an art, when she thought of it only as an “interesting job, a trade.” Perhaps, but she had by now a disinclination to study in a formal setting: She called herself a “self-learner.” This puts a positive spin on the trait; the negative version was that her cockiness, her sense of being special, made it hard for her to be just one of a group. That combination of self-esteem and alienation drew from her grandmother’s obsession with excellence, and this, too, contained the positive and the negative. Dorothea had high standards and surrounded herself only with well-made, austere, graceful, unpretentious objects—and these adjectives describe her photography as well as any. But the taste for the fine made her a bit of a social snob, as well. In her work as a documentary photographer she could admire the simplicity of peasants, but she could not abide low- and middle-brow commercial culture. “I have a certain snobbishness about things being very first-class, very top-drawer.”46 White influenced Lange significantly, although she recognized it only later. When she herself taught photography, her photograph-the-ordinary assignments, the ones she wouldn’t do when she was a student, emulated his.