Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Dorothea’s developing artiness attracted her to artists. Around 1912 she took up with a much older man, a sculptor, “slightly a madman,” she recalled, who “fell very much in love with me as a seventeen-year-old girl.” He would appear wherever she was, at all hours, “in a state,” even at her Hoboken home, where her always-amiable and amenable mother would take care of him and let him stay. “I knew that this was a real artist. And I knew that something was expected of me, but I didn’t know what that was.” She understood that he loved not her, but what she represented, and also that he was “half a myth” to her. In 1915 she met John Landon, who was about twenty years her senior, active in the famed Pleiades Club. He then became an ardent suitor. “I was the focus of his attention for a couple of years, completely, one hundred percent, three letters a day kind of thing.”47 He sent her poetry. The Hoboken girl with a limp was becoming an enchanter of men. This relationship, too, was mythical, she thought. After Dorothea there was another girl, whom he treated with exactly the same complete devotion.48

  The Pleiades Club thrilled Dorothea. This Greenwich Village literary society, its members including Stephen Crane, Mark Twain, and Eugene O’Neill, influenced the transformation of the neighborhood from immigrant to bohemian. The club met Sunday nights at the Hotel Brevoort on Fifth Avenue between Eighth and Ninth streets. A favorite inn for visiting Europeans, its café served wine and French food and drew in artists and writers—exactly the kind of hangout Dorothea would rediscover in San Francisco a few years later. Landon took her to high-culture events, such as a farewell dinner for Edward Hugh Sothern and his wife, Julia Marlowe, premier Shakespearean actors of the day. Dorothea remembered Marlowe reading Shakespeare’s sonnets. And Dorothea did love words, perhaps as much as images.

  It is easy, perhaps facile, to connect Dorothea’s attraction to older men with the longing for a father. That she attracted older men, from her employers to John Landon, suggests something else: that her tastes and conversation were becoming sophisticated, and possibly intimidating to men her own age. Bohemian urban subcultures always seemed to open possibilities for women, and they drew Dorothea magnetically. Having found them in New York, she would find them quickly in San Francisco.

  DOROTHEA AND FRONSIE loved New York and never imagined living anywhere else. But they were restless, too, and in their day, rich girls took premarriage European cultural tours to complement their formal education. Hard workers, Lange and Ahlstrom saved up money and decided to do the wealthy girls one better: They would travel around the world. The trip was not an escape—Dorothea denied having been unhappy and thought her desire “was a matter of really testing yourself out. Could you or couldn’t you.”49 It was to be an adventure, and one not built around photography. Dorothea proposed the plan to Fronsie, who loved it—she was a true sister in adventure to Dorothea.

  Both girls’ parents opposed the trip at first, but the girls overcame the resistance. If their parents contributed to the costs, it was only a little. Dorothea and Fronsie had very little money, but Dorothea felt confident she could get a job in a photography studio, and Fronsie, then employed by Western Union, thought she could get a job for that company anywhere in the world. Their economic self-confidence, unknown to their mothers’ generation, was another sign that they were “new women.” Dorothea took the camera that Genthe had given her, thinking to record the sights and, just possibly, earn some money through casual or temporary employment.

  They set out early in 1918, while the war still raged. Dorothea had grown up within view of the great steamships docked in Hoboken—her father’s office had been quite close to the piers—and to her the ships gave off the smells and sounds of adventure and luxury. So they went by ship to New Orleans. Here they were more thrilled than frightened by the rumors of submarines, a result of the 1917 Zimmermann telegram in which the German foreign minister had proposed an alliance with Mexico against the United States. They had prepared well, getting letters of introduction to friends of friends, who proved most hospitable, putting them up for a time in New Orleans.

  From New Orleans, the Southern Pacific Railroad took them to El Paso and Los Angeles, on a route roughly paralleling the old U.S. Route 80, then on to Oakland, where they caught a ferry to San Francisco. The overland part of the trip took six weeks, because they stopped off several times. The travel was mostly comfortable. Train interiors were then embellished with brocade upholstery, beveled-glass doors, inlaid-wood trim, brass fittings, and luxurious cushions. Sleeping cars were the standard on such long trips, and if the two girls had to share quarters with other people, these would certainly have been women. Passengers slept on ironed sheets, even in coach class, and enjoyed individual reading lights, dining cars with real china and silver, and elaborate menus. First-class passengers—which Dorothea and Fronsie were not—were supplied with barbers, showers, valet service, and ticker-tape news. But even coach passengers received service from the famed African American Pullman porters, who made the beds, poured the drinks, and protected women from harassment.

  The train ride was a stunning introduction to what the girls hoped would be a round-the-world adventure. Crossing the Rio Grande at El Paso, they soon lost any sight of green, heading into the deserts, dry plains, and barren highlands and mountains of western New Mexico and eastern Arizona. Soon after came their first sight of the giant saguaro cactus forests and the mysterious red mesas, rising so steep and so flat that they seemed man-made. Passing through Tucson, they could see that this was Mexican country. After crossing into California at Yuma, they went to Los Angeles and got their first sight of the Pacific Ocean, then continued up to Oakland.

  They crossed to San Francisco by ferry in May 1918. By now, newcomers would have seen no trace of the devastating earthquake of twelve years earlier. Dorothea and Fronsie were used to the steady upward climb of the New York skyline—from the 1890 World Building to the 1913 Woolworth tower. From a Hudson river ferry, there is no point from which one can take in the whole of Manhattan. San Francisco, by contrast, seen from the cross-bay ferry, appears an incomparable natural drama. The forty-seven-square-mile tip of a peninsula, rising anywhere from 150 to 1,000 feet above the surrounding waters, its lower levels often covered by fog, it is utterly photogenic. There were no bridges then, and scores of ferries plying five different routes scooted across the bay, so fast and numerous that thousands of workers were able to commute daily between San Francisco and East Bay cities. Dorothea and Fronsie arrived among these masses at the Beaux-Arts ferry building with its high tower, which had miraculously survived the earthquake of 1906. They marveled at the cable cars, rebuilt after the quake, with eight different lines climbing up and easing themselves down the dizzying steep hills.

  Their first adventures, however, were inauspicious. They checked in at a YWCA. The next day, while they were breakfasting at a Compton’s Cafeteria, Fronsie’s purse was picked of all their money. Undeterred, because there was a friend of Joan’s they could look up in Berkeley and because, Lange said, “we knew that we could get money from home if we needed to,” they sought advice from the YWCA and were sent to an Episcopal home for working girls, the Mary Elizabeth Inn at 1040 Bush Street, instituted to help and protect working girls. This was a purgatory for these two young “new women.” They felt they were “inmates” living in “cubicles,” subordinated to rigid rules and Christian sermonizing. One resident got ejected because she missed the 10:00 P.M. curfew and had no choice but to spend the night with her boyfriend—to the horror of the deaconesses who ran the home. With their Greenwich Village disdain for respectability, Dorothea and Fronsie soon got themselves branded as “disruptive elements”; it seemed the table where they ate became the troublemakers’ table. Soon they were evicted for unsafe as well as immoral practices—Fronsie left the electric iron on and it burned through the ironing board cover; Dorothea was caught smoking.

  The young women made their luck change, however. Once more displaying their grit, they decided not to call on parental r
esources but to get jobs and save for the rest of their trip. They managed this quickly. Fronsie did indeed get a Western Union job. Dorothea went to the city directory to find photographic shops and got a job the very next morning at Marsh & Company, a store selling luggage, stationery, cameras, and photographic supplies and providing photo finishing. It was not an easygoing environment. The boss was anxious that his employees be busy every minute. Dorothea took in the orders for developing and printing, but he also expected her to sell enlargements and framing aggressively. She found this obnoxious, but the job was improved by her fascination with the snapshots people brought in for developing. She looked at them as she packed them into envelopes, “and I realized at that time something that’s never left me . . . the great visual importance of what’s in people’s snapshots that they don’t know is there. . . . They never see them in any way but personal. One of the things that guided me finally into documentary work [was] that over-the-counter experience. . . .”50 Centrally located at 712 Market, between Geary and O’Farrell, Marsh’s turned out to be patronized by many local photographers. One of the first customers she connected with was Roi Partridge, who came in to buy photographic supplies for his wife, the photographer Imogen Cunningham, who soon became a close friend. Dorothea did not know it yet, but her life as a professional photographer had begun just a day after arriving in San Francisco.

  3

  Becoming a Photographer

  When Dorothea Nutzhorn applied for the job at Marsh’s, she gave her name as Dorothea Lange. This decision was entirely her own; her mother had not reclaimed the name Lange after her divorce.1 This renaming was doubly symbolic—of starting a new life, rejecting her father. None of her intimates, including her two husbands and her children, ever heard the name Nutzhorn until after her death. She never communicated with her father again.

  The name change did more than clear away the brush in order to build a new life on fresh ground. It was an erasure, a suppression of evidence. There was a practical reason, of course—Lange is simpler, more graceful, and more easily remembered than Nutzhorn. Perhaps Dorothea already envisioned herself as an entrepreneur, a master photographer running her own shop. But these practicalities did not require keeping everyone except Fronsie ignorant of her past. Her merciless fury toward her father came from her sense of abandonment and shame about his misdeeds, whatever they were.

  Dorothea loved San Francisco instantly. It was easy to get to know—with its population of about 500,000, it was not a big city to a New Yorker, which is how she now identified herself.2 Yet it was culturally and politically sophisticated. A business elite was solidly in control of the city, which was no longer the Wild West of the gold rush era. There were five major newspapers, among which the Hearst Examiner was the most prestigious. Mike de Young, publisher of the rival Chronicle, had already built the first skyscraper. Symbolic of the power structure was Mayor “Sunny Jim” Rolph, who in his nineteen years in office also headed the Ship Owners & Merchants Tugboat Company, the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, and the Merchants’ Exchange. San Francisco’s high culture featured an opera, a symphony orchestra, numerous theaters, a fine-arts museum, built by Mike de Young, and an art school, the California School of Fine Arts, built after the 1906 earthquake. The people who created this high culture would become Lange’s early photographic subjects.

  The gold rush had brought a cosmopolitan mix of people to San Francisco, and in 1918 its diversity—a quarter of its people were foreign-born—remained. These “foreigners,” however, were received and categorized quite differently than those in New York. There, for several generations past, immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and Slavic and Mediterranean countries were not considered “white” by the Protestant elites.3 In California, by contrast, the presence of other subordinated groups—Native Americans, East Asians, Mexicans—meant that all European and Mediterranean immigrants were “white” from the moment they arrived. Italians were especially prominent, bringing good food, good coffee, and wine to the city. Most people “of color,” to use a modern term, lived and worked in the countryside, with one big exception: the Chinese, of whom there were some eleven to fourteen thousand in San Francisco. Chinatown was San Francisco’s exotic other, and for much of the city’s history, residents of Chinese origin were prohibited by law from living outside its five square blocks. Dorothea had seen Genthe’s photographs of the district and its people, but the Chinatown Lange saw was entirely new because the earthquake had destroyed the original completely. Afterward, Chinese leaders successfully resisted a campaign to keep them from returning to the city and rebuilt their economy by designing and promoting Chinatown as a tourist attraction. With investments from the Chinese government as well as from Chinese and American commercial interests, developer Look Tin Eli built a new facade for the settlement, a stage-set China with the curved eaves, colorful street lanterns, recessed balconies, and gilded facades that became the prototype for American Chinatowns ever after. Commercial Chinatown seemed much safer to outsiders than the old Chinatown had—few opium dens remained, for example—and it was not long before Dorothea, Fronsie, and their new friends began going there for cheap, delicious food.

  IN THIS ECONOMIC and cultural context, Lange would create a portrait studio successful beyond her dreams. She developed a luxury portrait style that suited exactly the intimate taste—even when that taste was not well articulated by customers—of the city’s cultural elite. She became the inheritor of Arnold Genthe’s clientele as well as of his training and sensibility.

  At Marsh’s, Dorothea learned about the San Francisco Camera Club and joined it promptly. Between the two locales, she was perfectly situated to meet the right people. But Dorothea’s strategic location alone cannot explain how quickly she became the portrait photographer for a luxury clientele and a member of a community of artists. Already in 1920 Edward Weston, dean of western photography, made her portrait, a small token of her integration into this community (see figure 4.3). Only her charisma can explain it, or, more precisely, her mixture of charm, ambition, photographic skill, aura of vulnerability, and good looks. By 1920 people who met her knew she was destined for success. As one contemporary remembered her, “ ‘pretty’ is perhaps too strong a word . . . delicacy of features, beautiful eyes and a . . . slim, very attractive build.”4 She compensated so well for her bad leg that it often went unnoticed. “Just a little slide,” one friend described it. Roger Sturtevant, who worked as her assistant in the mid-1920s, said it gave a sort of “flow” to her walk.5

  At the Camera Club, she met a “smart, young, rich” businessman, real estate financier Sidney Franklin, who offered to go into business with her—this after she’d been in San Francisco only a few months. Evidently, he saw commercial potential in her work. She warned him that what she wanted would be expensive, but this did not deter him. Then two other new friends, Joe O’Connor and Jack Boumphrey, who distrusted Sidney Franklin, offered to loan her three thousand dollars, without demanding further involvement in her enterprise. Sidney Franklin released her from her commitment and she opened her own studio.6

  A Cinderella story like this raises questions unanswerable due to lack of evidence: Were these men her lovers? (Lange never discussed or wrote about such personal matters.) Did the appeal of this young, lone, disabled woman stimulate some male rescue fantasies? What photographs did she make in those first months that stimulated such generosity? How aggressive had she been in looking for such a stake? Evidently, Lange not only attracted men but inspired them with confidence in her photographic and business acumen. Although there was no shortage of portrait studios in San Francisco, photography was still a growing industry and the demand for it could support many more photographers.7 Furthermore, women did well in this business.8 The demand favored them, because most purchasers of portraits were women, who often wanted portraits of children and expected women to have a better feel for these intimate images. Supply-side factors also contributed. Portrait studios were marked as a suitable bus
iness for women, partly because they allowed women to work from home while continuing to fulfill wifely and motherly responsibilities.9 (This was one reason that female photojournalists, who could not work at home, were so rare.) Opening a studio did not require licensing, formal training, or large amounts of capital.10 Photography was a new profession and therefore not defined as a uniquely male skill or tradition. The field’s openness was even greater on the West Coast, where no photographic patriarch, not even Genthe in his day, ruled as Stieglitz did in the East, and no western male photographer disdained women’s photography as much as Stieglitz did.11 Although many camera clubs still excluded women, those that accepted them offered substantial resources—darkroom use, classes, libraries, and networking, of particular value to a new photographer eager to make contacts.12

  With her male friends’ money, Lange opened a shop in a handsome old building at 540 Sutter, near Union Square, San Francisco’s upscale shopping district. Her studio was in the best possible company: At the front of the building was Hill Tolerton’s distinguished art gallery, which sold modern work along with prints by Dürer and Rembrandt. Next door was Elizabeth Arden, a branch of the high-class New York beauty salon (Arden had seized on the term salon to replace the less sophisticated “parlor”). These two shops drew in just the kind of people who might be interested in an arty photographer. Lange’s savvy, high-rent, high-risk choice announced that she would reach for the top of the market immediately.

  Lange made sure to frequent the art gallery, where she charmed wealthy buyers and artists, who then saw and liked her portraits. Before long her clients were, as she put it, the “merchant princes” of San Francisco, the “cream of the trade.”13 No doubt they understood Lange to be Genthe’s successor, and Dorothea might well have believed, and fostered the impression, that she was his anointed. This kind of customer was drawn in through word of mouth, not advertising, and although Lange’s name was listed in the city business directory starting in 1919, it was missing by 1924, as if she no longer needed to advertise. It helped that her clients connected with one another at society and cultural events. By 1919 Lange’s reputation had already spread geographically and customers arrived from Oakland, Napa, Palo Alto, Humboldt County, and San Jose; by 1920 some came from as far away as Salt Lake City, Honolulu, and Seattle.