Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Lange’s own activist inclinations were unleashed by the falloff in her business: Fewer customers released time to think and look. What she saw when she began looking systematically also had consequences: “I knew that if my interests in people were valid I would not only be doing what was in those printing frames.”28 Her idea of the “valid” is packed with implications. Typically, she set herself a challenge. She felt she needed to validate her photography by looking at larger matters. To Dorothea now, the streets were not about San Francisco’s charming architecture or dramatic topography, but about the social disruptions palpable everywhere. Memories of the many miles she had walked through New York’s Lower East Side, and her increasing comfort there despite its often raucous street life, brought back her confidence as a walker in the city.

  Dixon’s apprentice and Dorothea’s future colleague at FSA, John Collier, Jr., recalled a sudden transformation in Lange: “. . . Dorothea Lange was a highly-paid, rather slick portrait photographer of wealthy women, and she made a good living at it. She was a very good craftsman; she did beautiful work. . . . She was pretty self-centered, and a little bit selfish, and indulgent. About that point she looked down from her window on Sacramento St. and saw a breadline . . . and something about it triggered some dedication in her. And she walked out of her studio and she figuratively never came back, you know.”29 His understanding of Dorothea was far off the mark, as was his sense of her transition as sudden. But he was right to sense a change in her.

  Dorothea’s brother Martin had followed his sister to San Francisco in the 1920s. His good looks, easygoing temperament, and mental quickness allowed him to knock about from job to job, and he often camped out in her studio. Seizing him as chaperone, she explored the inner-city streets. They spent hours walking the Mission District, where the city was billeting the homeless. They went to the “slave market,” where men gathered, hoping to pick up a few days or a few hours of work. She felt drawn to the breadlines, visually as well as socially, as she would be drawn to the unemployment-compensation and relief lines in the following years. One of her first street photographs, of the White Angel breadline, became one of her most famous.30 (See page 102.) It changed not only Lange but also documentary photography, as if pulling open a curtain.31

  Martin reported that she was “awfully hard to get along with”—that is, until she began her street photography.32 Paradoxically, going into the streets helped her relax. She had been nervous about being in the streets with Depression “bums” but found she felt safe. She had been apprehensive that her method was too slow to capture something important, because she couldn’t tell the subjects to hold still—“You know there are moments such as these when . . . 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”—but she was transfixed by her results. She had been anxious about invading subjects’ privacy or evoking their hostility, but they had not seemed to notice or to object if they did. On such reassurance her whole photographic future rested. “I can only say I knew I was looking at something. . . . Sometimes you have an inner sense that you have encompassed the thing. . . . You know then that you are not taking anything away from anyone, their privacy, their dignity, their wholeness.”33

  6.1. HOWARD STREET, SAN FRANCISCO, 1933

  Lange’s recollection exaggerated the suddenness of this, her first great photograph and her second epiphany, as memory often congeals around particular moments or images. A near mishap further emphasizes its accidental quality: she accidentally left the exposed film in the magazine holder of her Graflex, giving it to her assistant Roger Sturtevant to reload. Luckily, he reached inside it while in the darkroom, found the neglected film, and developed it.34

  This narrative of the accidental White Angel photograph, then picked up by others writing about Lange, implies a sudden leap—or fall—into what became documentary photography. The arresting beauty of that photo did surprise Lange, but it was not an accident. She was consciously exploring a new form of photography. Leaping makes a better story, and Lange herself sometimes employed that metaphor, but it sustains a misleading, romantic view of artists as working from instinct, intuition, as opposed to calculation, deliberation, practice, trials and errors. Moreover, Lange had never confined herself exclusively to studio work and to paying clients. In addition to her southwestern photographs, she had photographed the Chinatown in Carson City, Nevada, where she had gone with Maynard in 1924. At home in San Francisco she produced some striking modernist abstractions, including an image of sheets on a laundry line seen from the back porch of a tenement, a composition and symbolic motif she would use occasionally throughout her life. In 1928 she made a luminous portrait of a San Francisco Mexican-American child, and it came easily. By 1932, she found, “I didn’t feel much difference between the portrait sitters and these people” in the streets. Using a painter’s metaphor, she said that she saw “out there” as just a “larger canvas.”35 Now she made a Madonna of a young African American mother, much as she had done with the Indian mother in New Mexico.

  Also pushing her out of the studio was what she saw in print. Visual images increasingly saturated commercial print culture as new photographic and printing techniques—faster-drying ink and heatset printing, which scorched the ink dry as it was applied—made reproduction of images faster, cheaper, and more legible. Newspapers published regular rotogravure photographic sections, with images ranging from Japanese atrocities to bathing beauties.36 Glossy magazines, such as Vogue or The Ladies’ Home Journal or Nash’s, printed page after page of color advertising, some of modernist design (including work by Dorothea’s friend Louise Dahl-Wolfe), some of which she would have disdained as ugly and hokey. She would never try photojournalism or commercial photography, but she was absorbing the new mass distribution of photography and imagining its usefulness for other purposes.

  6.2. YOUNG BLACK MOTHER HOLDING BABY, EARLY 1930s

  Still, the transition required major readjustments. Studio portraits are made at the request of the subject. Documentary is initiated by the photographer who must surprise, persuade, or manage to be unnoticed by the subject. Many photographers experience their work as requiring a degree of aggressiveness, which in turn requires a degree of confidence, even entitlement. Every street photographer finds her own method of accepting, denying, and performing this aggressiveness. Lange found her method by trial and error.

  IN DEVELOPING WHAT came to be called documentary photography, Lange was by no means blazing an entirely new path. She knew the work of Jacob Riis and Lewis Hine. She knew Genthe’s photography of San Francisco’s Chinatown and Paul Strand’s in New York City. In San Francisco, several of her photographer friends had preceded her in taking their cameras onto the streets—Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Louise Dahl, Peter Stackpole, and Willard Van Dyke.

  Meanwhile, another network formalized itself as a school of photography, known as f/64, after a small camera aperture that provided sharpness and great depth of field. This group stimulated a West Coast photographic conversation about what was “authentic”—meaning, true to the camera’s inherent technology. To the members of f/64, this meant “straight” photography, sharp-edged, as opposed to pictorialism’s mistiness, softened forms, classical or historical costuming and poses, and “refined” subjects—the Beaux-Arts style. The “straights” drew a distinction that seems rather arbitrary from today’s perspective: Filters, varied lighting, varied chemicals, dodging and burning were acceptable; fuzzy focus, coated lens, scratching the negative, and hand-coloring the print were not. Theirs was an antilowbrow and an anticommercial sensibility.

  Initiated in 1932 under Ansel Adams’s influence, f/64 took in many of Lange’s friends—Imogen Cunningham, John Paul Edwards, Sonya Noskowiak, Henry Swift, Willard Van Dyke, and Edward Weston—and left Lange out. At its first, and only, exhibition, four more were invited in: Preston Holder, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, and Brett Weston (Edward’s son)—but not Lange. Her absenc
e offers hints about her identity at the time—still a pictorialist studio photographer.37 She was not yet widely sharing her street photography.

  Like many new ventures, f/64 put out a bombastic manifesto, which overstated not only its significance but also its novelty. What f/64 called “straight” photography, Paul Strand had been practicing for years. Photography scholar Sally Stein called the birth of f/64 and its “straight” idea less a proclamation than a summation.38

  But f/64 was also a political move, its focus both local and national. Locally, it targeted a particular California photographer, William Mortensen. The “straights” hated his cheesy photographs of models in elaborately staged and costumed classical, Renaissance, and Orientalist tableaux—and also scorned his great popularity.39

  There was also a national agenda: to bring greater notice to West Coast photography and to disrupt Stieglitz’s power to define art photography.40 The east-west differences in photography reveal something about Lange’s uniqueness in the direction she had chosen. Like western painters, most western photographers, both “straight” and pictorialist, focused on the natural rather than urban, manufactured, or industrial landscapes. Western pictorialists placed their human subjects in natural surroundings, rather than in studios.41 In 1932, Lange’s out-of-studio photographic work was urban, and in that dimension her sensibility seemed more eastern. So did her growing concern with social problems. Had she lived in New York, Lange would have joined the radical Photo League when it was established in 1936, an organization that promoted socially engaged photography and provided darkroom use and classes at very low cost to encourage the poor and the working class to try photography. From California, she became one of its official supporters and donated money. Yet less than a decade later, she would become a photographer focused primarily on western rural and farm life—an identity no one, including her, would have predicted in 1932.

  But since no one in the West had Stieglitz’s drive to control, the western spirit was less coherent, more individualist and democratic, and the organization f/64 soon disappeared. While it existed, however, it helped pull together Bay Area photographers. Their weekends in Carmel were particularly lively—and often raucous. Seema Weatherwax, an amateur photographer and girlfriend of Chan Weston, Edward’s eldest son, recalled that “all the boys would get together and we’d have an ‘orgy.’ ” (She was referring more to drinking than sex.)42 Holder recalled, “We’d go down there on Friday and arrive at night and drink till about 1 o’clock. . . . Saturday was usually spent getting over Friday night.” Adams entertained them with pranks: He played the piano once with oranges in his hands, and another time he played the “Blue Danube Waltz” with his rear end.43

  Dixon and Lange sometimes joined these gatherings, but given this style of recreation, it is hardly surprising that Lange was marginal. She was older than the men, who were mainly in their twenties, and she worked full-time. Moreover, despite her enjoyment of bohemian unconventionality, she liked order, not disorder—Holder called her “very middle class,” a pejorative in his vocabulary.44 And along with the womanizing, the group around Weston operated on a homoerotic frequency that shoved women to the edges of the group.

  Although Dorothea claimed to have experienced no resentment about exclusion from f/64, Ansel Adams later recalled that she was very much upset by the slight.45 Maynard was open about his irritation. By all measure the most explosive of her community, Maynard wanted to send a close-up of his bare ass as a “straight” photography entry to the exhibit, “to say, this is precision for you,” but unfortunately the picture didn’t turn out well. He did, however, write a scathing letter. He called f/64 slavish, bigoted, contemptible, narrow-minded. He was, and would always be, passionately loyal to Dorothea. He also made a sensible argument: that at this stage in the history of photography, the group should have been exploring all its potentialities rather than clamping down an orthodoxy.46

  If Maynard was right, Dorothea benefited from not being involved in f/64. The fact that she saw herself as a craftswoman, without pretensions to artistry, protected her from pressure toward an aesthetic orthodoxy. She and Imogen Cunningham were producing both “straight” and pictorialist photography at the same time, and both soft- and sharp-edged photographers were exploring modernist compositions. Insisting that only “straight” photography was legitimate produced wordy, sometimes nasty, and always unproductive debate about authenticity and inauthenticity in photography.

  7

  A New Deal for Artists

  Dorothea, her brother Martin, Maynard, and their friends listened to FDR’s inauguration at Ernie’s Italian restaurant and bar on Montgomery Street. Martin remembered it as “a big day . . . and [we] had a great laugh over the bartender’s comment, ‘Best president we ever had.’ ”1 Since FDR was a “wet”—that is, an opponent of Prohibition—the artists had supported him and now cheered the prospect of repeal. Except for that, the interregnum between election and taking office—four months at the time—offered nothing hopeful. Roosevelt was silent. Despite the populist rhetoric that would intermittently characterize his appeal—“. . . the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed. . . . They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. . . .”—his inaugural speech contained no proposals. His boosterish slogan, “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” was evidently false to anyone who looked around. Meanwhile, Californians were more aware than easterners of the Japanese invasion of Shanghai and Manchuria, but were not sure yet how the ominous background of Nazi power in Germany and fascist power in Italy would fit into the international picture.

  Within days after the inauguration, however, a different Roosevelt appeared. The administration immediately initiated a bank holiday; the Civilian Conservation Corps for unemployed young men; and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) whose head, Harry Hopkins, gave away $5.3 million (equivalent to $84 million in 2007) in his first day on the job.2 By October 1933, the first large public jobs program, the Civil Works Administration (CWA), announced plans to hire five million unemployed workers. The New Deal was dealing new cards. Even depressed and cynical Maynard noted, “Inauguration of Roosevelt. Hope.”3

  What influenced Lange most in 1933 and 1934 was the combination of government activism and its inadequacy to the need. As is so often the case, it was this juxtaposition of raised hopes and their frustration that stimulated grassroots activism and Lange’s own participation in it.

  MAYNARD CONTRIBUTED DIRECTLY to lifting San Francisco’s spirits. Two heroic bridges were under construction, one stretching over eight miles east to Oakland and Berkeley, the Bay Bridge, and one north to Marin County, the Golden Gate Bridge.4 When finished, they would transform traffic throughout the Bay Area, until now dependent on ferries. In 1930 Dixon had been commissioned to paint a vision of what the Golden Gate might look like when bridged (a breathtaking aerial view that now hangs in the office of the San Francisco Golden Gate toll plaza), work intended to promote the bond issue. The bridge project’s public-relations man, Charles Duncan, was Maynard’s brother-in-law, and he asked Maynard to recommend an architect; Maynard’s choice, Irving Foster Morrow, got the job and then regularly consulted with Maynard and his artist cohort. The project was controversial. Some thought it disfigured the grand entrance from the Pacific Ocean to San Francisco Bay, while others welcomed it as a monument, a technological tour de force, and a good investment. In an effort to mediate, Maynard organized a “pro and con powwow” for artists in his studio. The chief engineer and Duncan came with maps, drawings, and models. Although many of those present remained opposed, they agreed to make no formal protest, a considerable victory for Maynard and other bridge advocates.5 Some claim that Maynard and Dorothea ultimately chose the bridge’s color: Morrow had had it painted an undercoat of industrial red, and they urged him to keep it that way.6

  Such projects, systematically pursued, might have helped check unemployment and stimulate consumption in the area. But the state and
local governments pursued contradictory economic policies, floating bonds for bridge construction while simultaneously cutting budgets and thereby increasing unemployment. Until federal relief arrived, state and local governments were caught in a vicious circle: unemployment and recession shrank tax revenues and stimulated antitax protests just as the need for relief grew and governments’ borrowing capacities declined. San Francisco responded more mercifully than many other cities, but the net effect did nothing to mitigate the underconsumption crisis.7 Roosevelt made some of the same mistakes. He imposed a 15 percent pay cut on federal employees. His National Recovery Administration was financed by a regressive sales tax, despite the fact that, as the NRA head himself warned, “80 percent of the buying in this country is done by people who earn less than $1800 a year. . . .” Moreover, the NRA failed to control prices, which rose by 10 percent in July 1933 alone.8

  One program did the right thing politically and morally: relief. Relief was local and personal and created widespread loyalty to Roosevelt. Ignoring accusations of hurried, slapdash decision making, relief boss Harry Hopkins snapped, “People don’t eat in the long run, they eat every day.” Unlike so many unrealized and underfunded initiatives, the CWA kept its promises and employed 3.5 million by Christmastime, eventually assisting 22 percent of the population. The unemployed cheered the CWA because they almost all preferred jobs to “handouts.”9 In 1935 came the Works Progress Administration, with its $4.8 billion budget (the largest peacetime appropriation in U.S. history up until that time), employing 30 percent of the eleven to twelve million unemployed. Because most of its projects involved construction of large public facilities, the WPA became the most visible and popular New Deal program. Its employees put up more than 40,000 new buildings, including courthouses, firehouses, hospitals, schools, and built 350 new airfields, 78,000 new bridges, 800 parks, 1,400 athletic fields, 1,800 public swimming pools, and 40,000 miles of new roads. Equally important, it promoted conservation and public health by reforesting 20,000 acres, planting 20 million trees and bushes, and building 500 water-treatment plants, 1,500 sewage-treatment plants, and 24,000 miles of sewers. In 1938, when disastrous floods hit the Northeast, washing out railroad bridges, highways, and power lines, Hopkins sent fifty thousand WPA employees to work around the clock to evacuate endangered people, build dikes, provide temporary water and power, and then clean the massive expanses of mud that coated the streets and buildings—a federal helping hand never before available.10 Before long, the WPA would begin reaching artists.