Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  The conflicts take on new perspective in comparison to the experience of Marion Post Wolcott. She was raised by a wealthy feminist mother who volunteered in Margaret Sanger’s campaign for birth control and, after a divorce, moved to Greenwich Village—had she been in San Francisco, she would have been one of Lange’s customers. The young Marion was a serious modern dancer and socialized with members of New York’s experimental Group Theatre. While at the University of Vienna in 1933, she met photographer Trude Fleischmann, who loaned her a good camera. Her friends in Vienna were left-wing artists horrified by Nazism. She returned to New York, where she joined the League Against War and Fascism, helping Jews, including Fleischmann, to escape Europe. In 1937, after having done a few assignments for the Associated Press, she got hired as a staff photographer for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, and her male colleagues threw spitballs at her and put cigarette butts in her developer. Her assignments, not surprisingly, confined her to covering fashion and special features.33 (This brief experience as a photojournalist must have made the FSA seem a feminist paradise.) In 1940, Margaret Bourke-White and Mary Morris, who worked for the New York progressive newspaper PM, were still the only female photojournalists in the United States.34

  At the FSA, Marion Post was not only female and pretty but also a “girl” and decidedly upper-class. The men were kind, admiring, and protective. Since she traveled alone, Rothstein persuaded her to get an ax for protection. Both protective and censorious, Stryker lectured her on how to dress and behave—and sometimes he was right. She began traveling in South Carolina in a convertible with the top down, tanned from the sun, with “a very bright-colored . . . head scarf [and] jangly earrings. . . .” Her subjects, she recalled, “began dragging their kids away and thought . . . that I was . . . a modern gypsy in an automobile [who] would come in and kidnap their children. . . .” (Lange also wore head scarves, but on her the look was eccentric or practical, not exotic.) Stryker had to warn Post how dangerous it was for a southern black man to be seen with an unaccompanied white woman. The darkroom men in the office disrespected and patronized her, but they also gave her more help than they did the male photographers.35

  Post’s and Lange’s strengths differed considerably. Post was more adventurous, more outspoken about female freedom, and more willing to be intrusive—qualities that reflected her class background. She could be impetuous, while Lange made deliberated decisions.36 Post photographed a strip club and a miner taking a bath.37 Her biting photographs of the very rich at leisure are among the most challenging images in the FSA file.

  When you examine the two women’s experiences closely, a paradox emerges: Post was more articulate about sex discrimination, and seemed to harbor more unconventional aspirations for a woman, but she overcame discrimination less well and displayed a softening flirtatiousness that Lange did not have. Post sent a photograph to Stryker to prove she was tough: it shows her lying on her side on a muddy and rocky road along the Kentucky River, changing a tire by using a fence post propped on rocks to jack the car up. The photograph makes her resourcefulness cute, like the word feisty, which treats bravery and assertiveness in women as fetching. Post’s letters were witty and coquettish: “What really ruins my disposition [in New England in winter] are the icy cold toilet seats. . . . I practically took to sleeping in my clothes. . . . And no miss fancy pants underwear either. Long, wool and ugly.”38 But then Post entered a marriage that seemed almost patriarchal by comparison to Lange’s: Lee Wolcott not only insisted that Marion quit her job but also required Stryker’s shop to go back and relabel every photograph she had made with her new, married name. She never photographed professionally again. The similarities between her story and those of Consuelo Kanaga and Alma Lavenson suggest that Lange was the more independent, even transgressive woman, despite her seemingly conventional views about women’s nature.

  Although respected more than Post Wolcott, Lange nonetheless faced discrimination at the FSA. When she and Taylor married, the personnel office redid all her paperwork to change her name to Taylor—she ignored this and never used that name, just as she had never used the name Dixon (although others applied it to her at times). Hers was not just a “professional name” but her only name, exceptional in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet with Stryker, she did a strange thing: for the first year and a half, she signed her letters to him just “Lange.” She had never done this before; she had always used her full name—Dorothea Lange—in her portrait business. Clearly, she wanted to signal her professionalism and independence from Taylor, and to be treated like one of the guys. Starting in February 1937, by which time she had met Stryker twice in person, she signed “Dorothea,” and addressed him as “Roy.” But she never wrote him about her children, buying a new house, her friends, or not feeling well, as his male photographers did. When she had an appendectomy, he found out well after the fact.

  Yet the emotionality of Lange’s relationship with Stryker is obvious from their correspondence. She was especially hurt that Stryker never visited her on the road or in California. Stryker dictated long letters to his photographers, providing feedback on photographs and further instructions and advice. He complained to them about Washington bureaucracy in general and his specific enemies in particular. At one point, he instructed Lange to destroy a particularly frank letter about the Department of Agriculture and told her to write him at his home address because he did not want their correspondence to fall into the wrong hands.39 This trust established an intimacy that intensified her longing for him to see her at work, to meet the regional office staff, to allow her to host him. But he never came. He often felt he could not leave Washington, complaining to her “how they move in on you the minute you get across the District Line. . . .” But Lange knew that he traveled to see other photographers, some as far west as Arizona. The rejection wounded this woman who felt deserted by her father. Once, Stryker promised to meet her in the Southwest and spend a week traveling with her, but it never happened. In April 1937, he said he would join her in Albuquerque in May. In May, he promised to find a way to meet her in the South.40 In June, she was pleading, “You went with Rothstein, you went with Lee, you went with Mydans. And how about me?” Perhaps conscious of sounding like a child, she then lightened the emotional tone by commiserating with Stryker about “the tyranny of little men” who were threatening the project’s budget and who forced him to stay as “watchdog” in the office. But her complaints about his neglect sounded an orphan theme. “How about a letter to your little stepchild?” she wrote.41 In her flirtatiousness, she was an orphan, not a seductress.

  Why wouldn’t Stryker, usually a nurturing mentor, go to her? Perhaps he was resentful, jealous, or ill at ease when it came to Taylor. But without a doubt he misunderstood Dorothea: He confused her assertiveness with manipulative behavior, when, in fact, it arose from neediness and passion for the work.

  The photography project was white as well as male. Gordon Parks was the only person of color ever to photograph for Stryker, and he did not even draw a salary. Born in Fort Scott, Kansas, in 1912, he was just fifteen when his mother died and he became a wanderer, working as a waiter, bartender, and semiprofessional basketball and football player before deciding to try fashion photography. Jack Delano noticed his work at an exhibit on Chicago’s South Side and helped him get a grant from the Rosenwald Fund. One of the few liberal foundations to fund African American educational work at this time, it gave Parks a stipend to intern at the FSA photography project. Stryker explained his reluctance to accept Parks, even at no cost, in terms of the District of Columbia’s segregation.42 (Stryker often adopted this passive, buck-passing stance about racism; he claimed to be interested in the “Negro problem” but distributed photographs of whites because “we know that these will receive much wider use.”)43 The effect on Parks, however, was mobilizing: As he put it, “I came back roaring mad and I wanted my camera and he [Stryker] said, ‘For what?’ And I said I wanted to expose . . . this discrimination.”44

&nbs
p; LANGE’S POSITION IN the FSA was further complicated because she was half of a powerful couple. Taylor’s authority was imbedded in Stryker’s first letter to Lange: he would be happy, he assured her, to work with Taylor in deciding what she should photograph. It was an indication of a taken-for-granted sexism, an extraordinary relinquishing of control, and an acknowledgment of Taylor’s prestige. Taylor participated in all the early negotiations about her work, a role he yielded in later years—except when Lange was directly thwarted. It was Taylor who first suggested that the FSA pay Ansel Adams to make prints from her negatives. It was Taylor who first proposed that she head to Southern California to photograph the camps for migratory workers.45 Taylor accompanied her on many trips and all of her visits to Washington.46 Stryker expected to be head of a family, but Lange had another powerful protector. She did not always handle this ménage-à-trois with delicacy.

  Taylor’s influence meant that he could find his own money and authorization for trips on which he could accompany Lange or she him.47 From the summer of 1936 to 1941, he worked as a consultant economist for the Social Security Board, with the agenda of getting farmworkers covered by the Social Security Act. His efforts were in vain, because Democratic politicians had already promised large growers in the South and West that farmworkers—who included the majority of the country’s people of color—would continue to be excluded. But the job allowed him to shape his itinerary to match his wife’s assignments, and he was completely honest about this: “It also happens,” he wrote his boss in the spring of 1937, “that . . . Mr. Stryker has just ordered my wife to take the field through the South this summer in her car. I believe that the results of our work . . . together in the past have amply justified this [joint] method of work . . . as efficient, and economical to the government. . . .”48

  Lange frequently passed on to Stryker information and interpretations she got from Taylor. Feeding the boss intelligence that he would not otherwise receive had underscored her reputation as privileged and self-important. She once informed Stryker that Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace was preparing a tenancy bill.49 She had the audacity to lecture Stryker: “. . . the significance and use of the negatives which I have made on this theme [displacement by mechanization, which Wallace was emphasizing] might escape you.”50 Taylor sometimes received requests for photographs for congressional reports and hearings, and Lange would therefore ask Stryker’s permission to work on them. Paul wanted to give one of her prints as a gift to a Social Security official, and Lange asked permission for that, too.51

  Yet Taylor’s influence could not save her job in the end. Stryker let her go and rehired her several times when under budget pressure. Dorothea appears saintly in her patience with repeated layoffs, canceling of trips at short notice, travel authorizations delayed and withdrawn. As she prepared for a trip to start in February 1936, Stryker suddenly wired that she had to be on the road by January 27. So she hurried and then, on January 23, he wired that the trip was canceled. Two weeks later, it was on again. In October 1936, she was laid off, but in January 1937, she was urgently summoned back to work, although she had not been put back on the payroll. In early March, Stryker told her to prepare for a trip to the Pacific Northwest. She planned routes and made arrangements with regional FSA people, only to have Stryker cancel this trip and instead send her to the South. In September, Stryker laid her off again, this time with a month’s notice so that she could finish captioning her summer photographs. In June 1938, Stryker told her that if Ben Shahn quit, as anticipated, he would rehire Lange, but instead he hired Marion Post.

  Finally, in October 1939, he telephoned Lange while she was on the road in Oregon to notify her that she was being “terminated” as of January 1, 1940. A four-page letter written the next day detailed his budget problems but offered no explanation of why she was the photographer to be cut. Lange left no written account of her feelings, but we know how hurt she was from an extraordinary personal letter from Jonathan Garst, western regional FSA director, speaking also for Walter Packard, former FSA chief, an emotional plea to Stryker to rehire Lange. Garst discussed all that she had given, her “whole-souled” commitment; reminded Stryker that Taylor was “the father of our migratory camp program”; pointed out Taylor’s personal sacrifices for the cause, including the low university salary that resulted from his defiance of the state’s agricultural powers; and characterized Taylor and Lange as “hard up” because they supported a large family. In a remarkably emotional tone for such a letter, he referred to the deep hurt caused to both Dorothea and Paul: “Paul Taylor is apparently still violently in love with Dorothea . . . anything that would hurt her feelings would have very much more effect on Paul’s feelings than anything that was done to him directly.” He admitted that “Dorothea with her pell-mell enthusiasm may be at times difficult to work with” and suggested offering her part-time, seasonal work (as a way of saving face for Stryker).52 Stryker would not budge: “I selected for termination the person who would give me least cooperation in the job that is laid before me.” Then, defending himself not against Garst, who had said nothing about Lange’s artistry, but against his own barely suppressed consciousness of the foolishness of his decision, he added that “judgments of art are highly subjective.”53

  Lange’s assertive, interfering temperament cannot justify, or even explain, Stryker’s decision. No amount of Lange’s interference—especially since it arrived from three thousand miles’ distance—could have outweighed the value of her work. Her photographs contributed most to the cause they shared; her captions set the standard for the other photographers. Stryker should have put up with her.54 Stryker’s decision can be explained only by his greater comfort with his male protégés and less assertive female ones. Firing Lange seems of a piece with his rejection of Lewis Hine. Having made the decision, he went on to impute corrupt motives to her: He withheld her final check until all her equipment had been returned. She asked to get her cameras cleaned at FSA expense and he said no.55

  Controlling her feelings, she responded graciously, as she had to every previous layoff.56 Perhaps because she had been laid off so often, she hoped that this one, too, might be reversed. It never was.

  The FSA photography project was disbanded finally in 1943, the victim of conservative attacks and a wartime budget. The achievement of its last two years never equaled that of 1936—1939. Roy Stryker and many of his staff went on to magazine, corporate, or fashion photography. Lange postponed those options as long as she could and continued to find small pieces of government work for the next five years. This is not because she was a paragon of selflessness, but because the FSA experience represented exactly what she wanted to do. Whatever their grievances, every FSA photographer, including Lange, spoke of it as life’s high point. Lange, in fact, never ceased trying to create a similar project—a team of photographers working collectively at the highest technical and aesthetic level to change the world. The loss of her FSA job would have been infinitely more painful had she known that such a project would never again emerge.

  Part IV

  WARTIME

  1939–1945

  SAN FRANCISCO, 1942

  SCENE 4

  In 1942, the U.S. Army hired Dorothea Lange to photograph the process of incarcerating 120,000 Japanese Americans on the grounds that they might be disloyal. Throughout her work on this project, Lange was harassed by the same army that had hired her, but she developed a particularly adversarial relation with a Major Beasley (referred to by some as “Bozo Beasley”). Observing the critical quality of her photographs, he tried to find cause to fire her. He was particularly infuriated by her photographs of hothouse sheds in a camp where the sun shining through the glass panes cast prison bar–like shadows on the gardeners working there.1 Once, Beasley thought he had caught her out in taking a negative—this was forbidden; all negatives were to be held by the army—because he found an empty negative sleeve. She had indeed taken some of her negatives for her own use, but, through sheer luck,
not this one; he called her in and confronted her with the empty envelope, but she shook it and the negative fell out.2

  Another time, Beasley almost did catch her in a serious infraction. She gave photographs to Caleb Foote, a leader in the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an interdenominational Christian pacifist organization, one of the tiny number of groups to oppose the internment. Paul Taylor was already an active member of a local effort to resist the internment, the Committee on American Principles and Fair Play, and met Foote through that connection. Foote used the Lange photographs—one of a young Japanese American girl and another of the stables being used to house the internees—in a pamphlet denouncing the internment. Beasley saw the pamphlet and called her in. Once more, she was unexpectedly lucky. It seems that the prints she gave Foote had already appeared in a U.S. House of Representatives committee report (the Tolan Committee on Defense Migration), thus putting the images into the public domain.3 She could claim that the committee report was Foote’s source.

  18

  Family Stress

  Being fired brought hurt but also relief to Lange, and she looked forward to a slower tempo. The expected relief did not materialize. There were new on-the-road photography commissions and serious family crises, and it cannot be coincidental that she suffered her first serious health problems since childhood at this time.

  Late in 1939, Lange took another rural photography job documenting labor migration for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, which requested two months’ work on a “w.a.e.” (when actually employed) basis.1 The BAE’s leash was shorter than Stryker’s, and as a result her photography did not match the FSA achievement. There are fewer portraits, fewer pictures of field labor, and more of the terrible living conditions of migrant farmworkers, children in particular. As required, she also documented the better conditions in the FSA camps. But these photographs also reflect Lange’s own feelings—burned out, less optimistic, even despairing. There are some beautiful portraits. (See plate 6.) But many of the best BAE photographs are so sad, they are nearly pathetic, and when Lange’s photos are sad, the emotion seems to overflow the picture plane. They also seem angrier. This was the only time she photographed people as wretchedly unattractive as those in Bourke-White’s You Have Seen Their Faces. Bitterly, she captioned the batch from which the next two images come, “Children in a Democracy.”2 Despite her abiding loyalty to the camp project, her photographs raise doubts about whether most farmworkers’ lives had improved at all during the New Deal.