Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  The repressive mood affected all Americans, but the narrowing of cultural possibility squeezed artists and intellectuals particularly viscerally. Few members of Lange’s community—artists and scholars—shared the values that came to be called McCarthyist, but many were silent. Those who did not go along leaned into ironic and alienated identities—Beat writers, Abstract Expressionist painters, cool jazz musicians, noir filmmakers. Lange’s visual earnestness and faith in “the common man” seemed ever more naíve to both high- and lowbrow taste.

  THE SPRING OF 1945 brought Lange a last celebratory OWI job, to cover the founding UN conference in San Francisco in May and June 1945. This first act of an internationalist dream was also a last act of New Dealist vision; it inspired her but went sour immediately. Before it began, on April 12, Roosevelt died. Despite his visible weakening during the war, many Americans felt him to be immortal, as the generic good-father president. Millions wept privately and often publicly. It seemed fitting to Dorothea that the president died at Warm Springs, Georgia, where he had established a polio-treatment facility and often visited with other “polios.” And it fit the increased saturation of the culture with visual imagery that a widespread icon of this national grief was a photograph, published in Life, of CPO Graham Jackson playing the accordion, tears running down his face, as the president’s body was carried away.3 Dorothea’s grief came with a particularly painful ulcer attack. Both she and her physician suspected she should not take on the UN job.

  But Lange was incapable of turning down an interesting photography project, especially one honoring an historic occasion and the culmination of hopes for peace. Once again, however, she was prevented from doing a proper job by the people who hired her to do it. In an odd similarity to the internment photography, security men confined her to a gallery and refused to allow her to get close to the delegates. She tried to catch delegates on the street as they entered and exited, which made the job more strenuous. She carried on for the full two months. Her ulcer symptoms escalated to the point that she needed morphine for the pain. By late August she was hospitalized with life-threatening internal bleeding.

  One further blow completed the uncanny convergence of Lange’s personal, political, and photographic experience: these UN photographs, along with her other OWI work, were lost forever. After the New York office of OWI closed, victim of conservative attacks, no one could ever again find her photographs. The only remnants of her OWI work are the images that appeared in Victory and a few negatives she held back, which remain with her estate at the Oakland Museum.4

  Lange’s physical collapse in 1945 was only the first of a two-decade-long series of health crises, to which she responded with great physical resilience, until she could not.5 In 1945 a physician diagnosed a gallbladder disorder; surgery in August revealed that her pancreas was inflamed, and it was “drained.” But her pain, nausea, and vomiting continued until she began hemorrhaging and returned to the hospital, her family and friends collecting blood donations in a panic—she required twenty-three transfusions. At one point, her fever was so high, she was irrational. A more thorough gastrointestinal exam turned up a duodenal ulcer, and an antiacid diet was prescribed.6 She slowly healed and returned home on November 11, just in time to welcome Dan home from the army. She was rehospitalized in January, in late February, and in mid-March 1946, each time pronounced cured, until the problems recurred. Even when relatively stable, she could not talk or eat much without terrible nausea, and she vomited frequently. A hospital physician suggested that she had anorexia, and she consulted a psychiatrist. Finally, having confirmed the ulcer diagnosis, surgeons performed a gastric resection, removing much of the acid-bearing part of the stomach, and it seemed to work: Dorothea healed rapidly and came home after two weeks.7 Again, the good result was temporary. Without today’s strong acid suppressants, her ulcers periodically reappeared, and continued acid reflux produced esophagitis, constriction of the esophagus, which made it difficult for her to swallow food. This would continue on and off for the rest of her life. Physicians would repeatedly dilate her esophagus with a rubber tube called a bougie, in the hopes of producing a lasting reopening of the gullet. In 1950 and again in 1951, she received cobalt radiation treatment to destroy the ulcer and reduce acid production. These treatments produced a year of relief, sometimes two, but the symptoms always returned.

  Not surprisingly, Dorothea entered a protracted period of depression in the mid-1940s. All her government work had been directed toward change, from Paul’s specific causes to their larger ideals, but very little had been achieved, and now the government was disavowing those ideals. As a photographer, she was caught in a downward spiral: unable to photograph now, she feared that she would never be able to photograph again and this made her more depressed and less able to photograph. She felt that her illness was punishment for having been a bad mother. She sought consolation in domesticity, gardening, buying a sewing machine and making curtains, as if to reassure herself of her motherly capacity. Her stepdaughter Margot remembered her making a voluminous skirt with many pleats, spending hours and hours sewing red trim onto it, as a way of tolerating the pain. She cooked, although she could eat only tiny amounts at a time. She continued the antiacid diet. She gave up smoking with little apparent difficulty. Never much of a drinker, she would sip a bit of scotch and soda through a straw. She read eclectically—Dickens, Lewis Mumford, André Malraux, William Saroyan, Carl Sandburg, photography journals. “A total loss,” she said about these five years. A colleague of Paul’s referred to her in 1949 as a “semi-invalid.”8 But her family and friends recall very little complaining. It was as if she had compacted to a more minimal self, her desires shrinking along with her body. The physical changes were extraordinary. By age fifty, photographs show, she looked like an old woman—a result of years of work in the hot sun, combined with pain, poor nutrition, and weight loss.

  Lange was at one of her lowest moments when Maynard died in 1946. He had settled in Tucson with Edith Hamlin, his third wife, who soon became also nurse, chauffeur, and breadwinner. Dorothea felt grateful that Edith was there. As he grew weaker, Edith contacted friends, and a small stream of them came to visit, including Ansel Adams and even Sophie Treadwell, whom Maynard had not seen for twenty-eight years. When Dorothea got the news of his death, she was in the hospital, being prepared for surgery on her esophagus. An emotional Dan telephoned, said “Dad’s dead,” and hung up. Dorothea literally got up from her hospital bed and went home. She was not surprised at the news—he was seventy-one and his emphysema had been worsening for years. He had long had to use oxygen, and toward the end he needed it twenty-four hours a day. Although she had not seen him for several years, her pain was still sharp. She had always loved him.

  WITH ONLY A bit of exaggeration, Dorothea claimed that she did not pick up a camera for five years. This is partly because she continued to do all the cooking, cleaning, and gardening—like so many women in the period, she never seemed to think that a husband should do domestic work. She turned down most photographic invitations and commissions. She cropped her hair short, and kept it that way for the rest of her life, as if eliminating any drag on her energies. She worked in her studio, as absorbed with photography as ever. She pulled prints and contact sheets out of drawers, putting them on walls and in piles all over the floor, reorganizing them. Concentrating on how photographs speak to each other—“. . . pairs amplify and extend the meanings . . . like a sentence of 2 words”—she was reclassifying them thematically. Her unpretentious and mainly upbeat themes included “Killing Time,” or relaxation; “Pleasantries,” photographic jokes; “Indescribables,” motifs that could not be expressed in words; “Home is Where . . .”; and, she later added, “Death and Disaster.”9

  Reorganizing her files constituted a review of her oeuvre and it produced, oddly, a rebirth of ambition despite her invalidism. A desire that she had been suppressing for many years began to break through an internal prohibition—to recognize herself as an artist
. It was a dream she had repeatedly expelled from consciousness but never squelched. It heightened her anxiety, of course, but it probably also contributed to her return to active photography at the end of the decade.

  Surprising everyone close to her, Lange rebounded in the 1950s. She emerged, paradoxically, as a much-esteemed photography doyenne even as her photographs were no longer fashionable. Limited in her ability to photograph intensively, Lange became a key participant in the national community of top art photographers—something the government work had never left her time to do.

  She was sought out by Magnum, the world’s most prestigious photographers’ agency. Founded in 1947 by Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David “Chim” Seymour, and George Rodger, all foreign-born, all leftists, Magnum brought together photographers through a labor-union consciousness, aiming to bargain collectively for fees and win photographers’ control of their work. As a group, these photographers represented a new generation, influenced particularly by the possibility of action photography with fast cameras such as the Leica. Attracted to speed, both in their war photography and in Cartier-Bresson’s desire to “trap” moments of action, they also shared a masculinist romance of photography as adventure. Nevertheless, they revered Lange’s work; the aesthetic valorization of working people in her photography resonated for them with the socialist and antifascist experience of Europe, from which they had all emerged. They invited her to become a contributing member, and she agreed. Magnum was never able to get assignments for her—her work no longer had a commercial market. But several Magnum people remember her as the only outsider who put energy into the project, stopping by the Magnum office whenever she was in New York. In her no-small-talk way, Lange always managed to initiate conversations they enjoyed, conversations that were “philosophic,” not technical, “about how societies work, how cultures change.”10

  She was a central figure in the founding of Aperture magazine and in an historic photographic conference. Ever since f/64, Ansel Adams had wanted to develop a high-end photography magazine. He pulled together private and corporate underwriting for a 1951 conference of photographers to discuss the state of their art and to create a magazine. Never before or since has such a group been assembled. One hundred and fifty photographers came together at the Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies for presentations and panel discussions, but no “technical shop-talk” was allowed. “Every meal . . . was a symposium. No table was large enough to accommodate all who wanted to sit together. . . . ” One of the conferees said, “I had to expand or explode.”11 The conference contributed to Lange’s recuperation through the respect she engendered and the attention she commanded from the nation’s finest photographers. It also yielded a lasting product: the magazine Aperture. A committee including Lange, Adams, Nancy Newhall, and Minor White committed themselves to get it off the ground.12 On the first issue’s cover was Lange’s photograph of the conference itself.

  At the conference, some of the intense debates involved Lange centrally, and they afford a glimpse into her developing photographic thinking. Lange and New York photographer Berenice Abbott were identified as advocates of “realism,” but their differences at the conference indicated Lange’s temperamental antipathy to ideology. They were of the same generation, and both had absorbed bohemianism in Greenwich Village, but Abbott went to Paris when Lange went to San Francisco. Abbott’s arts scene there was more avant-garde than that of San Francisco. Like Lange, she photographed artistic and cultural figures, such as Jean Cocteau and James Joyce, but she also worked for photographer Man Ray and became a promoter of the photography of Eugène Atget. Returning to New York, she, too, became a supporter of the left-wing Photo League; she, too, did some New Deal government work; and she, too, considered documenting the changing world her fundamental calling. Also like Lange, she found a supportive partner, Elizabeth McCausland, a leftist art critic, who did much to promote her photography. But because of her location, Abbott remained a photographer of New York City, and her work did not resonate with Depression-era nostalgia for a rural and small-town world.

  At Aspen, Abbott hotly condemned abstract photography, a judgment Lange never shared, despite her own realist bent. Lange was open to a capacious range of styles. Nevertheless, she emphasized photography as communication. As part of that goal, she advocated narrative, an aim usually, although not necessarily, requiring realism. She argued for contextualized and historical photographic series, which could tell stories of change, as she had tried to do with An American Exodus and her World War II work. To illustrate, she sketched an imaginary “shooting script,” telling the story of the conference itself.13 The listeners, intrigued, asked her to give them a complete script, but she responded that it would have to emerge from a photographer’s engagement with the subject, or it would hold back “the possibility—and the necessity—of growth.”14 Each photograph might expose new insights and lead, therefore, to further photographs, unpredictable in advance. Emphasizing that the photographer must follow her subject material to new discoveries, Lange hardly sounded like someone who for four years had executed shooting scripts written by a nonphotographer who almost never saw what the photographers saw. (Fortunately, Stryker had sensed that he got the best work by respecting photographers’ autonomy.) Lange’s practice—an amalgam of her portrait method, involving interaction with her subjects, and her documentary method, in which she tried to use visual imagery to communicate social reality—had not changed so much as her articulation of it. What was important, however, was her insistence on openness to new information and ideas coming from engagement with the world outside herself. This is a photographer who, for all her fascination with personal relationships and inner character, never made a self-portrait.

  This complexity appeared also in her teaching, another new departure. At least twice, she taught a Saturday-morning photography class for fourteen weeks at the California School of Fine Arts.15 Although the course was open to all, most of her students appear to have been experienced photographers, such as Allen Willis, later called “dean of African American filmmakers”; George Ballis, who would produce a large body of photographs and films about California activism; Carolyn Mason Jones, an accomplished photographer of the performing arts; and Michael Bry, a much-published photographer of San Francisco’s beauty. Beginners may have been too intimidated to sign up.

  Her teaching method seems indebted both to Clarence White and to Roy Stryker. At some point during the course, she distributed the poem “Theory,” by the poet Wallace Stevens,16 and “Person-to-Person,” by Tennessee Williams, a 1955 statement of his artistic credo. Although unlike Williams in her interests and themes, Lange identified with his imperative to connect with audiences. He denounced subjective, narcissistic writing that “has not yet mastered its necessary trick of rising above the singular to the plural concern, from personal to general import.”17 This is the core of Lange’s refusal of only subjectivity. She asked of photography that it set up communion or at least conversation, not only between photographer and viewer but also between viewer and photographic subject. Photography thereby becomes a medium in which the viewer is an active participant.

  And yet what she wanted her students to do was by no means impersonal. She began the course by interviewing each of the students—twenty in one class—individually. She titled the course, “Where Do I Live?” She then organized it around that question, requiring students to bring in photographs that answered it.18 She assigned the observational exercise she had developed for herself, which she called “ ‘finger-exercises’ in seeing.” They were to take notes on the street, guessing at the stories of passersby. Another assignment required using nonhuman objects to reveal the human, a form of Lange’s much-used visual synecdoche. “We ought to know beyond a doubt that to some people . . . this desk or this garden, this bottle of pills, this racing form or this box of candy is home. . . .” In finding “the location of the heart,” she pointed out, searching the face alone can be misleading.

/>   As she had done at Aspen, she was asking students to find a way to express their own vision and the reality of the outside world simultaneously. The challenge was sterner yet because of her insistence that they “not make the kind of picture that bulwarks a popular conception. . . . True exploration into the possibilities of the photographic medium raises questions that are not answered.”19

  The challenge represented Lange’s own photographic development and the theoretical discussions about photography that she had participated in, from f/64’s emphasis on the “straight,” to the FSA project’s fusion of authenticity and propaganda, to her wartime efforts to represent and promote national unity against fascism without sacrificing her dissenting eye and visual questioning. She was trying to impart to her students a way of doing photography that could be simultaneously subjective and objective. It was in one of these classes that students challenged her to reveal where she lived, and she produced the portrait of her twisted foot—an act of self-revelation unique for Lange and one that must have affected the students deeply.

  Did this challenge come across? It would take a study of her students’ photography to know whether they were able to act on the complexity she asked for. Their letters were grateful. Several spoke of Lange’s extraordinary visual memory. They got better at making photographs, one student wrote, “because of your remarkable ability to keep track of what each one of the huge tablefull was doing and remembering all he had done before.” Another student praised “the unusually responsible consideration you gave to the problems of each individual . . . refusing to let me substitute verbal communication for photographic communication.”20 Altogether, her teaching file suggests that she was a gifted teacher for advanced photographers, and this is consistent with what her many assistants thought. As to how she would have worked with beginners, there is room for doubt, given her remarkable lack of interest in the mechanics of cameras.