Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  The message that all people are alike “under the skin,” an extension of the “Americans All” OWI theme, and that peace could prevail if people learned to avoid prejudice, ignored the more significant obstacles to peace—economic and social inequality. If you understood America only from this exhibit, you would be bewildered to learn that in that very year the Montgomery bus boycott launched the civil rights movement. No images of political conflict, social movements, or strikes were included. Solomon-Godeau points out that the only images from the realm of “politics” show people putting ballots in boxes, a narrow and quintessentially American definition of politics.58

  The exhibit presented universals at the expense of history. No photographs were dated. No captions identified place; locations were specified only by nation—an ideological statement about the superiority of nation-states to colonies, empires, tribes, and a further deindividualization of subjects. Displaying repeatedly the beautiful photograph of a young Peruvian flute player created a leitmotif that further emphasized the upbeat, universalist message. Just as the pictures were decontextualized, so were the quotations that replaced Lange’s typically informative captions. Compiled by Dorothy Norman, photographer and protegée of both Steichen and Stieglitz, the biblical, literary, and folkloric captions functioned as pop spirituality. The approach disguised international inequalities. In this context, the family of man becomes a biological given, not a product of human-created culture; even such matters as courtship, marriage, play, house building, and suffering are determined by our biology.

  The show was actually more nationalist than internationalist, despite its claims. The vast majority of the 503 photographs were American. Its humanism was strikingly religious in tone, reflecting the unique religiosity of the United States.59 It placed a white American family at the center of the exhibit, not just a family but a farm family of four generations—with photographs of ancestors on the walls—positing thus a false ideology about family life in the United States in 1955. In the book, this idealized American family sits directly opposite a largely unclothed Bechuanaland family. (Africans and other nonwhite peoples were mainly represented as primitive.) Could there be a more explicit visual statement about the direction of civilization?

  Its gender politics were particularly conservative, consistent with the culture of the times: Cold War political culture pressured women to devote themselves exclusively to husbands, children, and homemaking. In the exhibit, images of young love were followed by marriage, pregnancy, childbirth, breast-feeding, and other mother-child bonding in an inevitable sequence. Near the close of the exhibit, viewed after the audience had been shocked by the huge six-by-eight-foot color photograph of a nuclear explosion, seven elderly couples looked out at viewers (Dutch, Chinese, Canadian, German, Sicilian, American Indian—and another American couple, white, identified simply as from the “U.S.,” for they were the prototypical Americans), each one atop a caption reading “We two form a multitude.” Marriage thus not only propagates humanity but might, somehow, save us from destruction. Images of labor feature big male biceps, daring high-rise construction workers, men wielding heavy tools, building railroads, smelting metal, dragging in fishnets. Mother-and-child, pietà images suggest universalism among Eskimos, Native Americans, American blacks, and a Vogue model (or is she a lady millionaire?). These messages about what was supposedly universal did not accurately describe what was happening in the developed world—such as the increasing numbers of women in the wage labor force and in higher education and the widespread use of birth control as large families became economically impossible.

  The exhibition, like many since then, was designed to control the flow of spectators, to prohibit them from wandering among the photographs and thereby creating their own juxtapositions. The enforced path was circular, replicating the cyclical organization of the photographs—birth, childhood, marriage, reproduction, family, old age, death, birth—an ahistorical, eternal order. This order was, moreover, visually teleological: when looking at young lovers, one saw the large families ahead, for example. One decision brought together the insistence on crowd control and upbeat tone: a photograph of a lynching was removed after two weeks because, Wayne Miller thought, it caused the flow of spectators to stop and created a bottleneck.60 Yet it was in August of that year that fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was lynched.

  Much of this conservatism, however, was not a new Cold War product but a continuation of New Deal and World War II political culture. Depression family-values talk emphasized men’s natural role as family heads and women’s as domesticity. The stresses of war, paradoxically, produced similar responses: Although women’s employment and men’s absence eroded women’s reliance on male heads of household, government and media always represented that state of affairs as an emergency and continually referred to women’s dependence on men when soldiers returned. As the melting pot of Depression and war assimilated people of European-immigrant backgrounds to Americanism, non-Europeans continued to be treated as non-American. War nationalism invoked a rhetorical universality, as did “The Family of Man,” by ignoring the barriers to equality that rendered universalist rhetoric hollow.

  Lange had argued to make “The Family of Man” more complex, even a bit subversive. Some of her influence shows—for example, the nine father-child photographs (including her First Born). Her own Migrant Mother and White Angel Breadline were encapsulated within a series on calamities. But Lange ideas that did not make it into the exhibit might have shifted its meanings considerably. She argued that evil lived in the family of man and that the show should include more conflict, war, and other violence.61 She wanted the exhibition’s textual material to quote from President Eisenhower’s 1953 inaugural address: “The men who mine coal and fire furnaces and balance ledgers and turn lathes and pick cotton and heal the sick and plant corn—all serve as proudly and as profitably for America as the statesmen who draft treaties or the legislators who enact laws. This faith rules our whole way of life.”62 A hackneyed and masculinist piece of rhetoric, it nevertheless sounded the New Deal voice and resisted the McCarthyist voice. Steichen originally asked Lange “and your good husband” to draft a call to photographers that laid out the “over-all plan,” and the version he sent out incorporated most of Lange’s text. She wanted to begin the exhibition with six larger-than-life-size naked figures, one of each sex of three “races.” (Experts at that time taught that humanity consisted of Caucasians, Negroes, and Asians.) She wanted “working people’s bodies,” not models—that is, naked, not nude.63 But nakedness was not acceptable in the 1950s; Harry Callahan’s nude of his pregnant wife was weeded out,64 and the only flesh shown was the breasts of African women—signifiers of primitivism.

  Nevertheless, Lange’s enthusiasm about “The Family of Man” was unqualified. That enthusiasm reflected in part her never-quite-realized longing to belong to the art establishment. She had received some of that acceptance when Steichen included her work in a Museum of Modern Art show of six women photographers in 1949. But her California location, her long-term government employment, her continued commitment to advocacy, and her realist photography kept her, she felt, marginal rather than central in art photography. MoMA was its center.

  Yet her enthusiasm also arose from her astute appraisal of the exhibit’s impact, something the critics failed to grasp. Those who saw and loved the exhibit or book felt it, however unconsciously, as an affirmation of possibilities for peace and interracial respect, and as an endorsement of the United Nations—of New Deal international policy. It asserted the beauty of people of color. It undermined xenophobia, making foreigners appealing in their strangeness. It even showed a bit of racial diversity in the United States.

  Ultimately, Lange supported “The Family of Man” because she believed it was the best that could be done. She was not a purist. Temperamentally, and in accord with Paul, she believed that you offered what you could and celebrated the bits of progress that could be achieved. Besides, the Lange of 1955 w
as not the same person as that of 1935, nor was the world she lived in the same. The decade from 1945 to 1955 had frightened her at every level—physical, emotional, political. She knew that her photographic style was no longer trendy and, worse, her photographic ideas no longer on the national agenda. She understood her body’s fragility and fatigue; she could no longer breathe fire.

  DURING ONE NEW YORK trip for “Family of Man” work, Dorothea collapsed in her hotel room due to internal bleeding from her ulcers. She had been scheduled to speak to the American Society of Magazine Photographers, and when she failed to appear, Steichen phoned her hotel room. He and Wayne Miller rushed to her. Carrying her out, they took her by cab to Lenox Hill Hospital, where she once again received emergency blood transfusions. Steichen held Dorothea in the cab, and she recalled gratefully, “ ‘Steichen has the most marvelous protective hands.’ ”65 Being comforted in this moment of terror reaffirmed her experience of him as a father.

  She was stuck in New York at Lenox Hill Hospital for some time. Paul came, but she could not get to Dan’s wedding to Mia. Dorothea minded this loss greatly, as she loved ceremony, thought Mia delightful, and savored Dan’s transformation out of his very difficult years. She wrote what Mia recalled as a wonderful “welcome-to-the-family letter.”66

  Another trauma on another trip to New York was to the good: Dorothea was there when her mother died at age seventy-nine, when she who so often felt herself an orphan actually became one. It was a gift that mother and daughter, long separated by a continent, were now together through some of the dying. Dorothea left no record of her emotions at the time and she rarely spoke about her mother at all.67 Silence was her response to most of the greatest emotional events of her life. As mother-daughter bonds go, theirs was neither the closest nor the most distant, but their love and appreciation was mutual. Dorothea always kept a photograph of Joan on her dresser. Joan’s instinct was to soothe, and she played the same role with her daughter that she had with her mother: Perhaps unbeknownst to Dorothea, Joan sometimes soothed the victims of Dorothea’s sting, telling Margot, for example, to forgive her stepmother because “she can’t help it.”68 Dorothea did know that Joan had given her considerable gifts: generosity and competence and discipline, love of music and ritual, a taste for stylish hospitality and home decor, an open mind, a capacity for empathy, an appreciation for different cultures, and, not least, the confidence not to overvalue respectability. Characteristically, in their first decades apart, it was her own photographs of Joan that “revealed,” Dorothea said, her love for her mother.69 Once she had a large family and created grand holiday meals, Dorothea would send a daily card to her mother from mid-December through Christmas so that Joan would feel “with us and by us.”70

  Yet as Dorothea suffered the loss of a mother, pain and frightening collapses, family brought new pleasure into her life. John married Helen, who became extremely close to Dorothea; Ross, Katharine, and then Margot married; and they all had children. Dorothea became the grandmother of twelve.71 Three of these young families and seven of the children lived nearby. Dorothea’s greatest pleasure in her later years came from these grandchildren. She could spend hours with them in the garden or at the ocean, looking at weeds and sticks and shells, teaching them to see.

  22

  Working for Life

  In 1952, Lange tiptoed back into photography, and by the late 1950s she was working intensively again, her schedule now eased by the fact that all the children had left home. Her physical condition after 1945, always more a remission than a cure, leaves one awed by her continuing accomplishments. “I’ve always had immense physical reserves, for a person who has such a bad body, very strong.”1 This is an understatement.

  Now free of regular employment, she designed topics and approaches ambitiously and produced work of great beauty and significance. Professionally, the new ventures proved disappointing, because she was trying to sell her photo-essays to Life, entering a world of corporate mass journalism. In other words, she could not in fact be an independent photographer as long as she wanted paid work; Paul was happy to support her, but traveling for photography, now her habit, was expensive, and, besides, she needed paying work for her identity as a professional. With the end of government work, Henry Luce’s Time/Life/Fortune conglomerate represented a key outlet for photography, and many FSAers had worked there. Individual photographers were supporting their calling by acceding to a corporate sensibility, and often, as in the case of Luce’s empire, a conservative political one.

  In theory, Life published just what Lange wanted: photo-essays rather than individual photographs. But the working arrangements turned out to constrain her artistic integrity even more than the government had. Editors wanted photographers to dump thousands of pictures in their laps, then leave on the next assignment, not even consulting, let alone casting a vote, on the selection of photographs, layout, text, or overall message in the published piece.2 While Stryker had admonished Lange not to send him too many pictures, Life editors saw about seven thousand a week, from which they would select two hundred for publication. Moreover, months of photography could be bumped at the last minute by breaking news. In Lange’s work for Life, two of her four commissions got published in a form that she disliked, two were rejected altogether after she sent in photographs, and at least two proposals were turned down before any photography was done. Luckily, since Lange never did exactly what she was commissioned to do anyway, many of the photographs live on in spite of Life.

  This photography was shaped not only by Life but also by Lange’s own stage of life—older and fragile—and by history. Far removed from the New Deal’s orientation toward building a better future, the dominant strands of American political culture were now defensive, seeking safety in the status quo and protection against threats to it. Nostalgia pervaded all four of Lange’s projects, and that spirit made her think she could produce material Life would want. It was nostalgia for an imaginary past, of course. It was a nostalgia that had already underlain the last years of FSA work, when Stryker was calling for cheerful photographs, and now Taylor’s family-farm romance and Lange’s unease with the anomie of cities strengthened it.

  Her first project profiled three Mormon towns in Utah, and she envisaged a local exhibit as well as a Life feature. She had been in Utah often: with Maynard, for the FSA, and with Paul, and now she planned to realize her Guggenheim project. Although she knew just what she wanted to do for Life, her new sense of herself as feeble led her to gather three coworkers.3 She wanted Paul with her in case of health disasters. She wanted her son Dan because he was beginning to work seriously on becoming a writer and she could help him.4 She wanted Ansel Adams because of the subject matter. She felt that the inhospitable natural surroundings, mountains and desert, were fundamental to the culture of these villages—and no one could capture that except Ansel.5 This turned out to be a mistake. Not only did she and Adams quarrel, as usual, but Paul and Dan’s presence exacerbated the disagreements.

  Starting in 1952, Lange and Taylor studied the area and chose three towns with different economies: Toquerville, a bit of a ghost town, populated primarily by old people; Gunlock, remaining a subsistence-farming community; and St. George, transformed by a new highway into a tourist stop.6 Lange envisioned a coherent, orchestrated photo-essay, in four “movements,” each with different tempo, which would allow her to bring out the distinct character of each town. Toquerville, which means black in the local Indian language, would be introduced at night, an adagio in a minor key. “Concentrate on old people and houses. Photograph in a subdued and fading light.” The second movement, to be photographed in “high summer light,” was Gunlock; its themes were “everybody knows everybody,” “satisfied with what we have,” “the simple both in the light and in the material.” Quoting one of her Gunlock subjects, she wrote, “ ‘. . . knew you was as safe as if you was in God’s pocket.’ ” The third movement would sound the interactions of past and present—the desert, an old road or trail,
the graveyard, but also a neon sign. The fourth movement would be St. George, its light “hard and brilliant.” “A few decades ago money was practically unknown,” she wrote, but now there were twenty-three motels and the numbers who slept in them equaled one-quarter of the town’s population. It had become “a place to sleep, a place to eat, a place to service the car, a place between two other places—Los Angeles 832 miles, Salt Lake 237 miles.” Importantly, she did not condemn St. George’s residents, but praised them as brave in adapting to the commercial economy, pioneers venturing into the unknown. She planned meticulously, outlining photographs in “progressions,” like a film storyboard. She relied on her trademark synecdoche—that is, using pieces to reveal wholes: “the hymn book . . . the window . . . the white pierced ear . . . bread . . . the neon sign . . . the cornice . . .” Ever the bossy one, she made lists for Adams, too.7