Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  Yet photographic icons deserve a defense. They function to create what Raymond Williams called an “aide-memoire for activating a ‘structure of feeling.’ ”15 However often Migrant Mother appears, she connotes a worried mother, poor and under stress. The image of raising the American flag at Iwo Jima invokes a generic wartime heroism as well as that of a particular war, and the naked Vietnamese girl burning from napalm invokes the excruciating pain of all wars as well as that of the Vietnam War. Iconization makes its subjects into “types”—that is, individuals come to stand for certain categories, but this is an inevitable response to contextualized portraiture.16 It is harder to make them “types” but not stereotypes—something Lange often achieved.

  Despite her commitment to social context, Lange resisted being defined as a reformer photographer, sometimes rejecting even the term documentary. At other times, she accepted the term but argued about its definition: “Documentary photographers are not social workers. Social reform . . . may be a consequence, because it can reveal situations and can be concerned with change.” The photographer “is a witness . . . not a propagandist or an advertiser.”17 This view was unnecessarily defensive; what makes propaganda is in part its context—even one of Ansel Adams’s sublime photographs of the Sierras function sometimes as propaganda for wilderness preservation. Besides, at other times Lange defended propaganda—it was not unusual for her to contradict herself. The defensiveness reveals that even now, as she prepared for an exhibit that would label her definitively as an artist, she could not free herself of a lingering concern that documentary photography was second-class. The photography labeled “art” in her formative years—that of Pictorialism, f/64, Strand and Weston and Adams—excluded what she did. She knew that her best work was done as a government employee—a status oxymoronic with that of artist.

  That Lange did not make self-portraits was fundamental to her personality, her values, and the culture of her times. She was impatient with a photography that was about its maker: “. . . many artist photographers’ alliance with the world is very slight. Their alliance is to themselves and their effort is to translate the outside world in terms of their needs.”18 Lange did not lack vanity and ambition, but the mysteries that drew her were outside herself.

  AS PHOTOGRAPHERS KNOW but the public rarely appreciates, curating an exhibition requires extensive work. Lange’s labor was greater because this show would take place at the summit of art, and because she knew she was shaping her reputation. Nevertheless, she was not merely selecting the best of a lifetime of photographs. Tired as she was, she intended to advance her photography by presenting visual stories and conversations. It meant excavating tens of thousands of contact sheets, negatives, and prints and choosing a tiny fraction to show, then deciding how to group them and in what order. She had to consider the printing specifications for each one, their size, whether and how they should be matted and framed, how hung and on what kind of walls. She had to go to the Library of Congress and the National Archives to see the bulk of her work, which she did not own or possess.

  John Szarkowski made two trips to Berkeley to work with her on the forthcoming show, in December 1964 and August 1965. Knowing her diagnosis, he was at first worried about how to negotiate with a dying woman. On arriving, he was alarmed to find that she had already planned the show in her mind. Once they began working, however, he found it easy and natural; she was comfortable with disagreement and argued strongly herself. After the first visit his letters became looser, teasing, even flirtatious: “Go ahead, get mad. I warned you . . . However I cannot really bully you . . . because . . . I am in love with you, which puts me at a great disadvantage.”19 He felt her charm and also knew how to handle her.

  24.4. LANGE WITH SZARKOWSKI, BERKELEY, 1964 OR 1965

  MoMA had mounted five one-person photography shows previously, featuring Walker Evans, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Edward Steichen. Lange was not at all sure she matched up to this company, in good part because she knew that many high-art curators and critics did not think she did. Szarkowski’s visits were themselves a recognition, although not so great as it would have been a few decades later, since he was still a junior figure in the photography world. The gossip from MoMA, however, was that Szarkowski had not wanted to do this show.20 With pain and weakness adding to her stress, it is not surprising that she was anxious about the exhibition. “I was scared, really scared.” “It gives me the cold chills.” But not so scared that she held back.21

  At first, Szarkowski recalled, Lange wanted an Asia wall, an Ireland wall, and an Egypt wall.22 She thought photographic groupings should be historical and narrative, as in An American Exodus, while Szarkowski envisaged groupings based on visual themes. She argued fiercely: “Listen to me young man, you were in knee pants and I was there the day that men first lined up to get their first social security payments.” “You’re getting my back up just a little by pronouncements. . . .” She would not allow her photographs to “lose the argument” to universalistic images of human nature. “What’s the background of the white owner sitting on the porch. Who’s doing his work for him?”23

  Yet Lange also balked at an instrumental, reform-minded vision of the show. Her former protégé, photographer Homer Page, suggested that her MoMA show serve as a model for the urban photography project she was pursuing. Lange refused. She did not wish her show made into an appendage to a social-justice movement, and she wanted the artistic acclaim she was due. She would not let Szarkowski strip her work of its political content, but she would not let it be reduced to visual sloganeering, either. She did, however, write a statement to be mounted at the end of the show: “I would like to add a line to encourage persons interested in using a camera to concern themselves with making photographs of the life which surrounds them, to raise his sights to include what’s going on about us, to use the cameras to show this awareness.”24

  The better she got to know Szarkowski, the more she respected his opinions. Compromises became easier. He convinced her, for example, to include Migrant Mother. “This exhibit is not being done for these 50 people in the photographic community who could fill out a pretty good sketch of Migrant Mother.” Her response then illustrated the fruits of their collaboration: “Yeah, okay, that one picture belongs to the public but let’s put her in some unexpected place, in some relationship, give her a new both interpretation and understanding.”25

  Unable to make many of the final exhibition prints, she turned over most of the negatives to the man who had done the printing for “The Family of Man” exhibition, Irwin Welcher.26 He worked fast because he knew how important it was to her to be able to see the prints before sending them to MoMA. She wanted them on a polycontrast paper to avoid high-gloss, stark blacks and whites; he resisted this decision at first but then acceded and even found a spray coating that would enhance the detail; she was happy with the result. To her last days, she argued for her choices to Szarkowski, especially about the juxtapositions of the photographs, because she knew that mounting an exhibit always led to further changes. Then she sent him a gift: a cake of soap, two Idaho potatoes, and a gong from a Korean Buddhist temple for his new daughter, thanking him for “an immense partnership.”27

  LANGE HELD BACK just enough energy from the MoMA show to pursue the dream she had nurtured since the FSA closed down, a collective several-year photography project about urban life. Her work in Richmond and Oakland showed the need, and her model was, of course, the FSA photographers’ beloved community. Now the civil rights movement and the Kennedy presidency made the dream, called Project One, seem possible again.

  She had broached the idea publicly in 1952 in an interview with Jacob Deschin of the New York Times, in 1955 in a U.S. Camera interview, and in 1958 to Magnum. In December 1962, on her way to Egypt, she stopped in New York to talk to Henry Allen Moe of the Guggenheim Foundation about it, to no avail. She wrote a new proposal and took it when she traveled to New York City in May 1964 for the MoMA photograp
hy center opening, at which two of her photographs appeared.28 She sought support from the Ford Foundation and Steichen. Convincing Ben Shahn in New Jersey and Szarkowski in New York to bring together groups of photographers, she found support for her idea but would not compromise her vision. The assembled photographers envisioned a focus exclusively on the poor, a focus she considered simplistic and shallow. She thought, rather, that “. . . our decade of unprecedented ‘prosperity’ has many faces, there are many forms of privation within prosperity. . . .”29 The time had come, she said, to photograph “affluence—whose other face is poverty.” From Taylor, from her FSA work, and from Asia, she had learned that poverty is a relational phenomenon, a product of inequality rather than an absolute or a marker of underdevelopment that modernization would correct. Still, alongside this Marxist-inflected analysis remained her more spiritual allegiance. “There is poverty within us, poverty of spirit that allows the other poverty,” and both poverties needed documentation.30

  Meanwhile, even as she was getting nowhere with Project One, Lange began campaigning for Project Two, a permanent national photography center where photographers working collectively could expand the powers of the medium. She looked for university as well as foundation sponsorship but insisted on autonomy within a university; she believed that if fine-art photography became lodged only in university art departments, it would be cramped, possibly even stifled. Her animosity to photography’s becoming captive to art reveals another aspect of her mixed feelings toward high art—yearning to belong but unwilling to surrender her vision of photography as communication. Floating the idea that the new Kennedy Library incorporate a photographic center, she was trying to arrange a meeting to this end with Beaumont Newhall, Ansel Adams, and Szarkowski just two months before her death.31 Taylor continued to work for such a project after her death. He lobbied administrators and faculty at UCB to create such a photography center; he started a commission of notables in the photography world, and it further developed and circulated Lange’s proposal, with a budget of $400,000 per year for five years.32 The project was never realized. What Lange had feared came to pass: Photography came to be taught mostly in art departments devoted to training photographers or other academics.33 Lange was after a humanistic visual education for everyone, as much for those who would look at pictures as for those who would make them.

  In 1964, Lange seemed likely to join forces with some young photographers awakened by the civil rights movement and hoping to form an “FSA-type” cooperative group like her Project One. They saw her as their model, while she, thrilled by the movement, was of course ready to jump in as adviser and sponsor.34 Matt Herron and others involved organized a meeting, but she had to cancel because of a hospitalization. Their correspondence continued, and they sent her drafts of proposals for comment. Facing the same difficulty that Lange had in obtaining funding, they rewrote their proposal to focus entirely on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s voter registration and citizenship schools; Herron moved his family to Jackson, Mississippi, to work on it full-time. The civil rights organizations understood the power of photography, both to document the violence used against them and to communicate their spirit to potential supporters. One photography curator likened the power of these images to that of the freedom songs.35 Lange was never able to meet with them. Her illness cost all of us something that would have been extraordinary: Lange photographs of the southern civil rights movement.

  For her own photography in the last year of her life, Lange was overwhelmed with offers of help. In response to news of her scheduled MoMA show, those who knew how ill she was—and word traveled fast—responded with a generosity that signaled the affection and respect she engendered.36 Dorothea was taken aback. “I was scared, really scared [of being able to prepare the exhibit], but my God the people who are ready to come help me, you’d be amazed, and such magnificent offers.”37 Her race—between cancer and the exhibit—became a collective project.38 Letters poured in and friends and admirers “lined up” to help, she said with a kind of awe, offered to print for her, to help her sort and file photographs, even Nancy Newhall, with whom she had always had a tense and competitive relationship.39 These were gestures of gratitude and respect, of course, but also desire for intimacy; previously Dorothea’s need to control had not always left space for such overtures from others. In her weakness, others could take initiatives. Above all, many saw her photography as a national resource and felt that all America had an investment in this show coming off well.

  EVEN NOW, DOROTHEA was not left free to concentrate entirely on her own work, or even her dying, because of worry about the mental health of her stepson Ross Taylor. The most conspicuously talented, and quite possibly the favored child of the blended family, he had become an internationally known musician, ending his career as the principal French horn player of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.40 When Dorothea came into his life, he was ten, and his mixed experience with her was typical among her stepchildren: She blew up over small infractions, but she was the one who noticed and encouraged his musical talent. At fifteen, he played Mozart’s Third Concerto for Horn with the UCB Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Albert Elkus. Just as Paul had “pulled strings” to get Dan into the army, he arranged to get Ross into the army band so he would not be in combat.41 After the war, he studied at Juilliard, and in his second year there played with the New York Philharmonic. He married Anne Wegman, affectionately known as “Onnie,” a concert singer and the daughter of San Francisco Symphony Orchestra’s second violinist. In 1950, he joined the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra and in 1955 the San Francisco. Extremely productive, he became a highly regarded teacher and made over 150 transcriptions and arrangements for different instrumentations.

  Paul and Dorothea were, of course, delighted when he returned to the area with Onnie and their three children. But Ross had hesitated to make the move because of friction with his stepmother, and the fact that Dorothea did not take an instant liking to Onnie. Onnie’s feelings were divided: She found Dorothea generous but also intimidating. The Ross Taylors tried to limit their Berkeley visits to the big holiday occasions.

  A tense and brittle personality, Ross never had an easy time with his conductors. He considered Cleveland’s George Szell dictatorial, San Francisco’s Enrique Jordá an inferior musician, and Jordá’s replacement, Jozef Krips, also inadequate. Ross dealt with stress by drinking, and in San Francisco he began an extramarital affair. He showed symptoms of what his sister, psychotherapist Margot Fanger, considered adult-onset manic depression. Medication brought some relief inconsistently. In the early 1960s, his depression intensified and his manic periods became more frequent and more extreme. He could not stop talking and inhabited “another world,” imagining himself “with the greats of all time,” an alarmed Dorothea wrote to Margot.42

  Despite the family’s alarm and vigilance, Ross was found dead at age forty-one in September 1964, a death attributed to mixing liquor and psychoactive drugs. Many considered it a suicide, although some family members insist it was an accident, but in any case the combination of mental illness, drugs, and drinking was toxic. His death devastated many: his mother, Katharine; his father and stepmother; his wife; his two sisters, especially Margot, who felt very close to him; his children, aged twelve, ten, and six; his friend Rondal Partridge, who had tried to save him; and his musician colleagues.43 Coming shortly after Dorothea’s cancer diagnosis, the loss devastated Paul and Dorothea.44

  THE LAST YEAR of Dorothea’s life and the progress of her disease were documented, inadvertently and impressionistically, by the KQED taping. Twice weekly the miserable dilations of her esophagus in an effort to make eating possible.45 Cobalt radiation therapy at Merritt Hospital five days a week for six to eight weeks. She was emaciated, and for pain she took Librium—a tranquilizer, not a potent painkiller. (She clipped a newspaper article about Cicely Saunders, a founder of the hospice movement, who advocated using heroin for pain in the terminally ill.) She located
herself for a caller as “sitting on my couch of pain.”46 For the first time, she and Paul had Thanksgiving dinner alone. Yet once again, the cobalt therapy seemed to help and she returned to work on the exhibit.

  In the fall of 1964, she could work steadily on some days, taking little breaks, eating snacks. “I think I’ve gotta stop a few minutes, because I am beginning to get little knots again.” She would eat cheese cut into little pieces and some buttered bread and even gained some weight. She joked. Family members sang to her, “Golden Vanity” and “Lowland, Lowland,” and she complained, “Nobody asks me to sing I notice.”47 She laughed about the fact that Imogen Cunningham still didn’t drive, “still going around on buses. With cameras. But she’s very smart about hitching rides . . . it’s something like a monkey going from tree to tree. She’ll call you up and say I’m coming to see you. Someone is dropping me at your gate. I’ll only be there twenty-five minutes because someone is picking me up.”48 With the filmmakers, she discussed factional fights at KQED and with Conrat discussed what public radio could be. She was still cooking, though mainly for others, and giving away her treasures to her children. Margot admired some blue bowls from Egypt, and Dorothea insisted that she take them all: “Giving one is no good.”49

  She became increasingly dependent on Helen Dixon for help—cleaning, shopping, cooking, providing gossip, and bringing the grandchildren over. Many friends and neighbors also pitched in. By the winter of 1964, she could eat only ice cream and liquids, especially Helen’s chicken soup. Being denied food was what she found hardest.50 She had shifted from Librium to Percodan, but she continued to do some gardening. On some days, her energy level made some expect her to beat the cancer.51

  And she continued to be gripped by the civil rights movement, which went a good distance to overcome her anxiety about sharp conflict. These good feelings—feelings that boosted her will to live—were temporarily crushed by a repression very close to home. The dean of students at Berkeley banned from campus the information tables at which students recruited for political causes, notably the civil rights movement, which was now appealing for volunteers to go to the South and participate in nonviolent resistance. The dean’s move, foolish as well as unjustified, created the Free Speech Movement, which gained overwhelming student support from the Right as well as the Left. The chancellor, Paul’s former student and collaborator, Clark Kerr, defended the dean’s thoughtless order. In early December 1964, with students conducting a sit-in, he panicked. Instead of listening and negotiating, he ordered police to remove the students, a task accomplished with dogs and considerable brutality. Dorothea and Paul were horrified. Just a few years before, they had been thrilled when he became chancellor.52 Now Lange predicted, correctly, that the violence would never be forgotten, “Clark Kerr will never get out from under that image,” she said.53