by Linda Gordon
Lange’s respect for the farmworkers she was hired to photograph was part of a more general respect for labor. She refused to measure skill hierarchically. Where she could converse with her subjects, as in North Carolina, she took the trouble to learn what they did and to expose the expertise, planning, and problem solving involved.
Her assignment to document farm labor provided her the opportunity to bring women’s work into visibility. Her moorings did not include a women’s rights movement; the last one had peaked and then dwindled not long after she left her childhood home, and second-wave feminism arose after her death. So it is hardly surprising that she retained some Victorian notions of women as naturally nurturant, instinctive, self-sacrificing, and all-around softer than men—despite the fact that she herself was not like this. Her photography, however, subverted those beliefs. Her female subjects bear little resemblance to the stereotypical feminine; instead they are judicious, competent, and often powerful, like her male subjects. Few of her female subjects tip their heads in flirtatious, little-girl appeal. Their “domestic” labor is clearly arduous and skilled.
Despite her many images of suffering and sacrificing mothers, a modern and open attitude toward family structure shows in Lange’s photographs. Just as she thought that her photography “revealed” her unrecognized love for her mother, so the photography “revealed” unconventional forms of family. Late in her life, Lange recognized that the gender ideology of her youth no longer fit. Speaking of a photograph of a shipyard worker made in 1944, Lange remarked, “She represents the emergence of another era, of a change in the way women live . . . the growth in political development.”6
Lange was also more farsighted than most New Dealers in her environmental sensibility. At a time when the man-against-nature ethos still dominated, she saw and tried to show the cost of environmental destruction—the cost not only to “nature” but to human community and quality of life.
Lange’s remarkable ability to see incited her to dream of more than she could accomplish. To the end of her life, she longed for more time to work—not just more years to live but also time without interruptions. Always self-critical, she felt she was just beginning to explore the potential of still photography. And yet she enjoyed this restlessness. Admitting that she was “constantly restless and probing and frantic,” she nevertheless affirmed her choices: “that way of life and working keeps you alive, no boredom descends on you. You’re right out on the thin edge, all the time, where you’re unprotected, defenseless, where it’s going to hurt you, but you’re there by choice.”7
LANGE LEFT MANY descendants, and I had the good fortune to interview some of them. I was impressed not only by their generosity and openness toward me but also by their scrupulous and balanced perspective on her. No one would suggest that she was easygoing, yet her children, stepchildren, and grandchildren spoke of her warmth, her encouragement, and what they had learned from her, as well as of her infuriating need to control. All found their sense of her changed a bit when her biographer Milton Meltzer discovered the truth about her father, finding in it a clue to her insecurities. Paul Taylor in particular was deeply hurt that she had not trusted him with that truth. He continued to live with Dorrie, in a sense, for years after her death, as he parceled out her gifts, disposed of her photography and papers, and promoted her ideas. But he never ceased his activist intellectual work, and he continued advocating for land reform and supporting American farmworkers as they finally built a union—the United Farm Workers.
The most alienated family member was the one who agonized most over Dorothea’s death: her stepdaughter Consie. She decided that it would be hypocritical to attend the memorial service, but remained tortured, never fully at rest with that decision.8 Paul, always judgmental, responded angrily to Consie’s refusal, and as a result of his response, Consie would not attend his memorial, either. For her, the family only brought pain.
AT LANGE’S DEATH, a stream of obituaries and other tributes began to appear in newspapers, magazines, and letters to Paul. The San Francisco Chronicle and the Japanese American Nichi Bei Times put her death on the front page.9 A memorial service held a few weeks after she died drew hundreds. Dan Dixon spoke eloquently for the family. Critic Allan Temko spoke, repeating the widespread belief that she was responsible for the color of the Golden Gate Bridge and praising her eye for beauty, even in “humble cooking utensils assembled nobly at a primitive family hearth.” The California Wind Quintet played a Mozart quintet arranged by Ross Taylor. Christina Page Gardner memorialized her by mentioning three news items: Sonoma County, where she lived, was to get $200,000 in federal aid to build portable dwelling units for farmworkers; the last claims for damages to Japanese Americans from the internship were paid; and “Two Ku Klux Klansmen, who were acquitted in the nightrider killing of a Negro educator last year, attacked a Negro photographer yesterday and were promptly jailed. The photographer was also arrested.” Most telling, perhaps, is that Christina did not need to say more—everyone knew these events’ relevance to Lange.
Yet outside the Bay Area, she was well known only in the world of photography at the time of her death. The New York Times obituary repeated a common mistake about her work: DOROTHEA LANGE IS DEAD AT 70; CHRONICLED DUST BOWL WOES. Tributes by people who knew her well were, of course, more accurate: For Magnum, Wayne Miller wrote, “Although physically small and at times fragile, she was a giant made of spring steel.”10
Her recognition has grown steeply since her death, and in the first years, Paul was partly responsible. Promoting her became a job almost as important as his advocacy of the 160-acre limit. He tried several strategies for getting an urban photography project started. He systematically gathered information from Dorothea’s photography friends to create an exact chronology of her life. Whenever journalists, scholars, or curators wanted information, he wrote them at length.
It does not diminish his work to recognize that Lange’s fame would have developed even without him. She was “discovered” by the progressive activists of the civil rights, the anti–Vietnam War, and the women’s movements during the 1960s and 1970s. Today, her work is part of the classic canon of American art and international photography. Her name is frequently invoked to refer to a classic, realist feel in documentary, as in “There’s a Dorothea Lange feel to his pictures.”11 The National Endowment for the Humanities includes Lange photographs in its mass distribution of American art to schools.12 The famed German art publisher Taschen includes a chapter on Lange in its collection on twenty-five Photographic Icons. Her photographs are staples in textbooks, articles, and on Web sites about the Depression in particular and American history more generally. Migrant Mother is often included as the only nonjournalistic iconic photograph in a group including images of raising the flag at Iwo Jima, the spaceship Challenger explosion, JFK’s son saluting his father’s coffin, and the Kent State shooting.13 It is an icon in many countries besides the United States. The high-gloss art market has now taken in her vintage photographs and they regularly sell for six-figure sums.
Since so much of her work is in the public domain, it is repeatedly used for purposes alien to hers. Consider just the single photograph, Migrant Mother.14 Both profit and nonprofit businesses raise funds by selling prints of it, at prices from $9.98 to $755. At least one enterprise offers a “colorized” print of Migrant Mother.15 Others sell postcards and notecards featuring it. The photograph has been used to promote the Socialist party, the Black Panther party, the ACLU, myriad NGOs, academic conferences, and women’s movement and charity appeals and events. It appears on the Web sites of several countries and as the cover of an issue of the Archives of Pediatric Adolescent Medicine.16 It advertises Samsonite luggage, antiwrinkle cosmetics, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Salvation Army, the Gap, and hundreds of commodities. It is featured on GodWeb. Lange was right that it was no longer her photograph.
Much of her photography was originally published as authorless, so many fewer people know her name than kno
w her photographs. But that, too, is changing. She figures repeatedly in halls of fame and on lists of great women, schoolchildren’s heroes, and photographs that changed the world; Governor Schwarzenegger announced her induction into California’s Hall of Fame in 2008.17 She is the subject of dozens of dissertations and theses, thousands of college papers and school reports. There are plays about her, both amateur and professional, and several films. A public elementary school has been named for her in Nipomo, California. Her name is used as a comparison or metaphor, almost always complimentarily, to invoke a certain style and substance: realist photographs of the poor, photos where composition and bodies indicate anxiety or hard work or both, with restrained beauty.
What Lange would have considered her biggest failure was not personal but collective: that an urban photography project never materialized. More than seventy years since the New Deal, the United States has not generated large-scale public support for photography or the arts in general. Documentary photography thrives nevertheless, though very few practitioners can earn a living by doing it. Photographs and critics frequently mention Lange as source and inspiration. The next-best thing to Project One was the 1990 initiation of the twenty-thousand-dollar Lange-Taylor Prize for documentary collaboration between a photographer and a writer, supported by the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University.18 Winners have documented daily life in the Mississippi Delta, the struggle to survive in Cuba since the fall of the Soviet Union, Mayan survival in Guatemala City, Salvadoran street gangs, and living with mental illness.
DOROTHEA LANGE’S PHOTOGRAPHS have never been more immediately relevant. I never anticipated finishing this book under economic conditions resembling those she felt and illustrated. As I write, many are calling for “another Dorothea Lange” to document and communicate the impoverishment and fear that so many are experiencing. Yet her photographs have had an extraordinary impact even in the most prosperous of times; they may well live forever. There will always be a need to be reminded that beauty can be found in unlikely places, that we must learn to see beyond the limits of the conventional and the expected. Such indelible images mean more, not less, if we understand how they came to exist. They were produced not by a faultless genius who could remain above the wounds, failings, and sins that afflict the rest of us, but by a fallible and hardworking woman. They were produced also by the historical times she lived in, times optimistic and pessimistic, times that honored generous, compassionate, and respectful impulses of Americans and times that encouraged the closed, fearful, and intolerant. Lange’s photographs will always evoke the best of American democracy.
LANGE’S PHOTOGRAPH CAPTIONS
page xii. Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two.
9.4 Ditch bank housing for Mexican field workers. Imperial Valley, California.
9.5 Water supply: an open settling basin from the irrigation ditch in a California squatter camp near Calipatria.
9.7 Family of nine from Fort Smith, Arkansas, trying to repair their car on road between Phoenix and Yuma, Arizona. On their way to try to find work in the California harvests.
12.1 Near Meloland, Imperial Valley. Large scale agriculture. Gang labor, Mexican and white, from the Southwest. Pull, clean, tie and crate carrots for the eastern market for eleven cents per crate of forty-eight bunches. Many can make barely one dollar a day. Heavy oversupply of labor and competition for jobs is keen.
12.2 Filipinos cutting lettuce.
12.3 Filipino crew of fifty-five boys cutting and loading lettuce.
12.4 Cotton weighing. South Texas.
12.5 “Cleanliness.” Southern California. Oklahoma refugees camping in Imperial Valley, California.
12.6 1936 drought refugee from Polk, Missouri. Awaiting the opening of orange picking season at Porterville, California.
12.7 Cotton picker. Southern San Joaquin Valley, California.
14.2 *Waiting for the semi-monthly relief checks at Calipatria. Typical story: 15 years ago they owned farms in Oklahoma. Lost them through foreclosure when cotton prices fell after the war. Became tenants and sharecroppers. With drought and dust they came West—1934–1937. Never before left the county where they were born; now, although in California over a year, they haven’t been continuously resident in any single county long enough to become legal resident. Reason: migratory agricultural laborers.
14.3 Drought refugees from Oklahoma camping by the roadside. They hope to work in the cotton fields. There are seven in family. Blythe, California
14.4 Drought refugees from Oklahoma camping by the roadside. They hope to work in the cotton fields. The official at the border (California-Arizona) inspection service said that on this day, August 17, 1936, twenty-three car loads and truck loads of migrant families out of the drought counties of Oklahoma and Arkansas had passed through that station entering California up to 3 o’clock in the afternoon
14.5 Power farming displaces tenants from the land in dry cotton area. Childress County, Texas Panhandle.
14.6 The highway going West. US 80 near Lordsburg, New Mexico.
15.1 Butter bean vines across the porch. Negro quarter in Memphis, Tennessee.
15.2 Young sharecropper and his first child. Hillside Farm. Person County, North Carolina.
15.3 Tenant farmer. Chatham County, North Carolina.
15.4 Construction detail of double log cabin of Negro share tenants. The cowhide was hung there after being dried on a barn to be used as floor covering. Shelf shows churn, also bucket of water in which baby’s bottle is kept cool. Person County, North Carolina.
15.6 *Mr. Whitfield is topping, and at the same time worming. The children are looking for worms. The 3-1/2 year old girl found two. Her father says she is learning, but she is a little too rough with the tobacco leaves and bruises them. The children like to go to the field with their father. When the mother goes, the oldest girl has to stay at home with the baby. The mother has helped a “right smart” this year because Mr. Whitfield has been “falling off.” She thinks it is because he is so worried over paying the doctor and the hospital bills.
18.1 South of Eloy, Pinal County, Arizona. Ten-year-old migratory Mexican cotton picker. He was born in Tucson. He is fixing the family car. He does not go to school now, but when he did go was in grade 1-A. Says (in Spanish) “I do not go to school because my father wishes my aid in picking cotton.” On preceding day he picked 25 pounds of Pima cotton.
18.2 On Arizona Highway 87, south of Chandler. Maricopa County, Arizona. Children in a democracy. A migratory family living in a trailer in an open field. No sanitation, no water. They came from Amarillo, Texas. Pulled bolls near Amarillo, picked cotton near Roswell, New Mexico, and in Arizona. Plan to return to Amarillo at close of cotton picking season for work on WPA.
24.1 Home.
Inserts
Plate 5. “Skid Row.” Howard Street, San Francisco, California.
Plate 6. Cortaro Farms, Pinal County, Arizona. Migratory cotton picker on Cortaro Farms.
Plate 7. Migratory woman, Greek, living in a cotton camp near Exeter, California.
Plate 9. A grandmother from Oklahoma. She works in the California pea fields. Calipatria, California.
Plate 10. Cotton worker in Sunday clothes. Near Blytheville, Arkansas.
Plate 11. Near Douglas, Georgia. “You don’t have to worriate so much and you’ve got time to raise somp’n to eat.” The program to eliminate the risk and uncertainty of a one-crop system meets the approval of this sharecropper. She sits on the porch and sorts tobacco.
Plate 13. Tent interior in a labor contractor’s camp, showing household equipment. Near Westley, California.
Plate 15. Zollie Lyon, Negro sharecropper, home from the field for dinner at noontime, with his wife and part of his family. Note dog run. 1939, Wake County, North Carolina.
Plate 16. *One of Chris Adolph’s younger children. Farm Security Administration Rehabilitation clients. Came to the Yakima Valley in 1937 from Bethune, Kit Carson
County, Colorado. He owned his own farm there and he had lived there all his life. Drought forced him out with his wife and 8 children. His wife had been a school teacher. . . . “I’ve broke thousands of acres of sod. The dust got so bad that we had to sleep with wet cloths over our faces.”
Plate 17. Calipatria, Imperial Valley, in Farm Security Administration (FSA) emergency migratory labor camp. Daughter of ex-tenant farmers on thirds and fourths in cotton. Had fifty dollars when set out. Went to Phoenix, picked cotton, pulled bolls made eighty cents a day with two people pulling bolls. Stayed until school closed. Went to Idaho, picked peas until August. Left McCall with forty dollars “in hand.” Went to Cedar City and Parowan, Utah, a distance of 700 miles. Picked peas through September. Went to Hollister, California. Picked peas through October. Left Hollister for Calipatria for early peas which froze. Now receiving Farm Security Administration food grant and waiting for work to begin. “Back in Oklahoma, we are sinking. You work your head off for a crop and then see it burn up. You live in debts that you can never get out of. This isn’t a good life, but I say that it’s a better life than it was.”
Plate 18. Migratory Mexican field worker’s home on the edge of a frozen pea field.
Plate 19. Destitute family. Five children, aged two to seventeen years.
Plate 20. A grandmother washing clothes in a migrant camp. Stanislaus County, California.
Plate 21. Daughter of Negro tenant churning butter.
Plate 22. Loading cotton.
Plate 23. Loading cotton.
Plate 24. *Beginning at the bottom of the [tobacco] plant, the leaves are stripped; usually 2 or 3 bottom leaves are removed at one priming. Only the rip[e] leaves are primed, and ripeness is determined by the color of the leaf. When ripe, the leaves are pale yellow in color, although they are often difficult to distinguish from the green leaves. Hence the job of priming is something of an art, which is left to the men of the family, or to those “women folks” who are skilled at it. In the field picture, the men are priming for the second time, the “first primings,” or sand leaves, having been removed.