by Linda Gordon
Plate 25. Plantation owner.
Plate 27. Migrant agricultural worker in Marysville migrant camp (trying to figure out his year’s earnings). California.
Plate 30. Roadside meeting with Durham County farmer. North Carolina. He gives road directions by drawing in dirt with stick.
Plate 31. Drought refugees from Texas encamped in California near Exeter. Seven in family.
Plate 32. “Victory through Christ” Society holding its Sunday Morning Revival in a garage. Dos Palos, California. Testimony: “He’s such a wonderful savior, Glory to God. I’m so glad I came to home. Praise God. His love is so wonderful. He’s coming soon. I want to praise the Lord for what he is to me. He saved me one time and filled me with the Holy Ghost. Hallalulah! He will fill your heart today with overflowing. Bless His Holy name.”
Plate 45. *Negro tenant family who barely lives on the earnings of fifty dollars a year. They pay a standing rent. There are five children working; ages from seven to fourteen. The older children cultivating, the younger children hoeing and chopping.
* * *
*These captions are taken from Lange’s “general captions” that apply to more than one photograph.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book, more than any other I’ve done, rests on the generosity and knowledge of others, some old friends and some new acquaintances. In fact, my first thanks go to someone I never met, Henry Mayer. A superb biographer, he had embarked on a study of the life of Dorothea Lange when he met premature death from a heart attack. Some of his many friends sought a writer who could make use of the materials he had collected, their path led to me, and I rather hesitatingly agreed to consider the project. In doing that I met his wife, Betsy Anderson Mayer, a woman of uncommon generosity who gave me not only his papers but also his splendid collection of books of Lange’s photography. Betsy also became a friend and I am pleased finally to be able to thank her with this book.
I could not have written this book without the help of Dorothea Lange’s descendants. I want to thank them not only for their time but also for their thoughtful answers to my many questions, some of them intrusive. Many of them impressed me with their nuanced, judicious, and balanced appraisals and memories. I want to thank the late Daniel Dixon, and to express my regret that he did not live to see this book and tell me what he thought of it; Helen and John Dixon; Donald and Kate Fanger; Becky Jenkins; Katharine Taylor Loesch; Betsy, Meg, and Rondal Partridge; Dyanna, Onnie, and Paul Wegman Taylor. Others who were part of an extended Lange/Taylor family offered help, too, and I want to thank Mary and Malcolm Collier, Nora Elliott, Christina Gardner, Walter Goldschmidt, Pirkle Jones, Jennifer McFarland, Ray Marshall, Edee and Jack Mezirow, Helen Nestor, and the late Alan Temko. Lange’s previous biographer, Milton Meltzer, was kind enough to talk with me when I was in an early stage of research.
Scholars of Lange and in related fields also provided a great deal of help. I am especially grateful to Sally Stein, not only because her work on Lange is brilliant but also for providing me with an empty apartment for several weeks of work at the Getty Research Institute. Others read sections of the book for me and saved me from errors and/or gave me tips and materials; my thanks to Tom Bender, Arthur Bleich, Gray Brechin, Nick Cullather, Pete Daniel, Ellen Eisenberg, Donald Fanger, Jess Gilbert, Rosie Hunter, Hadassa Kosak, Judith Walzer Leavitt, Lewis Leavitt, David Ludden, Eric Meeks, Melissa Milewski, Greg Robinson, Anne Firor Scott, and Mike Wallace. In working with me on Lange’s photographs of the Japanese American internment for Impounded, Gary Okihiro was able to improve slightly my photographic sophistication and understanding of the Japanese American internment. I thank him also for his willingness to undertake a project with someone who was at first a stranger.
Allen Hunter, Elinor Langer, Bob Weil, and Laura Wexler read the whole damn thing, and their comments were invaluable. Barbara Forrest, Judy Leavitt, and Allen looked at photographs with me and reduced somewhat my tendency to agonize over choices. Helen Dixon, Becky Jenkins, Betsy, Meg and Rondal Partridge, and Dyanna Taylor helped me over and over again. Joyce Seltzer has my continuing gratitude for helping me become a better writer. A million thanks.
I want to thank also the archivists and graduate students who helped me with the research: Robin Doolin, Drew Johnson, Alice Hudson, Andrew Lee, Bill McMorris, Marcela Echeverri, Jack von Euw, Ivy Klenetsky, Melissa Milewski, Anamaria Quezada and Micaela Sullivan-Fowler. Michelle Chase did some painstaking scans for me. Archivists Beverly Brannan and Nicholas Natanson not only helped me find materials but as scholars, educated me as well.
The collective thanks I owe are no less fervent. First and foremost to my treasured colleagues in the history department and to colleagues from other departments from whom I have learned. Thanks to the NYU graduate school for providing me with some time to write this book. Thanks to the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library for a year’s fellowship and nurturing conditions for work. Thanks to the staff of W. W. Norton, especially Lucas Wittmann for his care and thoughtfulness with incessant details and Tom Mayer (in a lovely coincidence, the son of Henry Mayer, whose project I am in some sense completing). To Judy Dater, Gail Saliterman, Barrie Thorne, and the late Peter Lyman, thanks for putting me up. And my gratitude also to those who have heard me talk about Lange, displayed interest, and offered comments or asked difficult questions. These include many who just listened to lectures but especially friends whose intellectual rigor, aesthetic sensibility, and sense of justice have shaped my writing. Thank you to Allen Hunter above all, and to Ros Baxandall, Dick Cluster, Suzanne Desan, Sara Evans, Nancy Falk, Barbara Forrest, Susan Friedman, Ed Friedman, Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, Elinor Langer, Judy Leavitt, Lewis Leavitt, Gerda Lerner, Elaine Tyler May, Molly Nolan, Elizabeth Schneider, Joyce Seltzer, Shifra Sharlin, Charlotte Sheedy, Erik and Marcia Wright.
Finally, I have been blessed with an agent from heaven, Charlotte Sheedy. My editor, Bob Weil, is a rare jewel today, an editor who edited every page of my third-from-last draft, and the book is much better because of his superb skill and sensibility. Thank you, thank you, Bob and Charlotte.
NOTE ON PHOTOGRAPHS AND QUOTATIONS
Choosing which of Lange’s tens of thousands of photographs to include in this book was not an easy undertaking. I accomplished the task only by concluding that it was impossible to illustrate the full range of her subject matter and technique. I used several intersecting criteria for the selection: I wanted a balance of well-known, slightly known, and unknown photographs. I wanted to represent her range of subjects along several lines: in sociological terms—e.g., women and men, young and old people; in aspects of life—e.g., labor and living conditions; in geographical terms—e.g., East and West, U.S. and foreign; in genre—e.g., portraits, still lifes; in themes—e.g., relationships with others and with the photographer; in political and ethical concerns—e.g., social injustice, environmental destruction. My choices were further limited by a need to keep the cost of the book and my own expenditure under control. My apologies to those who find their favorite Lange photographs or themes not included.
The photographs are not presented strictly chronologically. Because some photographs must do double duty—for example, illustrate both genre and subject matter—I deliberately placed some where they fit my discussion of an issue rather than where they fit chronologically.
Sources for the photographs are identified separately after the notes.
In much of this book, I relied on taped interviews, sometimes transcribed, with Lange, her colleagues, and her family members. In quoting from interviews, I have corrected spelling and punctuation and have eliminated ellipses, “uh,” and pauses so as to make the statements easier to understand. Quotations from written sources are given exactly as they appear in the original.
NOTES
Abbreviations
AA Ansel Adams
AAA Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
BAE Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Department of A
griculture. All BAE photographs are in NARA (see below).
Bancroft Bancroft Library, University of California/Berkeley
CD Constance (Consie) Dixon
CG Christina Page Gardner
DL Dorothea Lange
Doud Richard Doud interviews, for AAA
FSA Bancroft Farm Security Administration papers, mss. C-R1, Bancroft Library, University of California/Berkeley
GRI Getty Research Institute
HM Henry Mayer
IC Imogen Cunningham
JD John Dixon
JDC John Dixon Collection
JZ John Szarkowski
KQED Tapes of interviews with Lange by San Francisco station KQED, 1964–65.
Lange field notes Notes taken on photographic assignments in small notebooks, OM. These sometimes give dates and locations, sometimes do not.
LNG Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum
LoC Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. All Lange images have the prefix LC-USF34-, followed by the photograph number cited.
MD Maynard Dixon
MD Diary Chronological notes by Maynard Dixon in box 2, Dixon Papers, mss. 73/8, Bancroft
MM Milton Meltzer
NARA National Archives, College Park, Maryland
OM Oakland Museum Dorothea Lange Archive
OWI Office of War Information
PST Paul Schuster Taylor
PST Bancroft Paul Schuster Taylor Papers, mss. 84/38, Bancroft Library, University of California/Berkeley
Riess Suzanne Riess, ed., “Dorothea Lange: The Making of a Documentary Photographer,” interview transcript, Berkeley, 1968, for the University of California/Berkeley Regional Oral History Office, Earl Warren Oral History Project
Riess/PST Suzanne Riess, ed., “Paul Schuster Taylor: California Social Scientist,” interview transcript, 3 vols., Berkeley 1973, for the University of California/Berkeley Regional Oral History Office, Earl Warren Oral History Project
RP Rondal Partridge
RS Roy Stryker
RS mss. Roy Stryker papers, University of Louisville, also on microfilm at LoC
TH Therese Heyman. All her interview transcripts are at OM
UCB University of California/Berkeley
UNC University of North Carolina, Southern History Collection photographs
Introduction: “A Camera Is a Tool for Learning How to See . . .”
1. Lange believed that Max Ernst was the author of this phrase but she was not sure and I was unable to track it down.
2. KQED 6.
3. Many of those familiar with the Migrant Mother picture took from it, unconsciously, the impression that it is a photograph of Lange herself, and they imagine her as a poor, Mother Earth sort of woman.
4. Evans quoted in Naomi Rosenblum, “Documentary Photography: A Historical Survey,” in Changing Chicago: A Photodocumentary (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 8; Daumier and Moholy-Nagy quoted in John Szarkowski, ed., Looking at Photographs (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1973), 72, 88.
5. KQED 16.
6. Riess. All further quotations from Lange in this book come from this oral history unless otherwise noted.
7. Nat Herz, “Dorothea Lange in Perspective: A Reappraisal of the FSA and an Interview,” Infinity 12, no. 4 (1963): 10.
8. Jack Delano, Photographic Memories (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 215.
9. Linda Nochlin, “The Realist Criminal,” Art in America, September/October and November/December 1973, 58.
10. Judith Keller, ed., Dorothea Lange: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 100.
11. Linda Gordon, “Biography as Microhistory, Photography as Microhistory: Documentary Photographer Dorothea Lange as Subject and Agent of Microhistory,” in Small Worlds: Method, Meaning, and Narrative in Microhistory, ed. James E. Brooks, Christopher R. DeCorse, and John Walton (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2007).
12. This is neither a psychological nor an art-historical analysis, for which I am not trained. Luckily I have been able to rely on some superb scholarship about Lange’s photography: Robert Coles, untitled essay, in Dorothea Lange, Photographs of a Lifetime (Millerton, New York: Aperture, 1982); James C. Curtis, “Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, and the Culture of the Great Depression,” Winterthur Portfolio (1986): 1–20; James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989); Jacqueline Ellis, Silent Witnesses: Representations of Working-Class Women in the United States (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1998); Therese Thau Heyman, ed., Celebrating a Collection: The Work of Dorothea Lange (Oakland, California: Oakland Museum, 1978); Therese Thau Heyman, Sandra S. Phillips, and John Szarkowski, eds., Dorothea Lange: American Photographs (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Chronicle Books, 1994); Karin Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980); Elizabeth Partridge, ed., Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994); Naomi Rosenblum, “Modernist Eye, Responsive Heart: The Work of Dorothea Lange,” in Dorothea Lange: The Human Face (Paris: NBC Editions, 1998); Carol Shloss, In Visible Light: Photography and the American Writer, 1840–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Sally Stein, “On Location: The Placement (and Replacement) of California in 1930s Photography,” in Reading California: Art, Image, and Identity, 1900–2000, ed. Stephanie Barron et al. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000); Sally Stein, “Passing Likeness: Dorothea Lange’s ‘Migrant Mother’ and the Paradox of Iconicity,” in Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self, ed. Coco Fusco and Brian Wallis (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2003); Sally Stein, “Peculiar Grace: Dorothea Lange and the Testimony of the Body,” in Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life, ed. Partridge; Sally Stein, “Portraiture’s Veil,” in Dorothea Lange: The Human Face (Paris: NBC Editions, 1998); William Stott, “Introduction to a Never-Published Book of Dorothea Lange’s Best Photographs of Depression America,” Exposure 22 no. 3 (1984): 22–30; Karen Tsujimoto, Dorothea Lange: Archive of an Artist (Oakland, California: Oakland Museum, 1995); Charles Wollenberg, Photographing the Second Gold Rush: Dorothea Lange and the Bay Area at War, 1941–1945 (Berkeley: Heyday Books, 1995).
13. KQED 24.
14. She went on to say, “He also trains his vision not to interpret in terms of what he guesses is the situation. . . .” KQED 14.
15. Richard Gregory, quoted in Atul Gawande, “The Itch,” The New Yorker, June 30, 2008, 63.
16. KQED 17.
Scene 1
1. Letters from students in OM and in JDC.
1. Child of Iron, Wounded
1. Riess, 17. This interview is my source for all of Lange’s childhood memories, unless otherwise cited, but only direct quotes are attributed in the notes.
2. Bernard Friedrich Nutzhorn, Dorothea’s paternal grandfather, came from Württemberg in 1859, calling himself a carpenter, but by 1864, when he became a U.S. citizen, he was operating a grocery store in the New York neighborhood now called SoHo. He married Dorothea Margaretta Fischer, born in Hannover, Lower Saxony, and brought to the United States by her parents. He soon bought property, moved to Hoboken, and opened a liquor warehouse as well as a grocery store. When he died in 1900, he left $15,000 in real estate and $500 in personal property—these amount to more than $332,000 and $11,000, respectively, today (not bad for an immigrant). They had three sons, and the second, Heinrich Martin Nutzhorn, born in 1868, became Dorothea’s father. At about the same time, Friedrich Lange, Dorothea’s maternal grandfather, emigrated from Oldenburg, also in Lower Saxony, and his future wife, Sophie Votteler, from Stuttgart. When they met, Sophie was a widow with a child—her first husband, Stefan Woll, had died young of consumption. She married Friedrich in 1866 and gave birth to five more children with him. He, too, was in business, a tea merchant in partnership with his brother Carl in Manhatt
an. Their first daughter, Johanna, born in 1873, became Dorothea’s mother.
3. Dorothea’s father had been married previously, but his wife died in childbirth, along with the infant, a year after they married.
4. Hoboken information was taken from the following sources: History of the Municipalities of Hudson County, New Jersey, 1630–1923, vol. 1 (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Co., 1924); Patricia Florio Colrick, Hoboken (Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 1999); Andrew L. Yarrow, “Hoboken,” New York Times, November 15, 1985; and census publications.
5. HM interview with Joy Lange Boardman, October 14, 1999.
6. John was the father of the film actress Hope Lange (1931–2003), Dorothea’s first cousin. Therese Heyman interview with David Lange, February 15, 1978, transcribed by Zoe Brown, in Dorothea Lange Archive, OM (cited).
7. Riess, 1.
8. The polio virus is excreted in human stools; the virus could enter the digestive tract through contact with infected water or sewage or dirty diapers. John Rodman Paul, A History of Poliomyelitis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 1–2. This understanding of the transition from endemic to epidemic polio has now been challenged, however, by the finding of high polio rates in Uganda and India; see Anne Finger, Elegy for a Disease: A Personal and Cultural History of Polio (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2006), 46. In the first large American outbreak, 71 percent of the cases occurred in well-to-do or moderate-income families; see Vermont State Board of Health, Infantile Paralysis in Vermont (Burlington, Vermont, 1924), 23.
9. In New York City, for example, the incidence of polio was highest in bucolic Queens and Staten Island, lower in Manhattan.