Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  36. Imogen Cunningham, years later, called Mather the “first and best influence” on Weston, saying she educated him to photography’s possibilities when he was only a “slick commercial photographer and an expert retoucher.” IC to Phyllis Masser of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, November 12, 1970, quoted in Lawrence Jasud, “Margrethe Mather: Questions of Influence,” Archive [Center for Creative Photography] 11 (1979): 55.

  37. Hard living and lack of economic security gave Mather chronic health problems, and she began to use opium and alcohol heavily. In the 1940s she developed multiple sclerosis; she died in 1952. Beth Gates Warren, Margrethe Mather & Edward Weston: A Passionate Collaboration (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Van Deren Coke, “The New Vision in Europe and America: 1920–1950,” in James Enyeart, ed., Decade by Decade: Twentieth-Century American Photographs from the Collection of the Center for Creative Photography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1989), 19–34.

  38. Susan Ehrens, ed., Alma Lavenson: Photographs (Berkeley, California: Wildwood Arts, 1990); review by Susan J. Cooke, Woman’s Art Journal 16, no. 2: 40–41.

  39. Often refugees from the defeated 1848 German revolutions, many joined the gold rush, found little gold, but soon discovered that they could make more reliable fortunes by supplying the miners. In the nineteenth century virtually all goods had to enter through the port of San Francisco. This was the origin of the Levi Strauss fortune as well as those of the Gerstle, Salz, Sloss, Freudenthal, Kahn, and Elkus families, among others.

  40. One historian thought that “the Jews in the American West in the second half of the nineteenth century were the freest anywhere in the world.” Fred Rosenbaum, Visions of Reform: Congregation Emanu-El and the Jews of San Francisco, 1849–1999 (Berkeley, California: Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2000), 41.

  41. One such, the Haas-Lilienthal house, is now a museum, one of the attractions recommended to San Francisco tourists.

  42. Jerry Flamm, Good Life in Hard Times: San Francisco in the ’20s & ’30s (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1978), chapter 5.

  43. Edythe Katten loathed her parents’ spelling of her name and much preferred “Edith.” For help in untangling these family connections I am indebted to Jonathan Katten, Anne Katten, and Jonathan Elkus.

  44. Lange postcard (of a Dürer) to Elizabeth Elkus, from Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, dated April 23, 1954, box 2, folder 43, Albert Israel Elkus Papers, Bancroft. Elizabeth Elkus was described by another friend thus: “If you know her even a little bit, if you’re in trouble, she’s just the person who comes to help you out in the most unofficious way, so that you wouldn’t even know you were being helped. She’s that kind of a person.” Suzanne Riess, ed., “Sketches of an Improbable Ninety Years,” interview with Helen A. Salz, University of California/Berkeley Regional Oral History Office.

  45. HM interviews with Jan Katten, February 16, 2000, and Ken Katten, March 4, 2000.

  46. JM interview with Roger Sturtevant, February 1977, OM, 31, 36. I have never been able to identify JM. Unfortunately what Sturtevant went on to say tends to undermine his credibility: “The women at that time who were sexually free went around figuratively [sic] raping males and doing Greek dances and being, what do I want to say, being spiritually superior.”

  47. Mill Valley Herald clipping, n.d., from JDC. An amateur painter, Wilson hosted lavish roast beef dinners for her artist friends every weekend; CD to MM June 21, 1976. It was from Mary Ann Wilson that Dorothea adopted the beret that she wore for the rest of her life.

  48. Gardner, “The Contemplation of Dorothea.”

  49. Maynard’s daughter Consie remarked, “Everything that was culture in S.F. in those days was supported by the old Jewish families. The Walters, the Haases, the Raases, the Arnsteins, the Kattens, the Salzes, the Zellerbachs, the Strausses.” CD to MM, June 23, 1976. Referring to the analogous crowd in New York, Benita Eisler calls it “upper bohemia”: Benita Eisler, O’Keeffe and Stieglitz: An American Romance (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 342.

  50. Riess, 118–119.

  51. Ibid., 90–92.

  52. Quoted in Allan Sekula, “Photography Between Labour and Capital,” in Leslie Shedden, Mining Photographs and Other Pictures. A Selection from the Negative Archives of Shedden Studio, Glace Bay, Cape Breton (Cape Breton: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, n.d.), 23.

  53. John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 1988), 35–36.

  54. Max Kozloff, “Nadar and the Republic of Mind,” quoted in Vicki Goldberg, ed., Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1981), 132–35.

  55. She gave Gertrude Clausen a kimono to throw over her suit to relax the lines of the composition. Yet she also posed her once looking away from the camera so that the then-fashionable Psyche knot of her hair would show. Gardner, “The Contemplation of Dorothea.”

  56. Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (w1986), 3–64.

  57. Alan Trachtenberg, “Likeness as Identity: Reflections on the Daguerrean Mystique,” in The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham Clarke (London: Reaktion, 1992), 173–92, 189–90.

  58. One scholar calls this the “auratic sign of middle class rights.” Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 54.

  59. Max Kozloff argued that because of these mixed functions, photographers are often caught between “the memorial aims of the image . . . and its type-casting function,” the former realist, the latter symbolic. Kozloff, “Nadar,” 130. Lange integrated those two aspects of portrait function well.

  60. Rosenblum, speech at the Amon Carter Museum.

  61. Smith, American Archives, 55.

  62. Riess, 54.

  63. Doud, DL.

  64. Sekula, “Photography Between Labour and Capital,” 194.

  65. Riess, 92. In what might have been a veiled dig at Lange, Cunningham said, “Most of the people that I photograph are people whose image both psychically and physically mean[s] something to me and that is the reason that I am an un-money making photographer.” IC to James McLeod, box 4, July 11, 1970, IC Papers, AAA.

  66. Quoted in Max Kozloff, New York: Capital of Photography (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 39.

  4. Maynard Dixon, Bohemian Artist

  1. Biographical information on Maynard Dixon was taken from: Anatomy of a Frontier Town: Maynard Dixon’s Fresno (Madera, California: Madera Method Foundation Press, 1995), a collection of primary sources based on the journal of Maynard Dixon’s mother, Constance Maynard Dixon; Wesley Burnside, Maynard Dixon: Artist of the West (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1974), Linda Jones Gibbs, with Deborah Brown Rasiel, Escape to Reality: The Western World of Maynard Dixon (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Museum of Art, 2000); Donald J. Hagerty, Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1998); Grant Wallace, “Maynard Dixon: Biography and Works,” California Art Research, WPA Monograph, WPA Project 2874, vol. 8, 1937; Jayne McKay, Maynard Dixon: Art and Spirit (2007 DVD, available from www.maynarddixondoc.com).

  2. HM interview with Edith Arnstein Jenkins, September 4, 1998.

  3. Winona Tomanoczy, “Remembrances of a Friend,” in Maynard Dixon, Images of the Native American (San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 1981), 80.

  4. Maynard’s father Harry, a Confederate officer, moved to California with a group of other Confederate loyalists fleeing Reconstruction and established an “Alabama colony” near the San Joaquin River. Harry St. John Dixon Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bringing his old party loyalty into a new context, he became active in California’s Democratic party. Harry Dixon had sufficient prestige and power that he could get away with refusing to fly the U.S. flag; he compromised by not showing the Confederate flag, either—instead, his wife, Constance, sewed a medieval banner as a means of
flying something unobjectionable. He named his second child Rebecca so they could call her “Reb,” thus offering him an intimate means of expressing his political attachments.

  5. “I have friends among them I would prefer to many a white man.” Zeb Stewart, “Do You Know Maynard Dixon?” from the audiovisual program at the California Academy of Science Exhibition 1981; Dixon papers, mss. 73/81c, box 2, Bancroft.

  6. Oscar Lewis, Bay Window Bohemia (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1956), 195.

  7. TH interview with RP and CG, August 26, 1975, OM.

  8. By the 1870s, San Franciscans patronized hotels and restaurants in unusually high numbers. Barbara Berglund, Making San Francisco American: Cultural Frontiers in the Urban West, 1846–1906 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 31–33; Warren Unna, The Coppa Murals: A Pageant of Bohemian Life in San Francisco at the Turn of the Century (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1952), 8, 53–54; Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters, Literary San Francisco: A Pictorial History from Its Beginnings to the Present Day (San Francisco: City Lights and Harper & Row, 1980).

  9. “Gottardo Piazzoni,” California Art Research, WPA Monograph, WPA Project 2874, vol. 7, 1937.

  10. Shirley Staschen Triest, A Life on the First Waves of Radical Bohemianism in San Francisco, transcript of interview, 1995–96, University of California/Berkeley Regional Oral History Office, Bancroft, 49–50; Samuel Dickson, Tales of San Francisco (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 669–70; “Lee Randolph,” California Art Research, WPA Monograph, WPA Project 2874, vol. 7, 1937.

  11. Idwal Jones, Ark of Empire: San Francisco’s Montgomery Block (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1951), 23.

  12. Dickson, Tales of San Francisco, 669–70.

  13. Robert O’Brien, This is San Francisco: A Classic Portrait of the City (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994), 33.

  14. Emily Hahn, Romantic Rebels: An Informal History of Bohemianism in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 46–47, 69.

  15. Andrée Marechal Workman, “Modernism and the Desert: Maynard Dixon,” Vanguard, March 1982, 23.

  16. The limited information about Lillian West Tobey Dixon comes from “Recollections of Constance (Consie) Dixon,” January 10, 1977, September 8, 1977, and February 5, 1978, typescript, given to author by Consie Dixon’s daughter Becky Jenkins; from http://genforum.genealogy.com/tobey/messages/251.html; Dixon papers, mss. 73/81, 1: folder Lummis, Bancroft; and http://www.askart.com/askart/t/lillian_west_tobey/lillian_west_tobey.aspx. Her career after the divorce does not fit with the story of complete collapse: After further study at the California College of Arts and Crafts, she was an adjunct instructor at UC Berkeley in 1918. She had a studio on San Francisco’s Russian Hill before moving to Salt Lake City, where she died in 1925 or 1926.

  17. MD diary.

  18. Workman, “Modernism and the Desert,” 25.

  19. CD to MM, July 6, 1976.

  20. In those days, the only gentlemanly thing to do was to get the wife to be the plaintiff.

  21. MD diary.

  22. Remembrance by Constance Dixon in Dixon, Images of the Native American, 64–65. I wonder if Dixon perceived the irony in Indian children playing at being Indians.

  23. CD to MM, October 25, 1976.

  24. His mood is evident in his early responses to her in his extremely terse notes. For example: “Dorothea and hope—her encouragement” (MD diary).

  25. Notes typed from Lange’s handwritten original, JDC; KQED 12.

  26. 1920 manuscript census.

  27. MM interview with IC, March 17, 1976.

  28. Quoted in Wallace, “Maynard Dixon,” 76.

  29. Notes typed from Lange’s handwritten original, JDC.

  30. San Francisco Examiner, January 22, 1920, 12; San Francisco Chronicle, January 22, 1920.

  31. California Division of Vital Statistics.

  5. Working Mother in Bohemia

  1. The Herbert Fleishhackers, one of San Francisco’s wealthiest families and among Dorothea’s clients, invited them to dinner once. Dorothea reciprocated and no doubt put great effort into her preparations for having them at her home; then the Fleishhackers invited the Dixons for a weekend at their country house, where servants waited to fulfill their every desire. TH interview with Roger Sturtevant, n.d., transcript 9, OM.

  2. CD to MM, October 20, 1976.

  3. TH interview with Sturtevant; CD to MM, June 23, 1976.

  4. San Francisco News, March 24, 1920; San Francisco Chronicle, March 25, 1920.

  5. Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978), 49.

  6. Riess, 92.

  7. MD diary. All subsequent Dixon quotes from this source unless otherwise noted.

  8. CD to MM, November 4, 1976.

  9. Erika Doss, “Between Modernity and ‘the Real Thing,’” American Art 18 no. 3 (2004): 25; Linda Jones Gibbs, with Deborah Brown Rasiel, Escape to Reality: The Western World of Maynard Dixon (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Museum of Art, 2000), 140.

  10. Donald T. Hagerty, Desert Dreams: The Art and Life of Maynard Dixon (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1998), chapter 6; unpublished biography of Maynard Dixon, California Art Research, WPA Project 2874, AAA. Recently, Dixon’s paintings have sold for as much as $1.7 million; see www.maynarddixon.org/auction.php, accessed March 26, 2008.

  11. TH interview with Sturtevant.

  12. Grant, “Maynard Dixon: Biography and Works,” California Art Research, WPA Monograph, WPA Project 2874, vol. 8, 1937, 8–9, 82.

  13. Many years later, in 1938 or 1939, Maynard told Consie that he had talked Lillian into having a baby because he believed it would “straighten her out.” When Consie asked why he had left her with Lillian, he gave the same reason: “ ‘Everyone said that the child would help straighten L out.’ ” Consie added the underscoring in the transcript of this interview to emphasize that he referred to her, to her face, in the third person. “Recollections of Constance Dixon,” January 10, 1977, September 8, 1977, and February 5, 1978. CD to MM, July 6, 1976.

  14. CD to MM, June 21 and October 25, 1976; Consie Dixon, “Recollections.”

  15. CD to MM, October 25, November 4, and November 10, 1976; CD, “Recollections.”

  16. Riess, 122.

  17. HM interview with Nora Elliott and Jeff Lustig, June 28, 2000; HM interview with Jon Elkus, April 18, 2000.

  18. Elizabeth Partridge, ed., Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 93. This photograph was used as a cover photo for Mary Karr’s memoir, The Liars’ Club.

  19. Meltzer, Dorothea Lange, 109.

  20. Partridge, Dorothea Lange, 94.

  21. Now Presidio Hill School.

  22. CD to MM, January 10, 1977.

  23. San Francisco Chronicle, August 20, 1922; Wallace, “Maynard Dixon,” 82.

  24. Reiss, 126.

  25. DL to Margot Fanger, February 1960.

  26. Author’s interview with Malcolm and Mary Collier, July 19, 2007.

  27. John Collier practiced through photography what he called “visual anthropology,” which his wife, Mary, traced to Lange’s mastery of showing context in photography. It is as if, Mary Collier said, John represented a second generation, bringing Lange’s intuitive ideas into full elaboration. Author’s interview with Malcolm and Mary Collier.

  28. W. L. Rusho, Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 1983).

  29. Everett Ruess to Stella Knight Ruess, letter dated November 5, 1933, in Rusho, Everett Ruess, 182.

  30. Maynard wrote Mrs. Ruess a hopeful letter, pointing out from personal experience that wanderers often dropped out of sight for a time and then reappeared. MD to Stella Knight Ruess, March 1935, in Rusho, Everett Ruess, 118. In 2008 Ruess’s body was finally found, and in 2009 definitively identified through DNA, near Comb Ridge, Utah. The unconfirmed story was that Aneth Nez, a Navajo, had actually seen him killed by Ute Indians (traditional enemies
of the Navajo) and buried him afterward; Nez never told anyone except a medicine man he consulted, who in turn told the story to another patient in 2008 who reported it. National Geographic Adventure, ApriI/May 2009; Salt Lake Tribune, April 26, 2009.

  31. Hagerty, Desert Dreams, 149.

  32. Ibid.

  33. These and other stunts are recounted in HM interview with RP, July 7, 1999; Arnold Genthe, As I Remember (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1936), 64–65; Meltzer, Dorothea Lange, 61–62; TH interview with RP and CG, August 26, 1975.

  34. For his “cold as Christian charity” remark, see Winona Tomanoczy, “Remembrances of a Friend,” in Maynard Dixon, Images of the Native American (San Francisco: California Academy of Sciences, 1981), 80. On anti-Semitism, see HM interviews with RP and with Edith Arnstein Jenkins, September 4, 1998. In 1938, MD wrote in a letter, “What gets me about the Jew bunch is always belly aken about the jewish problem . . . ther aint no jew problem only what they make hollering about it.” He then added, “Shure they like the Money but I have saw plenty Pale Faces . . . that’s got the same itch.” MD to Tom Moriarty, June 6, 1938, quoted in Doss, “Between Modernity and ‘The Real Thing,’” 24.

  35. Suzanne Riess, interview with Helen Arnstein Salz, 1973–74, University of California/Berkeley, Regional Oral History Office; Oscar Lewis, To Remember Albert Micky Bender: Notes for a Biography (Oakland: Grabhorn and Hoyem, 1973), 6–8.

  36. TH interview with AA, September 15, 1976.

  37. He acknowledged sadly, “. . . growing difference of opinion from other artists . . . less and less contact with them.” MD diary.

  38. HM interview with RP. Dixon was also annoyed, perhaps more understandably, that other artists fawned over Bender—yet he put up with absurd demands from his patron Anita Baldwin.

  39. CD to MM, October 25, 1976.

  40. Beatrice Judd Ryan, “The Rise of Modern Art in the Bay Area,” California Historical Quarterly, March 1959, 1–5.

  41. MD diary.

  42. Quoted by Robert J. Samuelson, “Great Depression,” in Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, at http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/Enc/GreatDepression.html.