Dorothea Lange

by Linda Gordon

  11. The FSA was distinctly more racially progressive than the rest of the Department of Agriculture. Jess Gilbert and Alice O’Connor, “Leaving the Land Behind: Struggles for Land Reform in US Federal Policy, 1933–1965,” in Who Owns America? Social Conflict over Property Rights ed. Harvey M. Jacobs (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 115.

  12. Quoted in Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 52–53.

  13. Doud, C. B. Baldwin, February 26, 1965.

  14. Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal, 215–23.

  15. Cara A. Finnegan, Picturing Poverty: Print Culture and FSA Photographs (Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003), 74.

  16. The single exception was the National Youth Administration, an unusually daring agency due to its leaders, Mary McLeod Bethune and Aubrey Williams. Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal, 37.

  17. Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 71.

  18. Lange thought that Tugwell’s motive was “a combination of something he really wanted to do and taking care of one of his boys.” Transcript of a conversation with Roy Stryker and photographers, 1952, box 10, John Vachon Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (cited hereafter as Conversation with Stryker and photographers).

  19. James Curtis, Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 9.

  20. Conversation with Stryker and photographers.

  21. Doud, DL.

  22. The pay scale discriminated against women: Office manager Clara Wakeham received just barely more than the lowest-paid men, for example.

  23. In 2007 dollars, this would be $981,000. Salaries had gone up since Lange was hired, but not by much: Stryker earned $5,600, the top photographers $2,600, Rosskam $3,200, and the senior secretary/office manager, Clara “Toots” Wakeham, $1,680. The lowest-paid man got $1,620 and clerk/typist Charlotte Aiken $1,500.

  24. Other government agencies used not only photographs but information. In the early days of the project, whenever photographers came in from the field, they were “shipped across the street to the Department of Agriculture. And we would be pumped dry by . . . desk-rooted specialists who couldn’t care less about our photographs.” Richard Doud, John Collier, January 18, 1965.

  25. RS to Peter Pollack, October 15, 1957, in Pollack papers, box 5, folder 39, GRI.

  26. “Could the man read? What interested him? What did he see about him? . . . a sincere, passionate love of people, and respect for people.” Doud, Stryker, 1963–1965.

  27. F. Jack Hurley, Portrait of a Decade: Roy Stryker and the Development of Documentary Photography in the Thirties (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1972), 40.

  28. Doud, Stryker. Rothstein went on to become a photographic intellectual, writing about the development of documentary photography, as well as the head photographer for Look magazine.

  29. Quotation in Edwin Locke, “FSA,” U.S. Camera, February 1941, 23. Ernestine Evans, introduction to The Frescoes of Diego Rivera (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929). See also mention of her in Diego Rivera, My Art, My Life (New York: Dover, 1991), viii, and in Bertram D. Wolfe, Diego Rivera, His Life and Times (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1939), 63. Ernestine Evans knew and loved Mexico and the southwestern United States; interested in rammed-earth houses, she secured for Walker an assignment to photograph these for the FSA; he did a poor job, but Stryker quickly sensed his potential. Stryker recalled, “If somebody were going to Europe and they talked to Ernestine and she gave them a series of letters” of introduction, he would return and report, “even the President’s letters weren’t as good as a couple of her letters.” Doud, Stryker.

  30. Richard B. Woodward, “Revising a Classic,” Doubletake, Spring 2000, 116–119.

  31. Doud interview with Ben Shahn, April 14, 1964. The attraction can be explained by Evans’s commitment to high culture, his disdain for conventional respectability and for everything pretentious, corny, or vulgar, and the “negative personal magnetism which is his only and suicidal claim on people,” as Evans’s friend Lincoln Kirstein put it. Kirstein, quoted in James R. Mellow, Walker Evans (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 142.

  32. HM interview with Louise Rosskam, July 30, 1999.

  33. Doud, Mydans, April 29, 1964.

  34. Lange’s early federal personnel records are inconsistent, contradictory, confused, and confusing—a situation typical in New Deal agencies being run at an emergency pace—about when she started. Throughout 1935, her salary came from several different agencies. She was first hired as a temp and then given a long-term contract, but even that appointment was dependent on the availability of emergency funds. Paul Taylor was at first Lange’s supervisor. He signed her letter of introduction, saying that she was a “field investigator-photographer” for the federal government and that “Any courtesies to Miss Lange will be appreciated.” As their romance developed, Taylor arranged to withdraw from his supervisory role.

  35. PST to RS, November 9, 1935, and RS to PST, November 15, 1935, RG 96, box 26, file 160, NARA.

  36. Karen Becker Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), 109.

  37. R. H. Doherty, Jr., “USA FSA,” Camera, n.d., quoting Harvester World 51, nos. 2–3 (1960), says the FSA produced more than 272,000 pictures; see Beaumont Newhall, untitled paper, box 43, folder 12, Newhall Papers, GRI. The number was 100,000 according to Leah Bendavid-Val, Propaganda & Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US (Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1999), 52.

  38. Conversation with Stryker and photographers.

  39. “When Roy said he was trying to get organized,” Lange said, “so far as I knew he never really did get organized. The ideas always grew faster than you could keep up with them . . . Maybe the fact that we didn’t have any organization, maybe the fact that we grew like Topsy for a while had something to do with” our success. Ibid.

  40. Stryker, Tugwell, and FDR never publicly denounced lynching.

  41. Doud, Charlotte Aiken and Helen Wool, April 17, 1964.

  42. Doud, Marion Post Wolcott, January 18, 1965.

  43. Doud, Mydans.

  44. Doud, Stryker.

  45. Stryker and Wood, In This Proud Land, 188.

  46. Thomas H. Garver, ed., Just Before the War: Urban America from 1935 to 1941 As Seen by Photographers of the FSA (New York: October House, 1968), unpaginated; Arthur Rothstein, Documentary Photography (Boston: Focal Press, 1986), Appendix A.

  47. Doud, Collier. All the photographers interviewed by Doud were in unanimous agreement on this point.

  48. Doud, Stryker.

  49. KQED, 16 and 17.

  50. Doud, Stryker.

  51. Evans repeatedly insisted that his work had no politics whatsoever, that he followed only an inner and exclusively aesthetic imperative, and he denied that Stryker or his fellow photographers influenced him in any way; see John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), chapters 9 and 10.

  52. U.S. Camera to DL, July 12, 1936, RS mss. All of Stryker’s correspondence is in this collection unless otherwise noted.

  53. P. Ingemann Sekaer to Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt, July 24, 1936, and RS to DL, October 22, 1936; RS mss.; Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution, 183–93.

  54. Doud interview with Romana Javitz, February 23, 1965.

  55. Quoted in Catherine L. Preston, “In Retrospect: The Construction and Communication of a National Visual Memory,” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1995), 124.

  56. See, for example, RS to Gardner Cowles (of Look), April 22, 1937.

  57. He would write formal censuring letters to those who used FSA photographs without permission; for example, see RS to Acme Newspictures, Ju
ne 29, 1936. On Social Security Board using FSA pictures without permission, see RS to DL, December 2, 1936.

  58. RS to Arthur Rothstein, May 19, 1936.

  59. RS to Russell Lee, May 17, 1938.

  60. Tugwell, in turn, claimed that FDR was his protector. “If we got into any particular criticism, all I had to do was go and tell the President, ‘You are going to hear something bad.’ ” Doud interview with Rex and Grace Tugwell, January 21, 1965. I am skeptical of this claim, given what we know about Roosevelt’s political instrumentalism.

  61. Each victory made Stryker more skilled and more cutthroat toward the photography project’s opponents. He remarked, “. . . when the lion tastes blood for the first time he likes it. And I didn’t forget that taste.” Doud, Stryker. In Stryker’s various conversations, he regaled interviewers with many stories of fending off attacks.

  62. Doud, Stryker; Stryker conversation with photographers.

  63. All the FSA photographers Doud interviewed made this point.

  64. Doud, Collier.

  65. Stryker conversation with photographers.

  66. KQED 13 and 20.

  67. Stryker conversation with photographers.

  68. Doud, Shahn.

  69. Stryker conversation with photographers; Doud, Shahn.

  70. Jack Delano, Photographic Memories (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997), 35.

  71. RS to Arthur Rothstein, February 9, 1937.

  72. Stryker conversation with photographers.

  73. He told Hine that he lacked funds, but to others he claimed that Hine “is not again going to do the type of work he did in his younger days.” RS to Lewis Hine, December 14, 1935; Hine to RS, December 27, 1935; RS to Hine, January 1936; RS to Hine, July 24, 1936; RS to Rexford Tugwell, December 13, 1938. In fairness, we should acknowledge that others may have shared Stryker’s judgment at this time. In 1939, Hine was fired, or let go, from a job at the United Fund in New York City (and Jack Delano was hired to replace him); Hank O’Neal A Vision Shared: A Classic Portrait of America and Its People, 1935–1943 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976), 234. A few days after Stryker’s last refusal, Hine’s wife died. Stryker did, at the urging of Elizabeth McCausland, get Tugwell to lend his name as a sponsor to an exhibit of Hine’s work, but it was too late to give Hine a boost—he died broke and depressed in November 1940. Walter Rosenblum’s foreword to America & Lewis Hine: Photographs 1904–1940 (Millerton, New York: Aperture, 1977), 10–11. A month before his death, Hine wrote Stryker to ask for a letter of recommendation for his application for a Guggenheim, for which he had already been turned down twice. Hine to RS, October 17, 1940.

  74. Kate Sampsell, “ ‘Three Generations of Grass’: Photography, Liberalism and the Myth of the American Yeoman,” History of Photography 27, no. 4 (Winter 2003): 334; Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution, 163.

  75. Doud interview with Gordon Parks, December 30, 1964.

  76. Doud, Lee, June 2, 1964, 17.

  77. Conversation with Stryker and photographers.

  78. HM interview with Rosskam.

  79. Doud interviews, passim. When Doud asked Russell Lee what he would have changed in the FSA project, he said, nothing, but his wife, Jean, said she would have liked to stay in places with washing machines, because she got sick of washing clothes in hotel bathrooms. Doud, Lee.

  80. Bubley was first a copy photographer at the National Archives, then was hired as an FSA darkroom assistant in 1942. Stryker let her try out by making documentary photographs in Washington; they were good, he was impressed, and he hired her at the bitter end of the photography shop for one project, documenting a Greyhound bus trip around the country. My thanks to Beverly Brannan for this information.

  81. Melissa A. McEuen, Seeing America: Women Photographers Between the Wars (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2004), 147.

  82. Doud, Stryker; Doud, Edwin Rosskam, August 3, 1965. My interpretation of how gender worked at the FSA has been influenced especially by the work of Sally Stein. See also Andrea Fisher, Let Us Now Praise Famous Women: Women Photographers for the U.S. Government, 1935 to 1944 (London: Pandora, 1987); Sharon Ann Musher, “A New Deal for Art” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2006); McEuen, Seeing America; Preston, “In Restropect,”

  83. Doud, Stryker.

  12. On the Road: California

  1. Taylor’s graduate students included Varden Fuller, Stuart Jamieson, Walter Stein, Walter Goldschmidt, Clark Kerr, Albert Croutch, Zelma Parker, Arthur Ross, Frank Speth, and Samuel Wood.

  2. To avoid taxing the reader with repetitive material, I discuss only three main regions where Lange photographed: California, the southern plains drought area, and the Southeast. She did significant photography also in Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Washington, New Jersey, and New York. New England was the only region she never photographed.

  3. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from farmworkers come from Lange’s field notes.

  4. KQED 17, 21, and 23.

  5. Vicki Goldberg, “Propaganda Can Also Tell the Truth,” American Photographer, December 1978, 17.

  6. Conversation with Stryker and photographers; Carl Mydans, Carl Mydans, Photojournalist (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1985), 19.

  7. Doud, Jack and Irene Delano, June 12, 1965.

  8. Lange field notes, February 21, 1936, San Luis Obispo; conversation with Stryker and photographers.

  9. DL to RS, March 2, 1936, RS mss. All Lange-Stryker correspondence is in RS mss. unless otherwise noted.

  10. Author’s interview with Don Fanger.

  11. HM interviews with Alice Hamburg, Tanya Goldsmith, Ernie Goldsmith, and Sonia Ruehl, April 22, 1999, and November 23, 1999.

  12. Elizabeth Partridge, ed., Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 10.

  13. She had to discipline him about his youthful pranks, too. Once, Ron swiped a sugar container from a tiny café/gas station. When, miles down the road, she realized what he’d done, she told him to return it. He drove back, and the waitress said, “I thought I’d be seeing you again.” Author’s interview with RP, March 21, 2002. Subsequent quotations regarding Lange’s working method are taken from this interview.

  14. RP, reflections on tape made for MM, 1977; TH interview with RP and CG, August 26, 1975, OM.

  15. Author’s interview with RP.

  16. Therese Thau Heyman, ed., Celebrating a Collection: The Work of Dorothea Lange (Oakland, California: Oakland Museum, 1978), 63–64.

  17. My search could only bring up photographs with the name of the crop in the caption.

  18. Lange field notes.

  19. C. M. Johnson to Rep. Toland, May 2, 1940, box 9, PST Bancroft.

  20. Michele L. Landis, “Fate, Responsibility, and ‘Natural’ Disaster Relief: Narrating the American Welfare State,” Law and Society Review 33, no. 2 (1999): 306.

  21. DL to RS (probably February 1936), with box of photographs number 12.

  22. Quotation from Lange’s field notes included in her letter to RS, May 28, 1937. On farmworker disease in general, see notes of Tom Vasey in PST Bancroft, carton 15; on children’s work, see Raymond P. Barry, ed., A Documentary History of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Oakland, California: Federal Writers Project, 1938), on-line at http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=hb88700929&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00122&toc.depth=1&toc.id=div00122&brand=calcultures.

  23. Quoted in Walter J. Stein, California and the Dust Bowl Migration (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1973), 48.

  24. Arthur Miller, “Tragedy and the Common Man,” New York Times, February 27, 1949; later used as a preface to Death of a Salesman.

  25. Leah Bendavid-Val, Propaganda & Dreams: Photographing the 1930s in the USSR and the US (Zurich: Edition Stemmle, 1999); Simon Dell, “On the Metaphor and Practice of Photography: Socialist Realism, the Popular Front in France and the Dynamics of Cultural Unity,” History of Photography 25, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 52–60; Pamela Auchincloss and Klaus Ottman
n, eds., Social Strategies: Redefining Social Realism (New York: Pamela Auchincloss/Arts Management, 2003); Milton Brown, introduction, Social Art in America 1930–1945 (New York: ACA Galleries, 1981); Marlene Park and Gerald E. Markowitz, New Deal for Art (Hamilton, New York: Gallery Association of New York State, 1977); Jeanine P. Castello-Lin, “Identity and Difference: the Construction of das Volk in Nazi Photojournalism, 1930–33” (Ph.D. diss., University of California/Berkeley, 1994); Belisario R. Contreras, Tradition and Innovation in New Deal Art (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania: Bucknell University Press, 1983); Susan Noyes Platt, Art and Politics in the 1930s: Modernism, Marxism, Americanism (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1999); Anthony W. Lee, Painting on the Left: Diego Rivera, Radical Politics, and San Francisco’s Public Murals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Donald Drew Egbert, Socialism and American Art (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1967). On New Deal social realism, see Barbara Melosh, Engendering Culture: Manhood and Womanhood in New Deal Public Art and Theater (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).

  26. Nicholas Natanson, The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992), 72. He calculated that Parks led in photographs of nonwhites; then came Lange, 31 percent; Post Wolcott, 24 percent; Rosskam, 24 percent; Evans, 18 percent; Collier, 14 percent; Shahn, 10 percent.

  27. Critic Sally Stein calls them “padonna” images. 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. Elizabeth Partridge (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994).

  28. Linda Gordon, Pitied But Not Entitled: Single Mothers and the History of Welfare, 1890–1935 (New York: Free Press, 1994).

  29. Conversation with Stryker and photographers.