Martha Raup, 3/21/06 - PHOT10-Foothill College, Winter 2006

Snapshots of Dorothea

Lessons Learned from Lange

Stand Up for Yourself

Dorothea Lange learned at an early age that it’s important to stand up for your self. Her mother wanted her to be a school teacher, as her aunt had been. It was a good career for a woman, and it could have suited her abilities. Yet she knew that wasn’t for her. In fact, she announced to her mother one day while still in high school that she intended to be a photographer! It was astonishing, because she had never taken a photograph, and didn’t even own a camera.

The career she chose really seemed to have chosen her. She noticed stories in the newspapers about Martha Graham, the dancer. One powerful image accompanying these articles stayed with her. As she walked along the streets of Manhattan one day, she saw that photograph in a display window. She walked into the shop to learn more about the photo, and met the maker of it. The studio owner was Arnold Genthe, a photographer made famous by his photographs of the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco. His portrait studio on Fifth Avenue catered to wealthy clientele. Dorothea began frequenting his studio, and eventually worked for him. He even gave her a camera, her first! He encouraged her to take classes in photography, and she took one class at Columbia University with Clarence White, the great Pictorialist photographer. All in all, it seems a serendipitous beginning for one who would produce one of America’s most prominent images. Migrant Mother became “undoubtedly the most popular image created during the Depression era”[1], and it moved a nation to respond to the plight of agricultural workers left without money for even a meal.

Take a Chance

Dorothea enrolled in the New York Training School for Teachers, as her mother advised, but she continued to dream of another life. One day, an itinerant photographer came to her family’s house, and offered to make inexpensive family photographs. In talking with him, she found that he didn’t even have a dark room. She offered him use of the empty chicken coop in the backyard, and together they cleaned it up and set up a processing studio. Soon, she was developing photographs on her own.

Widen Your Horizons

Once Dorothea had the knowledge she needed to make a career as a portrait photographer, she was ready to create her own studio. Yet Hoboken, New Jersey, where she was born (May 25, 1895), would not do. She talked to a friend she’d met in high school, and together they created a plan to travel around the world. At age 22, in 1918, they set out across the country, and got as far as San Francisco. When her friend Fronzie was robbed of all the money they had saved, they had to get jobs to support themselves. Dorothea got a job working in the photofinishing department of a downtown store. On her very first day at work, Dorothea met Roi Partridge. Partridge, an etcher, was also the husband of photographer Imogen Cunningham. These three, and their families, grew to be lifelong friends, as well as artistic companions. Eventually Dorothea also met a man who was willing to give her the money needed to set up her own studio. After only six months in San Francisco, Dorothea Lange set up her own portrait studio on Sutter Street.

Get Connected

Dorothea met her future husband, Maynard Dixon, at her portrait studio. She was fascinated by him, by “his sharp wit, his rich, detailed stories, and his ability to draw anything…”[2] Regardless of the age difference, (Maynard was 45, and she was only 24), Dorothea once again took a chance, and on March 21, 1920, they married. Two boys soon made the family complete. By now, Dorothea’s days were filled with homemaking and housekeeping, and left little time for photography. On one of their trips to the Southwest (where Maynard painted in his characteristic Western style), Dorothea Lange saw the photographer Paul Strand walk by. She realized then how much harder it was for a woman to be a photographer. He was free to work at his studio, while she had to care for a husband and children.

Make the Tough Decisions

Maynard and Dorothea separated in the early 1930s. Dorothea knew she had to have more freedom to do what she wanted and needed to do. And together, she and Maynard were quarreling too much, and co-operating not enough. The boys, aged 7 and 4, were sent to boarding school, and friends were told they were “saving money”. It was a tough decision, but one both partners knew they had to take. Dorothea moved into the room above her studio, and spent her time making portraits of people who could still afford to pay for them.

Follow Your Instincts

Photographing wealthy clients, as Arnold Genthe had done, came easy to her, and she was successful at it. However, she eventually longed for more. And she was troubled by what she saw outside her window. America was in the Depression, and she often saw “hungry, homeless men wandering forlornly along the sidewalks.”[3] One day, she felt driven to photograph what she was seeing outside her window. She took her camera, and walked outside, down to Market Street, towards the soup kitchen run by a woman called the White Angel. The photograph she took there, called White Angel Bread Line, continued to haunt her. She posted it on her walls, and looked at it in the ensuing days. When wealthy clients asked what she was doing with that photograph, she said she didn’t know. But it continued to call her to take her camera into the streets. More and more, she found herself going out after photographs, and her work began to take a whole new direction.

Find Your Niche

Maynard and Dorothea made another attempt at living together, and rented a house on Gough Street. When Dorothea needed time for herself, she sent the boys to stay with friends. During the summer of 1934, the family went to Fallen Leaf Lake, taking Ron and Pad Partridge, the twin sons of Roi Partridge and Imogen Cunningham. Dorothea tried photographing the nature around her. Her friend Ansel Adams was so successful doing that, but Dorothea was not satisfied with her results. One day, she realized that this wasn’t for her – she needed to photograph people! “…it came to me that what I had to do was to take pictures and concentrate upon people, only people, all kinds of people, people who paid me and people who didn’t.”[4]

Follow Your Passion

Dorothea’s photographs, meanwhile, were being exhibited in a small gallery in Oakland. Paul Taylor, an agricultural economics professor at the University of California in Berkeley, saw them and was quite moved. He called her up and asked if he could use one of her photographs in an article he had written. He also asked if she would accompany him to photograph one of the self-help cooperatives he was studying. Dorothea was delighted. She, Imogen Cunningham, and several other photographers joined Paul for two days photographing the families in a site 125 miles north. Once again, Dorothea allowed a chance encounter to determine the direction of her life. She admired Paul, and the way he worked, and what he believed in. “Dorothea learned about Paul’s belief – that weaving each individual story together with all the other stories would clarify the larger issues America was struggling with.”[5]

When Paul got a part-time job with the federally-funded State Emergency Relief Administration (SERA), he managed to hire Dorothea (as a typist!) to photograph the migrant laborers coming to California. “The Taylor-Lange reports were powerfully written, and illustrated with compelling photographs.” Based on these reports, $20,000 was transferred from another fund to SERA to establish the first two emergency California migrant camps, with “toilets, hot showers, stoves, tent platforms, a small building for the office manager, and a large community building.” Finally, Dorothea had found a way to marry her photographic abilities with her empathetic feelings for people, and to fit them together for a PURPOSE

Replant and Prosper

Roy Stryker, the head of the Resettlement Administration in Washington DC (later renamed the Farm Security Administration) saw the Taylor-Lange reports, and was impressed. “Stryker found Dorothea’s work so revealing he put her on his payroll in August 1935. She joined Arthur Rothstein and Ben Shahn as a staff photographer. The FSA photographers over the next few years included Margaret Bourke-White, Walker Evans, and Russell Lee. From 1935 through 1943, they photographed across America, compiling more than 270,000 photographs.”[6]

Meanwhile, Dorothea’s divorce from Maynard became final in November, and Paul and Dorothea married on December 6, 1935. They rented a house in Berkeley big enough for five children: Dorothea’s two sons (Dan, 10, and John, 7) and Paul’s three children (Katherine, 13, Ross, 10, and Margot, 6). Dorothea was regarded as a tough disciplinarian at home, but an excellent cook, and a capable manager of the household. And the couple was deeply in love, and uniquely well-suited.

In 1935, Rondal Partridge, now seventeen-years-old, began to assist Dorothea in her photo shoots. Paul couldn’t always accompany her, due to his teaching schedule, and she needed help with the heavy equipment and the driving. Once again, Dorothea profited from the chance encounter years earlier with Ron’s father Roi, and she took the opportunity to connect with people in a deep and lasting fashion. Ron Partridge is the father of Elizabeth Partridge, who wrote Restless Spirit, an excellent biography full of family photos of Dorothea. Elizabeth also wrote the accompanying text for an insightful film produced by her sister Meg called A Visual Life. Thus, the families of Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange have spent decades working and creating together, and we are all their beneficiaries.

GET THE PICTURE!

One time, Dorothea was driving home alone after a long and tiring month in the field. Late in the day, she passed a sign announcing “Pea Pickers’ Camp”. She was too tired for one more photo, and continued driving. “Twenty miles later, almost without realizing what she was doing, she made a U-turn and headed back to the camp. ‘I was following instinct, not reason. I drove into that wet and soggy camp and parked my car like a homing pigeon.’”[7] Inside the camp she found a family in a lean-to, a mother with her 4 children. Dorothea found that the freezing rain and sleet had ruined the pea crop, and that the family had just sold their tires to get money for food. She took six photographs in all, moving closer each time. In the final photograph, Dorothea asked the children to turn away from the camera, fearing their faces would detract from the image. The baby is partially hidden, and the mother gazes off into the distance. Her forehead is furrowed, and her face is forlorn, yet the dignity and determination of the American spirit in a time of despair is plain to see. The image itself is a masterpiece, an incredible photograph that expresses all that the Depression came to mean.

The next morning, Dorothea immediately developed the photograph, and hurried with a copy to the San Francisco News office. “Haunted by what she had seen at the pea pickers camp, she knew she needed to act immediately.”[8] The photograph was printed March 10, and picked up immediately by the wire services. “The response to the newspaper article was instantaneous and powerful. Seeing the desperate, helpless mother unable to feed her children shocked Americans nationwide. They were appalled that the very people who provided food for American families were themselves starving. The federal government acted immediately, shipping twenty thousand pounds of food to the California fields. Dorothea felt a flood of relief and satisfaction that she had helped the starving pea pickers. But she had no way of knowing then that Migrant Mother would become her most famous image, reproduced thousands of times all over the world. To many, it came to symbolize the despair and uncertainty of the Great Depression.”[9]

Keep Growing, and Create!

“Dorothea continued as a photographer until her death in 1965, crisscrossing America, and later the world, with her camera.” She photographed the “Second Gold Rush” in the Bay Area, when thousands flocked to the shipyards of Richmond during World War II. She made compassionate and critically-expressive photographs of the internment of Japanese-Americans during that war, photographs the government hid for decades. She photographed country people, and Irish people, and children, and produced books that showed others what she saw.

Following the war, however, Dorothea’s photography was limited for almost 10 years by long-term illnesses and surgeries. “Despite her stomach pain, Dorothea was determined to make a record of the tremendous social changes going on around her. ‘You can’t deny what you must do, no matter what it costs. And with me it was always expenditure to the last ditch. I know the last ditch. I’ve lived on the last ditch.’”[10] Dorothea had other losses and grief during these years. Maynard Dixon died in 1946, at the age of 71, and her son Dan returned from the war to live on the streets, homeless, dirty, and angry. When he finally returned home feverish and forlorn, she helped him rebuild his life. Eventually, he wrote an article on Dorothea, and published it, becoming over time a freelance writer. Good times came again for the Taylor-Lange family, as marriages and births and college and careers took over their daily lives.

Dorothea began shooting photographs, in her sixties, with a 35 mm camera, instead of the heavier camera she’d used for so many years. She reorganized her collection of negatives, “throwing out the ‘mountains of photographic trash.’”[11]. And she moved in new directions, photographically. “Going over all her work, Dorothea found that her focus was shifting. Earlier, she had photographed people in relation to harsh, powerful events like the Great Depression, the dust bowl, and World War II. Now she was trying to get at something else. She wanted to show people in relation to people, to see what they meant to one another and to themselves. There are ‘things you have to look very hard to see,’ said Dorothea, ‘because they have been taken for granted not only by our eyes, but often by our hearts as well.’”[12]

Practice and Profit from Partnership

Beginning in 1958, Dorothea accompanied her husband Paul, who began consulting work overseas. She went to Japan, to Ecuador, and to Egypt, photographing wherever they went. Even after an episode of malaria, and her diagnosis of cancer, Dorothea continued to focus on her work. Her last days were spent preparing a showcasing of her photographs put on by the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City curated by John Szarkowski. It was difficult for her to do so, for “She knew that choosing her best photographs and putting them up on the museum walls would be baring her soul for the world to see.”[13] She and John fought constantly for which photos should be in the show, and which should not. And the results paid off: “Together they put together a show that was stronger than either could have done alone.”

CONCLUSION

Dorothea Lange once remarked to a friend, “To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking. I’ve only touched it, just touched it.” Well, thank goodness for that, for in doing so she has touched the lives of so many. As a child, Dorothea Lange suffered polio at age seven and the abandonment of her father when she was twelve. Rather than allow these two circumstances to crush her spirit, or harden her voice, or cloud her vision, she made of her life a masterpiece. In the process, she has given all of us a model of an artist’s life. She has, herself, become iconic, just as her Migrant Mother, for just as her photographs reach us at the human level, her life shows us who we are, and what we’re made of. I salute Dorothea Lange, then, the artist, as much as I do her photographs, for she has given us a clear and concise recipe for what needs to be done. Like the good cook she was, her life produced a nutritious and soulfully-delicious feast for those of us who strive to see, and to be.