Lange, Dorothea (1895–1965)

American documentary photographer, famous for her rural scenes in the Great Depression. Name variations: Dorothea Lange (in professional life); Dorothea Nutzhorn (1895–1925); Dorothea Dixon (1920–1935); Dorothea Taylor (1935–1965). Born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey, on May 15, 1895; died in San Francisco, California, on October 11, 1965; daughter of Joan (Lange) Nutzhorn (a librarian) and Henry Nutzhorn; attended high school in New York City; married Maynard Dixon (an artist), in 1920 (divorced 1935); married Paul Schuster Taylor (b. 1895, an economist), on December 6, 1935; children: (first marriage) Daniel Dixon (b. 1925); John Dixon (b. 1928).

Owned a photography studio (1919–35); served as government photographer (1935–45); worked as freelance photographer (1945–64).

Dorothea Lange was one of the premier American photographers of the 20th century. Working exclusively in black and white with large format cameras, she made many of the most enduring pictures of the American countryside during the Great Depression, and of the human damage caused by unemployment, migration, and war.

Lange was born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895, the daughter of Joan Lange Nutzhorn and Henry Nutzhorn. Her parents were recent immigrants from Germany. When she was seven, Lange contracted polio, then a terrifying disease to which poor children were particularly vulnerable (though it also struck down such well-known adults as Franklin Roosevelt and Marjorie Lawrence ). Although she recovered from the paralysis it caused, Lange had a lifelong limp and a withered right leg. She later told an interviewer: "I was physically disabled, and no one who hasn't lived the life of a semi-cripple knows how much that means. I think it perhaps was the most important thing that happened to me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me."

Lange reverted as an adult to her mother's maiden name, partly because her father had abandoned the family when she was 12, after which she, her mother, and her younger brother Henry went to live with her grandmother, who was an autocrat and an alcoholic. Despite living in Hoboken, Lange went to school in Manhattan, crossing on the ferries each morning and evening with her mother, a librarian. On graduation from high school, where she was a loner and often a truant, she declared that she was going to be a photographer, though she had shown little interest in the craft until then and did not own a camera. Nevertheless, she made good on this declaration and found work at a series of photographers' studios, meeting rich people for the first time. She learned how to pose and shoot portraits, how to develop photographs, and even how to handle the business aspects of photography. She also took classes from Clarence White, a prominent art photographer of the day.

In 1918, aged 23, Lange and a friend left home in New Jersey and set off to tour the world. But after crossing the United States, they were

robbed in San Francisco, and Lange was again forced to seek work in photo studios. She had the good luck to meet and befriend Imogen Cunningham , who was to become one of the pre-eminent photographers of the century. With Cunningham's help, Lange established a studio of her own in San Francisco and was soon prospering as a California society portraitist. She also met a Western landscape painter, Maynard Dixon, and married him in 1920, despite the fact that he was already in his mid-40s. The couple had two sons, Daniel and John, born in 1925 and 1928, and Dixon's teenage daughter from a former marriage usually lived with them, too. But Lange, who claimed she had little aptitude for motherhood, continued with her work rather than surrender to domestic demands. She accompanied Dixon on sketching trips to the American Southwest in the mid-1920s and made some fine photographic studies of the Hopi and Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico. Her son Dan recalled her flair for self-dramatization:

She wore heavy, primitive, exotic jewelry. She smoked when few women dared …, and didn't when many women did. And her clothes weren't clothes; they were costumes. Some of these garments she designed herself. They were made of coarse white fabrics splashed with vivid embroideries across breast and shoulders, falling in long skirts that curtained her lame leg and twisted foot…. She disguised it so well that some people never realized that she walked with a limp.

Maynard Dixon and Lange both maintained successful businesses through the boom years of the 1920s but were forced to retrench drastically at the onset of the Depression, when orders for his murals and her society photographs fell off rapidly. They economized by living in their studios. Lange, whose work until then had been largely conventional portraiture, now began to investigate Depression conditions, and some of her most famous work depicted lines of unemployed, humiliated men seeking food and relief in San Francisco. She said later that, although she had enjoyed portraiture, "I realized that I was photographing only people that paid me for it. That bothered me…. I had to really face myself…. I was aware that there was a very large world out there that I had not entered too well, and I decided I'd better."

Paul Schuster Taylor, a World War I Marine veteran and professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley, admired some of these photographs in a show at the Oakland Museum. He used one in a Survey Graphic magazine article and then invited Lange to join him in working for the California Emergency Relief Administration, recently established as part of President Roosevelt's New Deal. Lange agreed and collaborated with Taylor, illustrating articles he was writing on the plight of migrant workers in California agriculture and their need for government-sponsored camps. They visited the overcrowded, makeshift huts, many of them made of canvas and scrap wood, and sometimes leaning against wrecked old cars, in which migrant farm workers were forced to live exhausting, insanitary, and undernourished lives. Clark Kerr, then a young social scientist, worked with them in California's Central Valley in 1934 and recalled that "they had complementary skills but contrasting personalities. She was always moving, mostly talking, reacting in a flash, living in the moment" whereas "Paul thought carefully about everything, spoke seldom, and then softly."

The head of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), a related New Deal Agency, saw her photographs and, equally impressed, invited Lange to work for his agency. "No one was ever given exact directions," she wrote later of the FSA photographers. "You were turned loose in a region, and the assignment was more like this: 'See what is really there. What does it look like, what does it feel like? What actually is the human condition?'" Much of her work in the following years, upon which her fame now rests, traced the exit of Southern and Midwestern farmers from their land, "tractored out" by the spread of farm machinery, or forced away when their land was ruined in the vast "dust bowl" storms of the 1930s. Her images, along with those of such fellow FSA photographers as Ben Shahn, Aaron Siskind, and Arthur Rothstein, have become the visual counterpart of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Like the novel, they show the enduring dignity, as well as the privation, in the migrants' faces, and the bleak solitude of deserted farm houses in the dust-bowl country. Unlike many of her contemporaries involved in documenting the human cost of the Depression, however, Lange was not drawn to radical left-wing politics, though she often sympathized with the work of American Communist Party organizers among the migrant workers. Neither was she the only woman involved in government photo-documentary work. As Andrea Fisher has shown in Let Us Now Praise Famous Women, Esther Bubley, Marjory Collins, Pauline Ehrlich , and many others also worked for the FSA and other agencies, each contributing photographs in her own distinctive idiom.

Lange, as even her close friends admitted, was a prickly personality, not easy to get along with. She was frequently at odds with Roy Stryker, the FSA administrator in Washington, partly because he specified that all the work she did while on the government's payroll become the property of the government, even such famous pictures as that of an exhausted migrant mother surrounded by her ragged children in a pea-pickers' camp. Indeed, she was required to send her rolls of film, as soon as they were exposed, to Washington, and often did not see the pictures themselves until weeks later when other government employees had developed and printed them. Some she sent to Ansel Adams, the premier

California landscape photographer, whom she had befriended in 1934, and he recalled that packages of film would arrive from the deep South stinking of mildew and sometimes damaged by the humidity. When museums and publishers asked to buy copies of her photographs for shows, she had to plead with Stryker to send her the negatives and promise to return them at once since they were all officially government property. Lange and Stryker fell out over this issue. After 1936, she worked only irregularly for the Administration, then was fired once and for all in 1938, over the protests of other FSA photographers who recognized her exceptional gifts. But at least she was able to use some of her FSA photos in a book she and Taylor published in 1939, An American Exodus, for which he provided the text and she the illustrations. It charts the depopulation of the agricultural South and West and follows migrant workers west to California and the work camps.

Lange's close working relationship with Paul Taylor, meanwhile (he had also joined the FSA), developed into an equally intense personal relationship; in 1935, they both divorced and married one another. (Paul, who had married Katharine Page Whiteside in 1920, had three children.) With his encouragement, she applied to the Guggenheim Foundation after losing her government job and became the first woman to win one of its fellowships. With the money, she undertook a documentary study of farm life in obscure parts of rural America.

The outbreak of the Second World War prevented Lange and Taylor's book from gaining much acclaim. But the war did provide another opportunity for Lange's continuation of her career as a government photographer. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, she was recruited by the War Relocation Administration (WRA) to make a pictorial record of the deportation of Japanese-Americans away from the West Coast. In the panic which seized California in the first days of the war, white citizens, including the governor, Earl Warren, feared that Japanese immigrants and their American-born descendants were potential enemy agents, and although there was no hard evidence to support the alarm, Warren was able to get President Roosevelt's support for the drastic relocation policy. Lange herself thought it was a disgraceful violation of civil rights and in her photographs she made a point of showing the deportees' violated dignity, or captured such ironic moments as Japanese-American children saluting the flag and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. The government was careful to use only those of her photographs which showed the evacuation of the West Coast cities and the deportees' arrival at Manzanar, in the dust-blown Owens Valley, as though the whole episode was good natured, orderly, and humane. They suppressed or confiscated pictures which showed that the deportees' guards were soldiers carrying guns. Whenever Lange entered the camps, she was accompanied by armed men who authorized or prevented her photographing of proposed subjects. Her husband Paul Taylor, meanwhile, joined a protest movement led by the philosopher John Dewey, and petitioned President Roosevelt to give each individual a loyalty hearing rather than undertaking a mass deportation.

Lange's other wartime work included photographs of the booming shipbuilding industry in Richmond, California, near her Berkeley home, in collaboration with Ansel Adams. Adams had also photographed the Japanese relocation project and published a book about it, Born Free and Equal, but of the two he was less outraged, and more willing to see the deportations as a temporary expedient made necessary by wartime conditions. On the other hand, he was more scrupulous than Lange on an expedition to Utah in the early 1950s to photograph isolated Mormon communities. Taylor and Lange disguised the fact that they were on assignment for Life magazine rather than just working as sociologists, and when the Mormons saw themselves in the national magazine they were "absolutely horrified," Adams recalled. "Some wanted to sue. I was very embarrassed."

In the late 1940s, Lange was forced by ill health to stop working—she had a succession of severe stomach ulcers which were only inhibited by radical surgery. In the early 1950s, however, still undaunted, she resumed her career, working for Fortune and Life magazines, on such photo-essay projects as the inundation of a California valley for the sake of the San Francisco water supply, and the work of an Alameda County public defender. In addition, she helped to create a new photography magazine, Aperture, in which she was able to feature more of her work than the commercial magazines could use, and discuss its technical as well as artistic elements.

Paul Taylor traveled abroad frequently in the 1950s, often accompanied by Lange. She found it difficult pursue her work in Korea, Vietnam, Pakistan, Indonesia, Ecuador, and Egypt because she knew none of the languages and continued to be dogged by ill health. In America, she had relied on conversations with her subjects to break the ice before photographing them, in a way which was not possible in Asia. She also wondered whether it was possible to do justice to many brilliantly colorful Asian scenes shot solely in black and white. Even so, many of her photographs of Asians and Egyptians, especially of women and children, are strikingly effective.

By the early 1960s, Lange's reputation had grown to such a point that the Museum of Modern Art in New York decided to mount a retrospective of her life's work. At the same time, a local television station, KQED, made two documentaries of her life and work, celebrating her

achievement. This full recognition had come almost too late, however, for in 1964 she was diagnosed with inoperable cancer of the esophagus. Her longtime friend Ansel Adams wrote that "the older she got the more beautiful she got. Absolute sexless beauty. Rather frightening sometimes." She was able to choose the photographs for the Museum of Modern Art show, and for her book Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman (1967), but she died, aged 70, in October 1965 before the show could begin or the book appear.

sources:

Fisher, Andrea. Let Us Now Praise Famous Women: Women Photographers for the U.S. Government from 1935 to 1944. London: Pandora, 1987.

Hayan, Therese T., et al. Dorothea Lange: American Photograph. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books-San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1994.

Lange, Dorothea, and Paul S. Taylor. An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion in the Thirties (published in 1939). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969.

Meltzer, Milton. Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life. NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1978.

Partridge, Elizabeth, ed. Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life. Washington DC: Smithsonian Press, 1994 (including cited essays and interviews by Linda Morris, Clark Kerr, Ansel Adams, and Sally Stein).

collections:

Oakland Museum, California; New York Public Library; Roy Stryker Papers, University of Louisville; Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

Patrick Allitt , Professor of History, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia