Hello Feminist Friday friends and fans! Welcome back for your monthly dose of feminist history! While working on this month’s post, I realized I have a weird soft spot for photographers. Back in the Facebook days of FF, I covered multiple photographers (and will probably brush up on those posts for future blog posts). I don’t know why I’m such a photographer fan. I can’t take a decent picture to save my life; I don’t have any photographers as significant influences in my life. But something about being able to capture a moment in time, to tell a compelling story in a single frame; well, that’s just incredible, isn’t it? This month my honoree is someone who put into stark reality some pretty awful times in the U.S. You have seen her work, even if you’ve never heard her name. Meet Dorothea Lange, the first documentary photographer.
Growing Up
Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn was born May 26, 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey. Everything I read makes it clear that two events in her childhood really shaped her future: contracting Polio at age seven and her father leaving the family at age 12. The Polio weakened her right leg and gave her a limp she would carry for the rest of her life. She said of the limp, “It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me. "I've never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it." It was tough; children made fun of her, and her mother would often get embarrassed by Dorothea’s limp.
The second event, her father leaving, forced her mother and siblings to move to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Here, Lange developed the skills that would lead her to become a great photographer. Lange would wander the streets of New York, unobtrusive and invisible. She wasn’t much of a student and often skipped school to people-watch. At 17, she became an assistant to Arnold Genthe, the photographer who rose to fame with his pictures of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It was here she decided she wanted to be a photographer, even though she had never taken a picture before or even owned a camera!
Lange’s mother was not impressed and sent her to teaching college after Lange barely graduated high school. She found a way to take a photography class at Columbia University and, in 1918, dropped out of teaching school. Around this time, she dropped her father's name, Nutzhorn, and took her mother’s maiden name, Lange. She and her friend, Fronsie (the most outstanding name ever to be named), packed up their belongings and all the money they had - $140 - to travel the world. They made it to San Francisco, where their money was stolen. Like all free spirits, she figured the universe wanted this and opened a photography studio.
Getting Started
Lange quickly made a name for herself by doing portrait photography for wealthy families. But in 1920, she made a move that would eventually influence her photography: She married artist Maynard Dixon. Dixon’s paintings were sweeping landscapes of the American West, a place Lange would come to know very well in a few years. She and Dixon had two children; Daniel, born in 1925, and John, born in 1928. Lange’s portrait studio was the primary financial support for the family. However, during a vacation in Lone Pine, CA, in the summer of 1929. there was a big thunderstorm. Lange had a bit of a spiritual awakening that she should take pictures of all kinds of people, not just elites paying big bucks for portraits. Very soon, a crisis would strike, ultimately leading to her fulfilling this desire.
The Great Depression
See, just a few months later, the stock market crashed in the fall of 1929, beginning what we now call the Great Depression. This is, of course, the time period that America was hit with a massive financial crisis; the drought in the middle and western parts of the country made things even worse. I’m not going to write a vast explanation of the Depression and Dust Bowl; that’s beyond the scope of this blog. Some great articles and books go much more in-depth about both of these events; go to your local library and check them out! Suffice it to say, things were terrible. People were living out of tent cities, selling their children because they couldn’t care for them, and migrating across the country to find work.
Lange turned her camera to the streets and began photographing the new normal the world found itself in. In 1933, she snapped a photo called “White Angel Breadline”; in it, a group of men stands in a group in front of the White Angel soup kitchen. One man faces away, an empty cup in his hands, his hat pulled down enough to hide his eyes but not the pain and embarrassment of his predicament. This photo got people buzzing about her, and soon economist Paul Taylor asked her and some other photographers to photograph him visiting the Unemployed Exchange Association in 1934. This began a long and surprising relationship between Lange and Taylor.
In 1935, Lange was hired by the Resettlement Administration (later known as the Farm Security Administration) as a field investigator. She and Taylor traveled all over the Midwest and West Coast, agricultural places hit hardest by the Depression. All the traveling had strained her marriage, and in September of 1935, Lange and Dixon divorced. Traveling was not the only strain on their relationship; all the traveling with Taylor showed that the two had much in common, and they fell in love. They married in December of 1935 and spent the next five years of their lives traveling together, gathering pictures and information about the troubles of people affected by the Depression. Between Lange’s incredible pictures and Taylor’s thorough reports, the government sprang into action, creating various aid and work programs to help. It was during this time that Lange took the picture Migrant Mother, probably one of the most recognized photos of the Depression and its effects on the lives of regular people (and let me tell you, there’s a LOT to unpack about the subject, Florence Owens Thompson; but we’ll have to save that for a later date).
Japanese American Internment
So who reading this remembers high school history? What was the event that brought us out of the Great Depression? That’s right, World War Two! Well, there’s more to it than that, but again, this isn’t the blog for that. In 1941, Lange was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship but soon gave it up after the attack on Pearl Harbor. She was asked by the War Relocation Authority to document the forced evacuation - I’m sorry, the “relocation” - of Japanese Americans. Lange captured the anxiety, stress, and trauma of these “relocations.” Her pictures include scenes of piled-up luggage that had not been sorted, the confusion and heartbreak of people waiting in line to be placed in an internment camp, and even life in the camps as people struggled to find some sense of normalcy. Just like with the Depression, many of the images we think of when we think of this dark time come from Lange’s pictures. Lange, however, felt that her photography work did not do enough to help the Japanese Americans, and she encouraged her fellow artists to do what they could help.
Now, something interesting that I found in my research is that many people said that Lange’s internment pictures were “hidden” by the government because they, you know, made the government look bad. This rumor began in 2006 because a news article claimed that the authors discovered something like 800 previously unreleased photos during the research phase of writing. However, no evidence exists of anyone trying to “hide” those pictures. My guess would be that Lange took, like, a billion photos, and only some were used. I have photographer friends, and this tends to be the case. Heck, when I got professional pictures taken with my partner a few years back, I know there were at least 300 pictures taken, and we only got like 20 or 30 because those were the best ones. So while I can totally understand where this rumor comes from, it’s not true.
After the War
Lange kept plenty busy after the war. In 1945, she was invited to teach photography at the California School of Fine Arts (now known as the San Francisco Art Institute); remember, she herself had no formal education in photography! In 1952, she started the photography magazine Aperture, in which she published many photo essays, usually done in partnership with her son Daniel, who, by this point, was a writer. Her photos are printed in various magazines and photography books. She is involved in several exhibitions of her work.
Sadly, Lange was plagued with health difficulties throughout the last decade of her life; many brought on Post-Polio Syndrome, which, as you can guess, was due to polio she survived as a child. Lange passed from esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965. She has continued to be honored in the photography profession, however. She was inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum in 1984 and the California Hall of Fame in 2008, and various schools and streets are named after her. But I really want to highlight her work's most recent exhibition, "Dorthea Lange: Her Words and Pictures,” at the Museum of Modern Art in February 2020.
In Her Own Words
I found this 2020 exhibition so exciting and vital because Lange was often frustrated with how her work was presented. Lange had a specific way of working with the subjects of her photos. She would get to know them and encourage them to open up to her about their lives. She believed that the pictures - or even most pictures in general - were meaningless without the context behind them. Migrant Mother, for instance, takes on a new meaning when you realize a) the woman has a name, Florence Owens Tompson, and b) she was an indigenous woman. Cherokee, to be specific. I think the context can be vital when dealing with images of marginalized or impoverished people to avoid exploitation. But if I’m honest (and I always try to be honest in this blog), I didn’t even think about the importance of context in photography until a very recent event.
Let me share something with you if I can get a little personal here. My grandfather died just over a week ago (I’m writing this at the end of February). He was almost 92. Don’t worry about me; I’m fine; we honestly weren’t that close. But I love old pictures, so I was excited when my mom brought home one of his photo albums. I found a spread of four or five photos labeled “Korea,” which I assumed were from when he served in the Korean War; beautiful shots of a vast rice field with a woman diligently working. She’s squatting down, and her head is turned so you can’t see her face. I was struck by how beautiful they were in their…I don’t know, averageness? Mundaneness? It was just a second of a day in this woman's life, this woman I would never meet. I told my mother I thought they were beautiful, and she told me a story.
When my mother saw these same pictures as a child in the 60s, her father shared that the woman had been an informant for the U.S. Troops. He told her that the woman would warn the soldiers of possible enemy action (whatever that is. Grandpa very rarely discussed the war with anyone). He explicitly told my mom that he probably wouldn’t have survived the war without this woman. Can you guess my reaction to this story? Obviously, my jaw dropped, and I was overwhelmed with emotion. These beautiful pictures were made all the more beautiful by having that story to accompany them. And I was struck by what I had read about Dorothea Lange and realized how right she was. I would have enjoyed the pictures anyway, but to have the context behind them, that this was a woman my grandfather wanted to honor because she saved his life, I haven’t been able to fully articulate why this context matters so much to me, or how it makes me feel. But Dorothea would have understood.
So, Dorothea Lange, we honor you as a pioneer in the photography field; and I honor you for opening my mind to how life-changing photography, and the people behind it, can be.