Dorothea Lange Read online

  When translated into today’s dollars, her fees seem substantial: Mrs. Wendell Hamon, 1921, sitting and eight prints, $40—worth $411 in 2007; Mrs. Arnstein, 1928, sitting and two prints, $25—equivalent to $296 in 2007.14 Lange’s prestige would likely have allowed her to charge top rates. Her contemporary, photographer Margaret Bourke-White, remarked that “the only way to make 90% of my wealthy clients appreciate the work is to charge simply unheard of prices. . . . It is almost prostituting oneself for money.” Lange bought an extremely comfortable armchair for her studio so that “ ‘my clients will not get up and leave when I name my price.’ ”15 Bourke-White was then a leftist, and her class resentment arose not only from her politics but also from her discomfort in an employee position. Lange never expressed resentment of the rich who commissioned her. She did not feel like an employee. On the contrary, she saw herself as an equal and even a teacher to her clients.

  Lange plunged into San Francisco’s world of professional photographers. Already in 1920, the San Francisco Chronicle referred to her as “a photographic artist of great talent, whose work has exceptional quality and feeling, and who has secured a large clientele. . . .”16 In the same year she became one of the twenty-eight founding members of the Pictorial Photographic Society of San Francisco.17 She successfully avoided antagonizing the dean of western pictorialist photographers, Sigismund Blumann, soon to become the editor of Camera Craft, the West Coast’s dominant magazine in the field, and the author of the best-selling Photographic Workroom Handbook (first published in 1927, reprinted for many years). He made images of wispy young women gliding through forests, foliage reflected in glimmering lakes, and San Francisco’s buildings and shoreline veiled in mist.

  Pictorialism can be caricatured—as I have just done—on numerous grounds: for its class and racial elitism, for its sentimentality, for its antiurbanism, not to mention the purist notion that photography should not try to look like a different art form. Some of these complaints involved masculinist sneers at womanly taste. The pictorialist lens not only celebrated the beauty of women and children but also feminized landscapes and urbanscapes, making them nurturant, graceful, and rounded, as opposed to Ansel Adams’s later craggy Yosemite, for example. In fact, this gendered opposition is exaggerated. Most pictorialists were men.18 Many photographers, like Lange, experimented across the pictorialist/modernist divide. Her style evolved in conversation with her clients, sensitive to what they liked but also introducing them to less conventional approaches to posture, dress, and facial expression.

  Lange also wooed her subjects with the elegant ambience of her studio. You entered Lange’s studio through the Tolerton gallery, passed to a courtyard with a semicircular pool and a fountain, spitting water out of a lion’s mouth, then entered the studio through French doors. The large reception room featured a fireplace, usually lighted, velvet drapes, and a large black velvet couch facing the fireplace. Lange decorated the studio in bohemian style, with exotic Arts and Crafts objects scattered about—a taste she had picked up from Genthe. She turned her studio into a kind of salon. She acquired a Russian samovar, and late every afternoon there was tea and tea cakes from a famous old San Francisco baker, Eppler’s, for whoever dropped in. This was served graciously by Lange’s receptionist Ah-yee, a beautiful Chinese “mission girl”—that is, she had been educated in a Christian mission school. She had a merry sense of humor and was very popular with Dorothea and her customers. By 5:00 P.M., the “place was full of all kinds of people,” taking on the atmosphere of a social event. People made dates to meet “at the couch.” They would sometimes roll back the rug, play jazz recordings, and dance.19 The fact that Dorothea worked very long hours contributed to the social life. She built a darkroom and a retouching workbench in the basement. “I was [there] working most of the time, day and night, Saturdays and Sundays, holidays. . . . That place was my life, and it became the center for many other people who used my studio in the afternoons and the night.”20 She left her door open so that people could enter even if she was in the darkroom, and she would hear their footsteps and come up. Guests got used to her hands, perpetually stained brown by the developer. Fronsie stopped by frequently, and the atmosphere of the studio contributed to her eventual career as a high-design decorator.21 The arty aura, of course, made the studio more interesting to potential clients. It was the opposite of a sterile cockpit, or the study/studio of a scholar or artist who could not tolerate distraction.

  Sometime in the fall of 1919, while working in her basement darkroom, she heard unusually sharp footsteps above her. She soon learned that they were made by the painter Maynard Dixon, who always wore cowboy boots, although she might also have been hearing the taps of the golden-headed cane he carried as a prop. It was not difficult to find out who he was, since he was “easily the most colorful figure” in San Francisco’s art world.22 She then saw him several times in the Tolerton gallery, but she did not approach him, feeling, uncharacteristically, a bit intimidated. The man who introduced them recalled that they immediately radiated mutual attraction. In March 1920, they were married. Impatient readers will have to wait until the next chapter, however, to hear more about their love, marriage, and life together in San Francisco—there is too much to tell to squeeze it in here. And it would be misleading to tell that story first, because it might crowd out the work and world that Lange created for herself.

  BY THE TIME she arrived in San Francisco, Dorothea had developed a talent for friendship and projected a warm and dramatic personality. Her manner was subtle—she was not one who held forth or entertained—but she sparkled even as she drew others out. Her charisma derived in part from her originality. The timbre of her voice was high and thin, a little girl’s voice at first, its pitch lowering as she warmed to her subject; friends reported that the dash and rhythm of her speech could be mesmerizing, an impression strengthened by her large, expressive eyes. Her conversation combined the arty-intellectual and the ethereal, sometimes even seeming fey. As she aged she grew sharper—“astringent,” one friend called her. She dressed eccentrically and dramatically, wearing pants or long skirts and a beret cocked sideways; some said she dressed in costumes.23

  She was by no means primarily oriented toward men; she developed strong relationships with women and kept them forever. Her charisma drew people to her, but had she not been a sensitive and attentive friend, they would not have stuck. But Dorothea was no feminist. Too young for the first-wave women’s movement, she died before the birth of second-wave feminism, so she had little exposure to women’s-rights talk. She never complained about sex discrimination, although the fact that she experienced it is undeniable to the historian looking back at her life. Yet after her death, feminists would claim her as a heroine, and they would not be entirely wrong, because her life was in some ways woman-centered: her clients were mainly women; her documentary photography would focus heavily on women and would raise critical questions about gender relations; and she developed close and enduring bonds with women, both photographers and customers.

  Many of Lange’s female photographer friends became, or already were, illustrious: Anne Brigman, Imogen Cunningham, Consuelo Kanaga, Alma Lavenson, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Tina Modotti, Margrethe Mather, and, a bit later, Hansel Mieth. But they also faced unique stresses. They shared tips on new developers and groused about difficult clients or ruined negatives, but their talk was not only of photography—in fact they may have wished it were; decades later, Lange would reflect ruefully that she had never had the luxury of a stretch of time in which to concentrate only on photography. The women photographers were preoccupied with how to combine career and artistic development with keeping men happy and taking care of children, or living without husbands and children, which some found equally hard. The solutions they contrived tilted one way and another and rarely lasted; the balances they struck differed, and they no doubt disagreed at times with friends’ decisions. How they managed speaks of what was and what was not possible for women at the time.


  The “mother” of the San Francisco women photographers was Anne Brigman. Many photographers benefited from her support, including Edward Weston, but particularly women—including Lange. Without Brigman, it would have been harder for the women to win recognition. A generation older than Lange and her other friends, her career was possible because she was divorced and childless. Having gained prestige from her association with Stieglitz—she was one of the two western members of his Photo-Secession group—she ran something of a salon in her Oakland home until she retired to Southern California in 1929. But she also displayed unusual independence. She trekked on her own for weeks at a time through the Sierras, camping out, braving red ants and storms in her search for primeval settings to photograph. Calling herself a “pagan,” she photographed nudes—including herself—perched in trees, naked lovers entwined so that they repeated the curves of gnarled trees. The most famous and most suggestive of these photographs, Cleft in the Rock, shows a nude woman fitted into the vertical, vaginal crack in a boulder. Then in the darkroom, she would smudge the negatives, scratch out the crotch, scratch in clouds and drapery, morphing her subject into a creature of mythology. She organized a group of women photographers who photographed one another nude, since it was not easy for them to use professional models.24

  The great photographer Imogen Cunningham became Dorothea’s best friend and remained so until Lange’s death forty-seven years later. Imogen’s husband, etcher Roi Partridge, met Dorothea at Marsh’s photo-supply store and invited her home for dinner, saying to Imogen, you really need to meet the young woman I met—“she practically leapt across the counter at me with her eagerness.”25 Imogen and Dorothea made each other and their families into kinfolk, celebrating holidays and outings together. One of Imogen’s sons, Rondal Partridge, became Dorothea’s apprentice and virtually her adoptive son (as well as a great art photographer himself), and his children became like grandchildren to her. Cunningham influenced Lange’s photography (for example, see figures 9.2 and 9.3) and they shared the pleasures and stresses of children, difficult husbands, and, soon, divorces, as well as the need for paying customers.26

  The adventuresome Dorothea was magnetically drawn by Imogen’s unconventionality and rejection of feminine propriety. Nonconformity was Imogen’s by inheritance. Her father was a freethinker (that is, an atheist), a vegetarian, a Theosophist, and a believer in spiritualism—communicating with the souls of the dead.27 She saw her mother as a drudge to husband, children, farmwork and housework, and the lesson she drew was never to repeat that life herself. She became an outspoken feminist. For one portrait, Cunningham made a double exposure, showing her mother’s head encircled by an imprisoning crown of kitchen utensils. But she blamed her mother for weakness, rather than her father for his domination. She adored her father, who had home-schooled her and paid for her art lessons. Her photography displayed her father’s brand of radicalism. An early self-portrait, made in 1906, shows her lying nude in the grass.28 In later years, she, like Anne Brigman, called herself a “heathen.”29

  She opened a portrait studio in Seattle in 1910, nine years before Lange did the same thing some eight hundred miles south, and worked with the same sensibility, one Imogen called “expressive portraiture.” Cunningham made herself a part of Seattle’s art world, as Lange would do in San Francisco. But unlike Lange’s, Cunningham’s work and ideas grew more daring. She photographed male nudes, including some with their genitals showing. She loved provoking, and continued to love it until she died, at ninety-three, in 1976.

  In 1915 Imogen married Roi Partridge, whose work, artistic tastes, and marital expectations were more traditional than Imogen’s. He took lengthy sketching trips, not considering Imogen’s burden, and seemed resentful of her photography, insisting that photographers had no right to sign their work since it was only an artifact of mechanical reproduction. Their son Rondal calls their marriage an “acid bath.”30 Under pressure from Imogen to earn a living, Roi took jobs first at the advertising agency Foster and Kleiser, where Maynard Dixon also worked, and then at Mills College, but despite his salary, he moved his family to a house in rural Oakland, where water had to be carried up a hill and light was provided by kerosene lamps. Imogen, without a darkroom, did no commercial photography until 1921. She ended the relationship when Roi tried to prohibit her from traveling to New York for a photography commission. We can imagine Imogen’s pleasure in her new acquaintance, Dorothea Lange, with whom she shared a drive for independence and photography.

  Dorothea was also captivated by photographer Consuelo Kanaga, another free spirit. “She was a person way ahead of her time,” Lange recalled, “. . . a terribly attractive, dashing kind of a gal, who worked for the News and lived in a Portuguese hotel in North Beach . . . entirely Portuguese workingmen except Consuelo. . . . She had more courage! . . . they could send her to places where an unattached woman shouldn’t be seen and Consuelo was never scathed. . . . She had a tripod with a red velvet head cover!” At a mere twenty-one, Kanaga got hired as a newspaper reporter and photojournalist—she may have been the only woman photojournalist in the country then. She gave up this security in 1918 to become an art photographer. Dorothea loved her irreverent spirit: “. . . generally if you use the word unconventional you mean someone who breaks the rules—she had no rules.”31

  Kanaga’s and Lange’s styles evolved similarly in the 1920s and early 1930s. It may have been in Kanaga’s more modernist work that Lange first saw portraits made so close that that the face entirely filled the frame. (See Lange’s portrait of a Hopi, figure 5.3.) In the 1920s Kanaga was more tuned in politically than Lange. Working to develop a social-reform photography, she roamed San Francisco streets, photographing street life and poor people. She is best known today as a photographer of American blacks, because these portraits were so unusual at the time. An activist with light, inside and outside the darkroom, she revealed the radiance of dark skin, a quality lost by photographers less skilled with light. Her sensibility toward African Americans, tuned to beauty more than victimization, also influenced Lange.32 Had Kanaga remained in California, their mutual photographic influence would likely have continued. But they were always in touch, and Dorothea saw her when in New York.

  Kanaga’s photographic career was truncated by marriages, three of them, and her life journey tells us, by contrast, something about Lange. Her first husband hated city life and insisted that she follow where his job as a mining engineer took him. They soon divorced, and she took off for New York and then Europe. Worried about being single, she soon married an Irish writer, Barry McCarthy. He expected her to remain at home, an entirely irrational expectation since he had no income—his work did not get published. She began an in-home portrait business, but even this threatened him, and once, in anger, he threw out many of her prints. Still she stayed. In 1930 they returned to San Francisco, where he became increasingly alcoholic and abusive. In 1935, finally escaping from McCarthy, she went back to New York, where she married for a third time, to artist Wallace Putnam. Unable to respect her photography as he did his painting, he moved them to an artists’ colony in Croton-on-Hudson, where she could not develop a studio business. For the rest of her life she did little photography.

  As a photographer, Kanaga was an original. As a woman fenced in, she was not; she could have been Virginia Woolf’s fictional Shakespeare’s sister, or any woman without a room of one’s own. Her need for a husband and her attraction to dominating men interrupted and ultimately shut down her photographic development. Lange, by contrast, managed to combine career, marriage, and motherhood. This was not a matter of political principle. It was just that her passion for photography would not be confined, and neither would her willfulness.

  Dorothea was friendly with several other young women photographers in the 1920s, and their stories also highlight the conflicting pressures women faced. The most glamorous was Italian-born Tina Modotti: star of San Francisco’s Italian theater, silent-film actress, lover of Edward Weston, a
ctivist in the Mexican Communist party, and partner of a Cuban revolutionary in exile in Mexico City. Like any number of other ambitious women of the time, she combined a modernist feminism and revolutionary leftist enthusiasm with pleasure in an identity as companion of charismatic, even heroic men. Her sensibility conceived of male and female as opposite and complementary essences, romanticizing and melodramatizing women’s unique receptiveness—a perspective common among bohemian women. Her views about women were like Lange’s, reflected in a fun-house mirror, magnified, distorted, and made theatrical. “As far as creation is concerned,” Modotti wrote, “. . . women are negative,” a comment much like Isadora Duncan’s “a woman can [n]ever really be an artist, since Art is a hard taskmaster who demands everything, whereas a woman who loves gives up everything to life.”33

  Taught photography by Weston, Modotti began with close-ups of flowers, bodies, and fruits and vegetables, but by the mid-1920s, she applied the same design principles to photographs of workers and peasants. When she arrived in San Francisco in 1925, she met many of the women photographers, and arranged to use Lange’s studio.34 Returning to Mexico, she threw herself into left-wing activism and into several affairs with important men, including Diego Rivera and Cuban revolutionary Julio Antonio Mella. In 1929 Mella was assassinated in front of her eyes, and she was falsely accused of killing him. Deported from Mexico, she left for Berlin in 1930, then for the Soviet Union, then for Spain; she returned to Mexico under a pseudonym and died there in 1942. Pablo Neruda composed her epitaph. And photography? She produced nothing of any significance after she left Mexico.35