Over the next decade as the nation faced the longest economic downturn in his history, photographer dorothea humanize her work. It discusses the photographers personal life and social and political content of her work. This event was recorded in october, this book was my first biography and i think it will be my last. Biographies are too hard to write. Im actually a social and historical person. In fact, when i began, i felt the times would dominate, that the book would focus on the political and social culture of the depression, of world war ii, of the cold war and that the life would be iltration. That was not to be. All that historys in the book, but Dorothea Lange is the star of the story with her forceable personality, she soon moved into the drivers seat and in a certain sense took charge, although i also spend a lieutenant of time arguing with her back and forth over quite a number of years. Of course, she didnt like the book. A biography is always got to be one life seen through another life, in this case mine. All i had written although i had written a great deal about gender, you know, gender, this biography forced me to exam more closely how gender works in the life of an individual. And this lecture, for which im very grateful for a must be of reasons, porsed me to look back and let me spell out what i was doing. Let me warn you that what im about to say is not in the book at all. This is kind of a meditation after the fact about the book. Now, speaking about this issue of gender was complex. Because an artists work lives after her, it was it was produced in one context but it takes on new meanings in whatever context people see it later. No matter how stringently we try to exclude temporary meanings, they intrude. So in speaking about this as well as in writing the book, i had to try to retain a double awareness about the past, about dorothea in which language lived. She was no feminist and she did not want to have her work discussed in gender categories. She wanted to be a great photographer. She did not want to be a great woman photographer. But historians should not necessarily try to please their subjects, so im doing it anyway. Let me start there are several levels to what im going to talk about. Im going to talk about the social, im going to talk about the social and political, and then im going to talk about whats in the photographs as we see them today. But im going to start with the personal. To a middle class filed of german born immigrants she was born in hoboken. Very normal life until two tragedies hit. When she was seven she got polio. When she was 11, her parents got divorced. She emerged from pole i. E. R owe with a small disability but she was deeply upset by her fathers departure from the household. The biggest blow, i think, is how these blows were assimilated by the young dorothea and her mothers influence was key. Her mother was embarrassed by her limp and urged her to disguise it as much as possible. In this way, even her polio experience was gendered because her mother was so anxious about what her body would look like. When skirts got shorter, dorothea began to wear slacks which was unusual and not fashionable. She never wore a skirt that was less than floor length. As an adult photographer, lange made many, many, many images of feet and legs and with her magic could make photographs of just feet enormously expressive. Then her mother also presented the marital separation to her as an abandonment by her father, although i learned that it was more mutual and more ambiguous. I wont go into that story. Thats in the would be. The point is that dorothea felt abandoned, because thats how her mother felt. She developed such a rage against her father that when she arrived in San Francisco in 1918 and where she was to spend the rest of her life, she adopted her mothers maiden name, which was lange and she never mentioned her father or his name to anyone, including her two husbands, her children, or her best friends. So here experience twopped along with her gender identity. That doesnt make her response in any way predictable. He was born with an exertive temperament. From age 12 she wandered alone the streets of new york. Ultimately, entire island of manhattan. She may have had a limp but she was extraordinarily strong. This tour of the city as she was a mediocre student in school. She did not attend university but she discovered on her own the art that was in new york. She taught herself photography by taking jobs. Her first job was at a person in one of those chain of portrait studios where she made cold calls to people trying to sell them portraits and worked as a resemmingsist at various photography studios and gained on her own the ve photographic skills. One of the people she worked for was a german american, a noted photographer. He thought she was very talented and gave her a camera. [inaudible] i figure she might be anywhere between eight and ten in that picture. She moved to San Francisco in 1918 and opened a photography studio in an upscale location. Within two years she had become the por trait photographer. This highvelocity success deprived the conjunction of her charismatic personality and a kind of modernist sophistication. At first she used the romantic misty pick torle style that tom nated in the 1920s. She soon began to modernize these pick torlist redemptions. For those of you who know about San Francisco, the man at the bottom is one of the most powerful men of the times. She attracted elite arty clients with a slightly bohemian elegance in her persona, in her stewed oseom byians. She never used the common backgrounds or pops. She opposed formal. She didnt ask her subjects to smile. She used dramatic shadows and unusual angles. She hid part of her subject. In short, her success derived from her sensitivity to the class taste of the clients she wanted. Her work represented the acme of individualism in port trachure in many ways. She used what shed learned to suggest or as she would say, to reveal individuality and a deep uper life. She endowed her subjects with interiority. She clients believed she had the power to capture their essence. They felt it just shown out from the images that she made. As she had begun to do in new york, in San Francisco she integrated herself into a bohemian arts crowd arched made her studio into a Meeting Place of artists and the more liberal wing of the citys art patrons. By 1920, a year and a half after she arrived there, she married the citys most desirable bachelor artist, manard dixon, the painter. Dixon was throughout dorotheas life much more famous than she is. Hes whats called a western photographer. He has many, many fans. Hit pictures can sell for up to a million dollars. Dixon dressed in black with cowboy boots and hat cut a dashing figure at the center of a crowd of artists. This small, limping photographic business woman had hooked the sexiest man in San Franciscos bohemia. During this marriage, lange entirely subordinated herself to may northward but in patterns unusual or not so unusual of women married to artist, she was not only the exclusive housekeeper and parent, she put up with his womanizing and long an sense on painting trips but was often the main breadwinner in the family. At one point lange was forced out of the studio and on to the streets in the sense that her clientele shrank. She was chasing in the confines of her studio and her marriage and the two steamed fuse in her mind. She would take her cameras into the streets. She was accustomed to being hired. She was gratified when she found often people on the street did not notice her. Later she would understand that she had a message for makeling them not a method for making them not notice her. She said about her early work in the streets, sometimes you have an inner sense that you have that you are not taking anything away from anyone, their privacy, their dignity, or their wholeness. On such selfreassurance her whole photographic future rested. Documentary photography connected her to an extraordinary man who became her second man and partner for the ast of her life, paul taylor, product product of berkeley who ordinaryer into the ex security administration. Theres been nothing like it sense, to our great loss. For six years a small and amazingly hard working group of about a dozen photographers made several hundred thousand photographs of american rule life. The project was initiated to create propaganda for roosevelts new deal with you expanded to create a democratic picture of the rural united states, one that emphasized particularly those who didnt work at farming, rather than the owners of the great plantations of mistened california. There are several pair dwocxeses in langes life, including the fact that this quintessential city girl ended up working for the department of agriculture, never having even visited a farm when she was hired, but my favorite of the paradox is the way it turns around, a typical story of womens emancipation,. In the usual story you start with a woman who is a dependent on her husband and who gradually works her way into a profession, getting a job, having an income of her own and feeling independent. Lange reversed it. She got the opportunity to become a great photographer when she married a second husband who could support her on his academic from the university of california and relieved her of the responsibility of earning for her whole family. And it was a large family, she had two children of her own and four stepchildren. Ok. Now, i said were going to talk first about the personal and second about the socialist. But we know its impossible to separate the personal from the social historical, but some episodes are more constrained by the social than other, so i want to illustrate by sketching out one account of langes life, one aspect of her live and that is her motherhood. When she married manard dixon she inherited a 10yearold stepdaughter, constance. The girl was furious at dorothea from the start. She had lost first her mentally ill, alcoholic mother, and then she had been for a time her fathers only love. Manard, instead of providing reassurance to his daughter when he married, he immediately turned her over to dorothea and resumed his own pattern of taking long, long trips into the desert to paint. Dorothea was flying high with her studio practice and did not want to be stuck at home while manard and his friends socialized in the restaurant. Sot she had her own trouble with this dependent. For whatever reason, she was unable to mother this unhappy rl and they had a terribly terribly angry and violent elationship. Then two sons were born. Im sorry. That comes later but you can watch it now. As with constance, manard turned over the two boys entirely to dorothea and took no responsibility for them. By 1932 when the marriage was beginning to erode and the boys were 7 and 4, dorothea and manard made the first of many decisions to place their children in foster care. Her divorce, her remarriage, and the security job confirmed the practice. Between 1932 and 1940, all these children, all six of them, her two the first two children were in paid foster care placements for parts of most years, from a couple of weeks to three or four months at a time. Dan vixon, the oldest son recalled his feelings to me when i interviewed him about how he tpwhelt his mother and father would come to the visit and i quote dan dixon. I remember standing outside the place where we lived waiting and waiting for that black model a to appear, and when the day was over, i remember watching it go weeping and weeping as the red taillights receded. In writing about lange, i had to reckon with this pain. I have discussed it with many, many friends, and not a single one of them who is a parent can imagine doing such a thing. But as a historian, im obliged to put her sons resentment and sadness into the context of the 1930s and its standards about motherchild bonding. Employed mothers then frequently turned to relatives, parents, foster parents and institutions in that matter. Poor mothers often placed their children in orphanages temporarily or in foster homes, those who could afford to pay. The rich sent their children to boarding school and often did this starting at very young ages, or they had fulltime livein nannies. Although it was become day care was becoming more common and carried the stig ya of a. Tigma of charity, it was furthermore, the Child Development experts of the time held that foster care was the superior choice, in a Day Care Center they reasoned, children would be cared for my strangers who were responsible for groupings of children. In foster care, children would have a mother and a family, possibly even a father. Ironically, the Child Development wisdom of the time also said separations and shifting caretakers were not traumatic for children so long as their fundamental physical needs were met. Although many experts today consider childrens emotional and developmental need for bonding exclusively with one or two parents to be an timeless and yir reduceable fact of human nature that is simply not what childhood experts thought in the 1930s. Lange felt enormous anguish and guilt about this decision. She soon developed the first symptoms of severe ulcers that would cause her so much pain in later years and ultimately lead to her death. Her children were also manards and he did not share any of these feelings of guilt. After the divorce he visited them very rarely and evinced not one quit of responsibility for them. They were entirely supported by language and her new husband paul taylor. Paul taylor had three children and handed them over to dorothea and thought it just fine to place them in foster care. Yet none of these children and i talked to all of those who were alive none of them blame their fathers at all. This is, however, entirely understandable. In 1935, few people thought fathers had caretaking responsibilities for children. But her guilt from placing out the children derives not just from feeling like a bad mother but also from something even more unspeakble to her, and that was admission, that most ambition, the most unwomanly of drivers. When she was offered the job, she did not hesitate the moment, although she knew it would mean not seeing her children for months at a time. She knew she was a bad mother but her ambition in some ways hid itself not only from others but to her through a variety of consciousness that she disguised it. Until well after world war ii she never admitted to a desire to be an artist. She considered harry tradesman to use her word. Studio photography often functioned as a camouflage for ambition because it allowed women to work at home and trivialize the significance of their work. Langes chief defense against recognizing her own ambition took the form of experiencing her drive as if it came from somewhere else, from a force beyond her control. She often spoke of herself in the passive. She called herself a channel, a cypher, a person that can be used for lots of things. These are all quotes from her. Her denial extended to the way she discussed placing out her children as if she had no responsibility for making it happen. And i quote from her, if the boys hasnt been taking from me y circumstances, she wrote. And yet while she faced the daunting gender norms of her time she not only charged herself but made herselfing a second husband from a marriage made in heaven. Paul taylor exited only pride and encouragement for her ambition, never thought for a moment she should stay home and mind the children. She thought she was a genius and adored her for it. Womens ique spin on emancipation, find the right husband. These are images of two new deal murals, and it shows i chose them because theyre typical. And i think they reflect visually what im about to say about policy which is viryullly every new deal program rested on conservative assumptions about gender. Even the Emergency Relief Program either excluded women or excluded them from public jobs and consigned them to puny relief payments, or if they did give them jocks, they limited them to makework jobs such as sewing mattresses in sweat shops. Social security, the Labor Relations act, the fair labor standards act excluded from coverage almost all men of color and women of all races. Langes employer, the department of agriculture was one of the most discriminatory federal agencies. It was at the time the biggest operation of the federal government, bigger even than the defense department. Then called the war department. Ts definition of its considered them not as farmers but as farmers wives. Within the department of agriculture, the Security Agency that lange worked for constituted an enclave of progressives and radicals who sought to help the needs of growing small family farmers, of tenant farmers and share croppers, those who had been most devastated by the depression. Not surprisingly Farm Security was under constant attack not only from congress but also from the more poufrl men in the department of agriculture. As the only female photographer until Marion Post Wolcott was hired by the project in its very last years, langes sal write was lower than that of far less experienced men. On the job she was caught in a double bind. She was on the one hand treateded discriminatoryly as a woman but on the others hand she was expected to work like a man, that is, a man who had a wife. For example, all the other f. S. A. Photographers who are on the road for months at a time took their wives and occasionally their girlfriends along as unpaid assistants on the road. Lange, who needed the help most, i might point out, hired the son of a friend who became instantly a great photographer himself and paid him out of her own pocket and out of her own 3 a day per diem allotment. She bought meals for him, too. To Paul Taylor Lange have been influenced by the labor movements at the time. The San Francisco long shoremans general strike of 1934 and also the great aing architectural strikes of californias central and imperial vaffs seemed of ex treem violence. I think a lot of people remember the struggle that ended with the creation of the united farm workers. There were many failed struggles in the 1920s and 30s. In several cases, the big growers arranged to get hundreds of their men deputized by county sheriffs so as to be able to beat up strikers, agitators, even journalists and federal mediators with impunity. There were kills. The there were private stock aids in which opponents were locked up without charges. Lange tried several times to photograph the strikes and always failed. Her disability meant that she could not move quickly, especially when burdened with heavy cameras, and i show these because i want to remind you what the cameras looked like. She never used 35 millimeter camera. She used these very, very large and heavy view cameras and whenever possible also used a tri pod. O she had a lot to lug around. Photojournalist tapa says famously, if your pictures arent good enough, youre not close enough. Well, lange could not get close enough. None of her pictures of these strikes and other similar conflicts turned out well. Now, i think this failure had a lot to do with gender as well as with disability. The violence terrified lange. She withdrew. The labor mufmentse of the 1930s often assumed very macho tactics, discourses and strategies. Uninterested in organizing insulated c. I. O. Themselves from alternative organizing strategies. While the class violence of the 1930s was almost exclusively employer generated, it nevertheless had the effect of excluding women. However timid she might have been physically, in mind and in spirit, lange was extraordinarily brave. She defied not only gender but also racial conventions as is evident of her photography of people of color. Influenced from her San Francisco days influenced by an extraordinary photographer some of you may be familiar with, and of course by paul taylor who was in the 1920s virtually the only anglo scholar studying mexican americans. Langes race consciousness grew first from traveling through the san waugh kean valley learning about how my grant farmers were treated. Then in the Southern States from North Carolina to mississippi she photographed share croppers. From Farm Security she made more photographs of people of color, approximately one third of her total output than any other photographer until gordon parks joined the staff at the very, ery end of the f. S. A. Project. This fact about her extensive photographer and she was not well known because she did not own or control any of the photography. It was all the property of the federal government. She was sfosed to send a raw un supposed to send raw undeveloped film to washington. She distributed it free of charge to all types of media. They decided what to distribute. They distributed what they considered accept tobble the mainstream. A few years later, she when she tried once again to do something that she controlled, she defied not only the u. S. Fovet and near unanimous Public Opinion but also defied the organized left to which many of her friends belonged in her risque photographic opposition to the sbernlt of japanese americans, which i dont have time to go into now but ill let you know if youre interested in that, a few years back, also i put out a photography book, a collection of her photographs of the japanese internment. It is called impoundment. Its about people but also about the fact that her photographs were impounded by the u. S. Army. Now i want to turn to the photography itself. At that time outset, Farm Security photographers ssignment was to cover fallingapart barns, soil erosion, of the dust bowl. Lange would influence the projects whole legacy through her use of port trachure which is what she did and in a certain sense all of her photography was portrait photographry. She took the same camera and the same eye she had turned on the rich and directed it toward the poor. Producing portraits that individualized her subjects and made them interesting and memorable to the viewer even as she illustrated their depression predicament. Instead of the blank backgrounds she used in the studios, she produced images of individuals in their social context. I think this is the popularity of the photos, that she showed not masses but of individuals and particular stories. In doing this, lange was feminizing the field. Just to show you a couple of examples of earlier documentary otography, the word of jacob rece tended to show context or faces but rarely both. The tone like that of walter evans was cool and internet in comparison to the emotional se duck activeness of langes. People will usually photographed hauntyly, immobile. Sometimes dignified but never flirtashese. Evans coolness was an entirely gendered matter. He had a favorite phrase. Referred to photographing babies as a synonym for selling out artistic integrity. Lange wanted personality, activity, and emotion in her photographs. More over, there are no lange photographs of unlovely people. No doubt, she may have passed over some subjects, but more importantly, she made her there areovely and if time for questions i can talk to you about how she did that. The portrait which in her words, a portrait is a collaboration between a photographer and a subject and that, therefore, as a result, subjects had a perfect right to expect clear mimmings of themselves flattering images of themselves. She applied that same principle pal to her documentary work. This departure from documentary socalled objectivity, a very much contested concept in photography, could be recognized as gendered. It was a personal service to the client, not so distant, at the time it was considered quite closely related to interior decoration or fashion and makeup consultation and photographyh fi. Ut placing the documentary was a male as well as a female practice and one that paralleled her husband paul taylors social science. Taylors strong sense of responsibility, not just to document but also to correct the injustices and sufferings his scholarship uncovered had been characteristic of the whole field of social science and was now being reinvig rated during the depression. Now, ive said that there are ways in which langes style was quintessentially feminine but i think we have to be on guard of analyses of her work as film anyone. Critics have employed some of he worst gendered cliches, reading off her content of her work as intuitive to be characteristic of women. She lived instinctively, photographed spontaneously. Another wrote. From artists like Dorothea Lange, the making of an image is a trick of grace about which she can do little beside making herself available for that trick of grace. Another described her as a piece of white photosensitive paper or like an unex bowsed film on to which light and shadow marked impressions. My point here is not to deny the gendered aspects of her work but to challenge categorizing it as instinctive. Far from a passive receptor, she was an assertive visual person, visual and selfconscious working to develop a photography that could be maximally commune ca a active in their viewing. Her years are subject to the finest controls, of positioning subjects, of camera angles, of speed and aperture and timing. Just want to give you one little example. First photograph was the product of her taking either six or seven exposures or photographs of that same group of people. Working her way gradually and carefully toward the one she liked best, and that doesnt count all the exposures she would have thrown away. She carefully planned every photograph, often made a dozen exposures of a single scene. Those who observed her in the field unanimously remarked on how slow she was, and her tempo was overdetermined by her disability, by her large cameras, by the need to calculate light. There were no light meters yet in the 1930s. Many expert photographers can appear to look instinctively because they operate quickly as a result of years of practice. Lange has that speed in her eye but not in her body. She read extensively rural economics and social ol just and listeneded to taylors explanations before picking up the camera. Her every exposure, not to mention her every move in the dark room, was the result of study and practice. Now, its true that lange sometimes characterized her work and style as instinctive, but she was wrong. Many artists experienced their perceptions this way a, male as well as female. Makeover, in performing an exaggerated intuitiveness, lange was manifesting her guilt and fear of her own ambition and mastery. Far more important, i think, than what she said, however, is what the photographs show. As the formidable lange expert sally stein has shown, her photography shows a trance gressiveness toward gender norms, though it appears that lange herself might not have recognized it. E the popular cull chure strengthened the breadwinner family picked the wonl while mothers, c earth lange visualized women as independent and often conflicted. This is a photograph not from the depression but from a study of defense plant in richmond, california, in the keiser shipyards. Her depression photos are sharply etched, often thin and delicate, but always tough. Shows women in hard labor in the field, women as often as men. Her rural subject matter was probably what was responsible because a sexual division of labor was less common among hard working people. 2w5s very common for women to work in the fields and follow omen are farmers, as well as farmers wives. Quintessentially a photograph, lange did not show women as wives. This take applies not only to women working in the field but lso to their domestic labor. There are seering photographs of the Living Conditions of farmers, she showed how women struggled even while camped in the fields to create a semblance of order. This is one of my favorite of a genre that lange did a lot of, although theyre not well known, and that is still life. But this is a still life of the make shift kitchen that a woman who was a my grant farm worker has created in where she lives is nothing but a canvas leantoo supported by a couple of stakes. Its also an extraordinary photograph. If you look at it very closely, theres a tremendous amount of information in it about what these people ate, about what she owned, how they managed. Hundreds of lange photographs point out how women tried to create kitchens and brms, how they cooked and bathed children and washed clothes while living without tents, leantos furniture. They are doing nothing less than creating civilization out of wilderness. In her words, lange articulated fairly conventional gender ideas. She often talked about how she believed that women had unique functions for which they were destined and unique ways of seeing. But winding through her maternal photographs, theres always a subversive dimension. She made many madonnas. This is one of then. But obviously, its not a typical madonna. Interestingly enough, she almost never photographed whole Nuclear Family units. They are mostly fatherless. Mother and child formed the central couple. A common refrain during the epression, a common motif in the vernacular Christian Culture in which she was raised and in which most americans lived. T langes madonnas are starting. They are sometimes like heroic soviet women. They can do anything and however hard the conditions, they will survive and defend their children. Fragile and soft as this nursing mother may be, there is no mistaking the steely determination in her eyes. In fact, for lange, motherhood was often represented as a burden. It seemed to require constant vigilance against danger. It would be easy to trace this back to langes own guilt about leaving her own children and leave it at that, but im not convinced by that reductionism. Its also a mold of recognizing mothering as hard labor and recognizing mothers as workers. Even her quintessential madonna, the photograph i showed first, the one thats known as my grant mother, actually shows a woman whos turned away from her children rather than toward them. The photographs of pregnancy are striking. These images are still impolite, if not indecent in the 1930s. Some of you may be aware of that, for example, no pregnant woman was allowed to hold a job who had to appear in public, if she were pregnant. It would be several decades before Public Images of pregnancy became respectable. Lange made quite a few portraits of visibly pregnant women and they are mott maternal cliches. Some have negative attitudesed about their pregnancies, not surprising at all in the depression conditions, but still big step away from the sent gentalized joy associated with motherhood. Like many female photographers, she made many pictures of children, far more than the male Farm Security photographers. Some of her children are cute and lively, displaying the standard appeal of children for viewers of photography, although not so common among pictures of people of color that are being shown to whites. Not soy of them are also happy. I find her pictures exquisitely sensitive to the complex emotional lives of children, taking even children seriously as individuals of this i found this is just a particularly striking correlation. The girl at the top is a part of a my grant farm working family in the state of oregon picking hops. The girl at the bottom taken two decades slaret a palestinian girl from a time when she was traveling around the world doing photography in asia and some in latin america. These children are typically not be their parents, perhaps neglected but if so, likely beyond the circumstances of the control of a caring parent. Her view of poor rural children like her view of the mothers was no doubt charged with emotion about her own children and her own child had. Hood. Her own identification as neglected and neglector adds to the visual outrage embedded in the many images she made of child labor. My hunch is that many of these childrens very hard lives actually functioned for her in a contradictory direction on one hand, making the deprivation she saw, that the deprivation she saw made her own childrens pain less intense and her own guilt less. On the other hand, daily encounters with unhappy, sick, and hungry children helped her escape from the awareness of suffering children. Perhaps most unconventional are langes many images of fathers with children. Padonnas. All them they are so many of these and they are so unusual. These images are often exceptionally tender, quite possibly more so than the motherchild images. Her sensitivity to fathers may be another product of her travels in the countryside since close fatherchild relations are a common aspect of rural life where people are not as separated from their fathers as hey are in cities. Whats interesting is that theyre not only tender, but there are quite a number of pictures like the one on the i guess its your right that show so much joy. The one on the rights one of my favorites. Its basically a picture of a my grant farm worker who has just returned from a hard days work in the field and is just completely delighted by being greeted so effusively by two children and a little dog. Now, the presence of a child gives a father dig tirks because he becomes responsible and therefore gains authority. But when they appear together with their wives, langes fathers are often in weakened positions. I didnt i dont have a picture to show you of that, but in fact, dejected policemen, they l them, in lange brood in groups, they slump on street corners, they bend over park benches, etc. , but even these dejected guys are not unattractive and they are by no means abject. They are graceful and softened as if sherp finding the Positive Side of male disempowerment. She showed idle unemployed men as worried and despondent but absolutely manly. Always attentive to masculine ways of handling humiliation, in her photographs of the japanese internment she was particularly sensitive to teenage boys. And i quote from something she wrote. They were the ones that really hurt me the most. The teenaged boys who didnt know what they were. What she meant was they thought they were american but now the American Government says they arent. These americanized boys, they were loud and they were rowdy nd they were frightened. She recented this subtle subversion in her photography of people of color. Racial liberals of the time typically perceived subor the nated whites. Racists saw them as louisiana and stupid. Both groups saw them as somehow depleted. And if you want an example of at im talking about, look erskine called wells book you have seen their faces. Its quite, quite, quite updating in its racism. Langes images stand out for their lack of pity, their lack of objective indication. Just as with her white subjects she often shoots from below north to heighten the dignity of er subjects. Social subordination, even expressed in bodily deference, did not obscure a persons energy, purposefulness and complex active. Her subjects are restrained, even cerebral. The photographs of nonwhite women are often more charming than those of men. They are less depressed but never simple. Perhaps what makes a lange portrait most gripping is that the subjects retain an air of reserve. Those who look down on their subjects, as many photographers who preceded lange did believed, i think, that they knew their subjects, knew who they were, knew what they were like. Langes photographs suggest, i think, that the photographer does not understand everything about her subjects. It remains a mystery. And this may be their mostful and challenging message. To reevept, lange was no feminist. Ive often wondered what her thoughts would have been had she lived just a few years longer and experienced the womens movement. She died in 1965. Her photography when considered with the questions we can ask today seem almost to suggest a questioning, an awareness of contradictions that is only barely subterrainian. I suspect that this consciousness or possible unconsciousness was not unique to lange but could be found among many women whose lives and work in the 1930s, in part because of the depression, simplely could not fit the gender structures that the depression and the new deal era were trying to reaffirm. Its just possible that artists like lange were especially sensitively in touch with their raw spots created by this lack of fit. And i want to suggest that despite the absence of any feminist activism in that period, surely its roots could be found. Thats it. Thank you so much. [applause] id be delighted to have questions or comments or arguments or whatever. Cup ol questions regarding her process of photographing subjects. One of the questions you had mentioned was that she had a process for not being seen, not being noticed which would allow her to get a more spontaneous, natural reaction from them. And the second one is how she made them beautiful, you had mentioned that also. The answer to both of them are the same. She had a lot of mystical talk. She herself said Something Like i know how to put on a face so that no one will see me. But if you read if you look at how she worked and read what some of the critics say you understand how she did it. First of all, she exaggerated her slones. She knows from her portrait work is that everyones instinct is to stiffen up for the camera. One way to get them not to do that is have them forget about her. Sometimes she would be very, very slow try this tri pod over here and try this over there. She preferred to have three cameras fully loaded so she could change according to what she was going to shoot, and she found that if she kept doing that for a while, people got tired of watching her and they stood around waiting for her to be ready and then she would make the picture. Another technique was conversation. ,n relation to the farm workers she learned right away from paul taylor you do not ask questions like how much are you paid or whats your boss like, that sends Union Messages and people run away. Or better was how do you get to the next towns. Or one of her favorites was she would ask for a drink of water and drink it very, very slowly. Yet another one was she knew that kids were really interested. The kids would come flocking around, and she actually forced herself i was shocked at this she forced herself to let the children hold and exam the cameras. And pretty soon shed have a whole gaggle of kids around. The parents would come over to make sure the parents werent bothering her. Her purpose in all of this was to get people relax into their natural body language. She believed that if the although i said before she thought peoples faces were real things, actually, she was much more interested in how bodies reveal things. And i didnt show you really any of these. But some of her most extraordinary photographs are portraits, portraits where you dont see the persons face at all, but you see through gesture, through position a great sense of what the emotional state of that person is. Ure. I have a question. Once she set her photos often to the government, how did she get any of them back . It was a constant struggle. This was not just to her, it was to all photographers. Heres the problem. A photographer wants to immediately see the product of her work so that she or he can criticize it and adjust, maybe the lighting or the speed is not right. So you want to see them right away. Theoretically Farm Security was supposed to make work prints from the negatives and ship those back. But there were times when they were a month, six weeks longer before she got to see them and she was furious. The constant argument, the corresponds goes on and on about that. They cheated. They kept back some photographs. They didnt send them. Otherwise, they couldnt know what they were doing. But they couldnt use them. They couldnt allow someone to publish them because that would of course give them they werent their property. They did not own these photographs. But it was really a constant struggle. The same thing was true of the japanese internment. She never saw those photographs until the year before she died when she took a trip, she learned that they had been rather quietly placed in the National Archives and took a trip to washington to see them in 1964. Shed done it in 1922, so it was a huge, huge problem. I got the impression that none of her kids really for gave her. Is that true . Did she develop a rapport with any of them . Yes, i have spoken with both and one of her stepchildren, who are still alive, and many, many, many of her grandchildren, who are often closer to my generation. I was actually so impressed with how judicious they were in speaking about their mother, which was nice for me because i feel like they were not in any. Ay trying to censor they complain about her. She was controlling. She was not always an easy person to get along with. Boys used to call her dictator duff. They alsoe time, understood she was an and or mislead generous person. Every younger photographer who she meant toward sort of talk about her as if she walked on water every younger photographer who she mentored. She was generous with praise and help. I was really struck by what a remarkable kind of distance they had on it. John dickson, the other son, said the same kind of thing a lot of sadness and even some bitterness that will never go ,way, but at the same time there was a lot of generosity. I can tell you personally that all those who are still alive should be thrilled that this. Ook is here i dont know that they have read it yet. I dont mean to imply i just mean that they are glad it happened. Linda for anthank extraordinary presentation, and toant to invite all of you purchase the book here. If you are watching somewhere else, purchase wherever you can. It is an extraordinary read, extraordinary history, extraordinary biography. Thank you all for coming. [applause] thank you. Thank you so much. On history bookshelf, here from the countrys bestknown American History writers of the past decade every saturday at 4 00 p. M. Eastern, and to watch these programs any time, visit our website, www. Cspan. Org history. You are watching American History tv all weekend every weekend on cspan3. Each week, reel america brings you archive all films that help tell the story of the 20th century. Last honors for Herbert Clark hoover, 31st president of the united states. The Nations Capital pauses to pay tribute to the son of a blacksmith who rose to the highest office in the land and remained in Public Service until. He end of his 91st year his body is carried up the steps of the capital to rest on the rotunda, an honor reserved for a few men the great, the humble his in his passing mourn passing. It is a scene strangely reminiscent of last november when the body of president john f. Kennedy lay here. The president wreath is a simple one of carnations. In two days, tens of thousands of people filed by in final who overcame man the fate of being a depression president to gain new stature as a statesman and humanitarian of international repute. Mr. Hoover is laid to final rest in the town of his birth, west branch, iowa, amid the boyhood scenes he loved so well. Farewell to herbert hoover. No more fitting epitaph could be written than he helped feed the hungry and clothes the naked, and he loved his fellow man. American watch reel every weekend on cspan3s American History tv. The 2015 cspan studentcam competition is under way, open to all middle and High School Students to create a five to sevenminute documentary on the theme the three branches and you, showing how policy, law, or action by legislative or Judicial Branch has affected you and your community. List of rules and how to get started, go to studentcam. Org. 200 years ago during the war of 1812, british soldiers invaded washington, d. C. , on august way four, 1814, and set fire to the white house and u. S. Capitol building. President James Madison and first Lady Dolly Madison fled the city. Oft, pamela scott, coauthor buildings of the District Of Columbia spoke at