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