Dorothea Lange by Elizabeth Partridge

Author:Elizabeth Partridge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2013-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Second Born

Berkeley, California, 1955

“Walking wounded” included both inner and outer scars. “There are many, many people on the streets today who are ‘walking wounded,’” she said. “I see the ‘walking wounded’ in myself and in my friends.” It was, she acknowledged, a “recurrent theme in my pictures.”89

In 1952 the photography curator at MoMA, Edward Steichen, decided to put together an exhibit he called Family of Man to celebrate the universality of human experience. Dorothea volunteered to help, and Steichen was delighted to accept. It was a perfect project for her, and the energies she had available. Dorothea looked through West Coast photographers’ portfolios, sending Steichen prints, showering him with her ideas about what should be on the walls. Deeply aware of the message the show would contain, she urged Steichen to make sure he included negative emotions as well as positive ones—jealousy, hatred, envy, loneliness.90 She functioned in essence, though not in title, as an assistant curator.

The show opened in January 1955 with contributions from 273 photographers, and more than 500 images hung on the walls, three of them Dorothea’s own photos. Though the show was panned by critics as sentimental, it was a runaway success, breaking all previous records for attendance at an art show. It was an invaluable experience for Dorothea in the multitude of ways photographs have to work together—complementing, reinforcing, even contradicting one another—to create a resonant show.

Dorothea’s increased health coincided with the new popularity of photojournalism and the rise of glossy picture magazines in the 1950s, such as Life and Look. Looking for new publication avenues, Dorothea asked Ansel to collaborate with her on a story about three Mormon towns in Utah. She and Ansel drove out with Paul and Dan: Paul helped gather information and smoothed the way with various Mormon officials, and Dan wrote the copy.

It required a very different shooting style than Dorothea was used to. “When she was doing an article for Life, she was focusing on a narrower subject,” Paul explained. “When she was out in the field photographing for the government, it was catch as catch can—whatever aspect of the general situation might pop up, we stopped by the roadside and that she took. Whereas, for the three Mormon villages, you worked those villages, and worked them over until you felt you had them presented . . . When you were with the FSA, you grabbed what you saw.”91 Dorothea chaffed under the constraints; there were rigid publication deadlines, and the editors had total control of the photo selection, layout, captions, and text. Of the more than one thousand images Dorothea and Ansel shot, less than thirty were used in the final article. And though Dorothea and Ansel had begun the project with great respect for each other’s visions, in the end they were pulling in two different directions.

Taking her cumbersome Graflex and a 35 mm camera, Dorothea and Dan traveled next to County Clare, Ireland, for an article on country people. For six weeks she worked tirelessly in her old FSA style, shooting twenty-four hundred images.

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