Dorothea was a small woman, who she said was able to disappear, not be obvious even with a camera in her hand. However, the stories she gathered came from talking to to people, asking for their stories, telling a bit of her own. She had no intention of taking from her subject, but of giving something profound, attention to their stories. Apparently that intention came through again and again.

Gas Station. Kern County, California. 1938.
Dorothea Lange.

Dorothea was one of the influences on me that made photography possible as a life's work choice. My early teenage years were ripe with a moral impulse to make a difference while I'm here, alive on this planet. With the war in Vietnam, political assassinations, global strife, looming environmental disasters and the threat of nuclear war, the dawning of my political awareness necessitated shaping a life that acted on those concerns. At first that seemed like law, government, politics or something along those lines. But those processes seemed so ripe with conflict, corruption and ambiguous progress.

The arts and photography were just one of many areas I wanted to explore, and it was a newfound knowledge of Ansel Adam's environmental work, and Dorothea's social work that led me to believe I could shape a path through life making art, and make a difference at the same time.

I didn't know anything of Ansel's and Dorothea's friendship, but it seems there is some interesting history there. My curiosity got perked in a clip of Dorothea referring to artists and documentary photographers:

Many artist photographers alliance with the world is very slight. Their alliance is to themselves. and their effort is to translate the outside world in terms of their needs

This seemed like it might have been a criticism of photographers engaged in landscape or other purely artistic photographic efforts. I thought it might have been referring to Ansel Adams as Cartier-Bresson once did:

The world is going to pieces and people like Adams and Weston are photographing rocks!

Of course Ansel had been working for decades on the preservation of the wilderness he was portraying, as so many photographers I know also have. We seek ways to give back, to make a difference. It has become second nature for me to tell a photographic truth (not a Photoshop enhancement) about this earth, and use that very truth to foster an appreciation of the real and magical world we live in. That world needs allies in the struggle to preserve it, we need greater connection with this earth to live as healthy natives to this planet.

Riding somewhere in the middle of all of this was a line that touched me long before photography did, from folk singer Phil Ochs in the liner notes of his Pleasures of the Harbor album:

“In such an ugly time, the true protest is beauty.”
               Phil Ochs, liner notes
               Pleasures of the Harbor, 1968

I then learned that Ansel and Dorothea had been friends for decades. She had been well acquainted with the Group f/64, had talked Ansel into more than one joint project, and in the 1950s he hired her to teach at the California School of Fine Arts (later becoming the San Francisco Art Institute).

Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams made me aware that photography could make a difference. They made me believe I could make a difference.

Migratory field worker picking cotton in San Joaquin Valley, California. 1938
Dorothea Lange.

An empathy with the downtrodden and struggles of the Depression impressed me early on with Dorothea's work. My own family migrated from Oklahoma to California in the early 1930s, and her work always touched me as being symbolically a portrait of my own kin. Just as John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath almost could have been my own family story. The fact that so many of her photographs were made in my homeland of the Great Central Valley, also brought her story home to me.

Personal connections with our heroes are often imagined, but I was touched on hearing Dorothea's son Daniel recount his mother and Paul Taylor's moment of truth together while walking through a field of wildflowers in my homeland of California's Central Valley:

Down in the Central Valley, springtime, knee-deep in poppies and lupines, they stopped the car, they walked out into the wildflowers, and they looked at each other, that look told that they were going to spend their lives together.                    
             -Daniel Dixon in the video "A Visual Life"

Bean thresher. Mechanized agriculture between Turlock and Merced, California. 1936.
Dorothea Lange

Over these last few days since the American Master broadcast, I've gone back through the video collection I have, again browsed the Library of Congress collections, revisited some old memories and experiences associated with Dorothea Lange and inspired by her. It has been a good journey. I've learned many things I did not know, and my feeling of kinship for this remarkable woman has only grown deeper.

A few Dorothea Lange Links:

Library of Congress website

AUDIO IN|SIGHT: Dorothea Lange with Deborah Klochko

Dorothea Lange film: A Visual Life

Dorothea Lange: A Visual Life excerpt

Ansel Adams Portraits of Dorothea

Our Stakes in the Japanese Exodus

Life Magazine Sept 1954. Three Mormon Towns by Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams and Daniel Dixon. Exhibition of Dorothea's Photos from the Project.

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