"A Democratic Way of Seeing"

Abstract

"A Democratic Way of Seeing" Robert Vanderlan (bio) Linda Gordon . Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. xxiii + 536 pp. Photographs, notes, and index. $35.00. Dorothea Lange took some of the most famous photographs in American history, including one—"Migrant Mother"—that has become an iconic image. Her work constitutes a great deal of our visual memory of the Great Depression, and at the same time, her photographs have become divorced from their original context. The photographs she took, along with those of her colleagues at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), were part of an effort to educate Americans about the realities of rural America during the Depression and to build political support for government aid programs. The work of Lange and the FSA, along with that of other pioneering documentarians, helped legitimate the expansive new role Franklin Roosevelt envisioned for government. Lange's photographs were moving and beautiful, and they remain so; yet, at the time they were taken, they were also politically potent. These photographs must constitute the core of any biography, and, unsurprisingly, Linda Gordon builds her major argument around Lange's Depression photographs. Calling her a "photographer of democracy, and for democracy" (p. xiii), Gordon argues that Lange's photographs "enlarged the popular understanding of who Americans were, providing a more democratic visual representation of the nation" (p. xiv). By depicting those sharecroppers and migrant workers who were invisible to most Americans, Lange was advancing claims for the dignity and humanity of the socially invisible. There was an implicit politics here, as Lange assumed that the viewer who granted the humanity of those depicted in her photographs would be better prepared to grant them the full rights of citizenship. Gordon calls Lange's method, "a democratic way of seeing" (p. 219), an evocative phrase that might have been the book's title. Instead, Gordon calls her biography A Life Beyond Limits. The decision prioritizes Lange's personal struggles and accomplishments. Lange was a pioneer. Acting with few models to follow or socially sanctioned avenues to walk, Lange forged a career as a portrait photographer and documentarian. She participated in two unusual marriages and achieved her own problematic balance between work, womanhood, and family. Here, too, Lange subscribed [End Page 481] to a democratic way of seeing. In personal no less than political terms, Lange envisioned a more democratic set of possibilities for women and for relationships between men and women. Lange, born Dorothea Nutzhorn, grew up in a prosperous, middle-class German American family in New Jersey. She contracted polio when she was seven, leaving her with a twisted left foot and permanent limp. Having expressed a desire to be a photographer, despite never having held a camera, Lange apprenticed herself to photographers. She moved to San Francisco with a friend in 1918 and became a professional portraitist. Cultivating both the wealthy customers who patronized her studio and the various modernist photographers in San Francisco, including a number of women, her studio became a bridge between artists and the liberal rich. Viewing herself as a "tradesman" (p. 63), Lange offered "her clientele a portraiture that suggested—or 'revealed,' she would say—individuality and a deep inner life" (p. 60). Throughout this biography, Gordon uses Lange's life as a springboard to describe the larger world she navigated. Sometimes uncomfortable analyzing Lange's photographs, Gordon is in her element describing the social history of the worlds Lange inhabited. The experiences of polio survivors, the immigrant family experience in Hoboken, N.J., the appeal of Isadora Duncan and the new woman ideology of the 1920s, the bohemian subculture of San Francisco, the cultural front on the West Coast, all receive detailed treatment. In many cases, Gordon's telling adds new complexity to our understanding of each, detailing the ways, for instance, in which West Coast modernism, even in San Francisco, was far less urban than the more familiar New York variants. None of these interpretations break new ground, but Gordon's deft handling breathes new life into old knowledge. The center of the book, and of Lange's life, arrives during the Great Depression, when Lange put her client-centered portrait talents...