Dorothea Lange's May Day Listener.
Maynard Dixon, Dorothea Lange, and George Herriman Go On A Road Trip.
Dorothea Lange, May Day Listener at Rally, 1934, gelatin silver print, 9 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches.
A painter, a photographer, and a cartoonist drive into the desert. It was 1922, and the trio set off from San Francisco to Walpi, Arizona, going “east to see the West,”1 as Maynard Dixon, the painter, put it. Each had constructed their own idealized vision of the West, and each returned from the trip with that vision radically amended.
Of the three, George Herriman was then the most famous — he was the creator of the Krazy Kat comic strip, the ur-text of violent cat-and-mouse cartoons2 — and Dixon was already a pillar of Western painting and illustration. But the photographer, Dorothea Lange, would produce the most durable contribution to the construction of the West when, ten years later, she took a photo of an itinerant vegetable picker — Migrant Mother — an image of rural America nearly as iconic as American Gothic.
The Arizona desert was a collision site for the three artists — not between each other, but between the human stories they were trying to tell and the abstract languages they wanted to tell them with. Dixon had built his career illustrating cowboy paperbacks and William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner; Herriman, also on the Hearst payroll, had created a surreal, modernist Arizona as the setting for his cat-and-mouse comic. Lange was even more the coastal elite, learning her craft at Columbia University under Clarence White. Having built up these fantasy versions of the American West, the three artists drove out to the desert to compare them to the real thing.
Lange’s response to Arizona was informed by her education in New York. Her teacher, Clarence White was an avowed socialist and personal friend of Eugene V. Debs. He collaborated and exhibited with the modernist impresario Alfred Stieglitz.3 He taught the construction of a photograph in compositional terms, blocking out forms like abstract patterns. Lange had a knack for treating the human body as an abstract form, and when she found herself penniless in San Francisco in 1918, she opened a portrait studio. Maynard Dixon had spent the preceding years doing entirely abstract painting: designing camouflage for the military.4 He walked into Lange’s shop one day, and a romance between them bloomed. By 1922, Lange and Dixon were married, and struggling to figure out what modernism meant for the West — the real West, not the “Krazy Kat” West. Not far South of Coconino county that year, David Siqueiros published a manifesto against “art for art’s sake,” declaring:
We repudiate the so-called easel art and all such art which springs from ultra-intellectual circles, for it is essentially aristocratic.5
Dixon put it more succinctly:
Damn smarty-arty artists.6
Herriman gained subtle pictorial insights from his desert excursions— he leaned into the weirdness. In 1922, Hearst expanded Herriman’s strip to two full pages on weekends, and the expanded format allowed Herriman to include studies of patterns from Hopi and Navajo designs, inserted into open space on the comic strip as entirely abstract elements. That year, a modernist ballet based on Krazy Kat opened in New York.7
Dixon, too, brought the fruits of the 1922 Arizona trip to New York, and his show at Macbeth Galleries the following year was a critical and commercial success.8
For Lange, it would be another decade before she could unite her ability to make dynamic pictures with the nuanced human stories that she was eager to tell.
II. A Hunk Of Lightning.
“I will set myself a big problem,” Lange later recalled.
I will go there, I will photograph this thing, I will come back, and develop it. I will print it, and I will mount it and I will put it on the wall, all in twenty-four hours. I will do this, to see if I can just grab a hunk of lightening that is going on and finish it.
She was speaking about a labor rally at San Francisco’s Civic Center in 1934. In her recollection, she describes the problem almost entirely intellectually, as if it was no consequence to her what the gathering was. But certainly back to her days with Clarence White, Lange was deeply attuned to the critique of capital presented by the organized left.9 But the schism between the intellectual challenge of creation and the profound sympathy for the human condition left its marks through even this simple chore, and she lamented in the next breath:
I couldn’t run two things together consecutively, and two sides of my life. I couldn’t, but I could take this piece and isolate it, which I did.
The result was a small batch of photographs of attendees of the rally, all telling a story across their faces. The woman holding a leaflet seems pulled in many directions — burdened with anxiety, perhaps considering the speaker’s remarks with skepticism or desperation. The nuance and even ambivalence gives these early expressions of Lange’s mature work a drama and intimacy that resists easy politicization. And easy politicization didn’t appeal to Lange, but of course it came knocking.
A friend saw these photographs and said, ‘They’re valuable, they’re useful,’ and made some connection with a magazine called Survey Graphic . . . And they bought one of that series of photographs and they printed it full page. It was a street speaker talking into an old-fashioned microphone . . . Underneath they put the slogan, “Workers of the world, unite!” Which was no favor to me. But that’s what they did. Made me a Communist right away, quick.10
Never mind that she wasn’t a Communist. Throughout her career, Lange seemed to simply shrug off this sort of attempt to label her work. It was published in magazines with misleading captions; it was included in demographic surveys by the federal government, giving the sheen of objectivity. It was used to propagandistic ends by socialists and for materialist ends by capitalists.11 Lange herself seems to have let it all roll off her, wryly suggesting that no one involved was organized enough to execute effective propaganda. But then, all the captioning and re-contextualizing doesn’t seem to bury the power of Migrant Mother or May Day Listener. They speak of a dread of being abandoned and forsaken, and of a grace and courage to continue on. Lange’s great pictures work without words, and in fact succeed in spite of them.
Happy May Day, and thanks for reading,
Jonathan
Department of Corrections:
An earlier draft of this article omitted the photograph, May Day — apologies for the extra material in your inbox, but we hope the inclusion of the illustration justified the extra bit.
Peter Jung noted that in last week’s column, ‘F is For Frame,’ I mistook Roger Shattuck for Aaron Draper Shattuck. That’s two entirely different Shattucks my friends, and I regret the error!
Others pointed out that the title was misleading: we didn’t talk about frames at all. We regret leading you on, you frame enthusiasts! We were riffing on the silly Orson Welles movie title F is For Fake, but rest assured we’ll bring you an article on frames soon, too!
As quoted by Thomas B. Smith in “Maynard Dixon’s 1900 Visit to Arizona: The Beginning of an Artistic Love Affair,” in The Journal of Arizona History, vol. 49, No. 3, autumn 2008, p. 27.
Typical dialogue: “Here comes Krazy — time to crease a noodle with a brick.” Many have imitated Krazy, but none have yet improved upon it.
White’s political views extended to ardent belief in professional equality of the sexes, and he was instrumental in launching the careers of many women, including Margaret Bourke-White’s. The high number of women photographers coming out of White’s classroom did not escape the notice of Alfred Stieglitz who remarked that, of his “pupils ‒ women ‒ half-baked dilettantes ‒ not a single real talent.” Stay classy, Al!
See our article on camouflage artists here. Dixon worked hard to keep the sophisticated and the primitive separate in his work, painting a number of abstract canvases under the pseudonym “Nvorczk.” His more radical experiments were attacked in much the same way as Modernists at the Armory Show in New York: as unfinished, unprofessional, and simply tasteless.
Published as a broadside in Mexico City, 1922; Laurence E. Schmeckebier Modern Mexican Art, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1939, p. 31.Full text here.
Donald J. Hagerty, The Life of Maynard Dixon, 2010, p. 25.
John Alden Carpenter wrote the ballet; I haven’t checked, but I bet it hasn’t aged well.
Dixon was less politically adroit than his companions, later recalling that “the super induced tension of the Hearst office finally got on my nerves to such a degree that I knew only the open desert could restore my health.” (As quoted by Hagerty, 2010).
Many of her later remarks suggest that she just stumbled into interesting scenarios and photographed them, but certainly this wasn’t the case. She had a shrewd sense of where to find human suffering and injustice and how to dramatize it, as when she turned down a Guggenheim Fellowship in favor of documenting Japanese internment camps during World War II.
Interview by Richard K. Doud, New York May 22, 1964, “Dorothea Lange interview, 1964 May 22,” Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Full text here.
There also a robust literature of misogynist critique of Lange’s work — hard to miss if you do much poking around, but I think John Lauck should be publicly noted for his especially odious “Dorothea Lange and the Limits of the Liberal Narrative: A Review Essay.” Among the reasons Lauck doesn’t trust Lange’s “agenda” are rumors of sexual attraction to women, rumors of mental health problems in her family, and rumors that she may or may not have had an abortion. I guess that Lauck sees some relevance to her work as a photojournalist, but he doesn’t bother to spell it out.