When Dorothea Lange looked out the window of her San Francisco studio in the spring of 1932, she saw a group of men waiting in a bread line. The sight of the crowd, dotted with people in drab coats and caps, others in tailored suits and fedoras, hit the photographer like a thunderbolt, according to Linda Gordon’s 2009 biography of Lange. The Depression was raging, and her portraits of the city’s upper crust could never capture the depths of what was swelling just below: “It stays in my memory,” the photographer said in a 1960 interview at the University of California Berkeley. “I was under personal turmoil to do something.” Lange would have to venture out, to keep looking.
Her impulse reverberates through the survey of her portraiture at the National Gallery of Art, which received a major gift of Lange prints in 2017. The show, featuring more than 100 pictures mounted on dust-blue and navy walls—one of shipyard workers walking home, another of a single farmer, shading her eyes from the sun—is a testament to Lange’s lifelong conviction: The most compelling photos can be the quietest, those that draw a person out, laying bare a soul.
“She had tremendous empathy,” Philip Brookman, the show’s curator, tells City Paper. “She must have in order to make her pictures.”
That sensibility stemmed from Lange’s early life. Born the first child of Heinrich Nutzhorn and Johanna Lange in Hoboken, New Jersey, in 1895, Lange contracted polio at seven and walked with a limp for the rest of her life. When she was 12, her father abandoned the family. When Lange was sent to school in New York City, she walked the streets with what she later called a “cloak of invisibility.”
When Lange told her mother, in 1912, that she wanted to be a photographer, she had not taken a single photo and had never held a camera. But Lange was a quick study. She learned the give and take of the photo shoot from the famed photographer Arnold Genthe. As Lange put it in her 1960 interview, Genthe “could make the plainest woman an illuminated woman.”
Lange moved to San Francisco in 1918 and soon opened her own photography studio. One of her earliest portraits, which opens NGA’s exhibition, is of Stella Hurtig Jones, a famed vaudeville dancer known for her flamenco and tango shows. In Lange’s picture, however, Jones is not in costume. Instead, she sits, slump-shouldered, before a murky ground of dreamlike shadows. Donning a crow-black dress, Jones looks out wistfully, as if waiting for a long-delayed train.
Lange worked in a “very humanistic way,” Brookman says. “She was very interested in people, in observing them.”
By 26, Lange was the most sought-after upscale portrait photographer in San Francisco. She still walked with a limp but tried her best to conceal it, her eccentric dress and cocked beret a kind of signature. Lange did not take herself too seriously, her hands always stained brown by the developer: She was a photographer through and through.
In 1935, Lange married the economist Paul Taylor and began working for the Resettlement Administration (later renamed the Farm Security Administration), a federal agency created under the New Deal to address migrant labor and rural poverty. Her photos had a purpose: To inform policymakers here in Washington, D.C., about the realities of the Depression, on the ground and in the roadside camps of California, where some migrants lived without running water.
One photograph in the exhibition’s opening room followed Lange’s appointment to the Resettlement Administration. It is a close-up of a woman’s legs, crossed, the uneven line of her mended stockings trailing down to her toes. As with all of Lange’s photographs, the more you look, the more you see. The intricate weaving of the woman’s flats, offset by the shadow of her coat, give the work a genteel air. The sitter, whose face we’ll never see, is composed, even elegant. Lange never pitied her subjects.
“She had a terrific memory,” Brookman says. Lange carried a small loose-leaf notebook with her, but even when she did not have time to jot down her observations, “she would often remember a sitter’s words, making very detailed notes at the end of the day.”
Lange titled one of her pictures “On the Plains a Hat is More Than a Covering.” The work, of a weathered hand clutching the curled brim of a hat, mesmerizes. It is a portrait of James Abner Turpen, a tenant farmer in Texas who was evicted shortly after the photo was taken, replaced by new agricultural machines. Lange’s original caption echoed Turpen’s lament: “What are my boys going to do?”
Hung opposite is a picture of a cotton worker resting on a scale, his palm covering the lower half of his face. His eyes, deeply shadowed by the sun overhead, seem to look out endlessly, as if you could fall into them. Wisps of his hair curl in the wind, like a calligrapher’s flourish. There’s something theatrical about the pose, his strong cheekbones suggested more than announced. Lange saw something in the cotton picker, as she did in all of her sitters, that runs deeper than language, something visceral, heartrending.
Taylor, her second husband, loved Lange, as he wrote to her in the summer of 1935, for “the clarity with which you see people … For the courage with which you face them.” The letter, documented in Gordon’s biography, continues with Taylor writing that he admired her sympathy, “extended in the same quality to all human beings low & high.”
In her portrait of Nettie Featherston, mounted midway through the show, Lange’s sympathy soars. Featherston, the wife of a migrant laborer in Childress, Texas, is shown from below, towering, monument-like, with one hand on her forehead, the other resting on her neck. A triangular cloud cuts across the sky, framing Featherston, whose lips are pursed, verging on a smile, or a wail.
One third of Lange’s pictures are of people of color, more than any other photographer working for the Farm Security Administration, until Gordon Parks, a self-taught Black photographer, took a position at the FSA in 1942. However, most of these photos from Lange were never distributed by the U.S. government. Today, her portrait of a formerly enslaved woman in Alabama is particularly moving. She is pictured in a field, the delicate checkered pattern of her dress and apron catching the half light, her face tensed, brow furrowed.
Lange’s picture of a storefront in Oakland, mounted a couple rooms down, is no less evocative. The Japanese American-owned grocery store is emblazoned with a sign that reads “I am an American.” Tatsuro Masuda, the 25-year-old store owner, posted the sign in December 1941, a day after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. In August of the next year, Masuda and his wife, then pregnant with their first child, were sent to an internment camp in Arizona. The quiet picture, not a soul to be seen, startles: Everything is as it should be, until it isn’t. (Lange’s World War II-era pictures of Japanese American internment camps were not published until 2006.)
In the next room, a photograph of a child in Korea, tightly cropped around the young boy’s face, is set against a navy blue wall. The work is paired with the dozens of pictures Lange took in preparation, some of the boy before a crowd of other children, others of their dilapidated school. In her final shot, she focused squarely on one boy, eyes closed, who, for a minute, stands apart in a sea of people.
In 1958, Lange was traveling with Taylor, who was sent overseas as part of a global development effort. Lange’s photos bring out her sitters, people who did not look like her or speak her language. She felt out of place on the bustling streets of Seoul. “I am immediately the center of a pushing mob of children and curious adults,” she remembered, according to her granddaughter’s documentary, Dorothea Lange: Grab a Hunk of Lightning. But her pictures are quiet. The Korean child in her 1958 portrait is, like Lange, alone in the crowd.
In another work, simply titled “Egypt,” two women look out with piercing black eyes. The pair was seated next to male companions, but Lange zeroed in on the women and their captivating stares. It’s a photo—like so many of Lange’s—that you can look at endlessly, losing yourself in the gorgeous play of light.
Getting lost didn’t faze Lange. “She is a student,” Brookman says of the photographer, who traveled the world, teaching herself to see more deeply. “She is studying what is going on in an almost anthropological way.”
Lange’s best known work, “Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother),” has a studied grace. Mounted midway through the show, the curators give the picture its due without making too much of a fuss about it. In the iconic photograph, a woman looks out, one hand cradling a baby, another resting on her face, framed by two other children turned away. The work was unplanned. Lange was driving in the rain after a long day’s shoot when she saw a sign about a pea picker’s camp and, after a drawn-out internal dialogue, decided to stop. In the camp she found not a pea picker but a Cherokee woman awaiting her husband and sons, who had gone to repair their car. Lange arranged the scene carefully, moving a pile of dirty clothes out of the frame.
“It’s important to remember when you look at photographs,” Brookman explains, “that you are not looking at something entirely true.” It’s unclear how often she posed her subjects, but Lange knew how to do so for maximum effect.
But even Lange’s most controlled pictures have a kind of magic about them. They are alive, as if shot moments ago. The faces that look out at you from a Lange portrait belong to no age at all. They are right there, ready to confront, to shatter.
For Lange, the finest pictures never came from “swooping in and swooping out in a cloud of dust,” as she put it in a 1964 interview. They are born of trust, of “just sticking around.” Some of her pictures are stark, others lulling, but all are forever present.
Dorothea Lange: Seeing People runs through March 31 at the National Gallery of Art. nga.gov. Free.