American Masters

When I said I am trying to get lost again, I really expressed a very critical point of departure, that frame of mind that you need to make fine pictures of a very wonderful subject. You cannot do it by not being lost yourself. I am trying to get lost again. When you're working well, it is, first of all, a process of getting lost. So that you live for maybe two, three hours as completely as possible a visual experience. The cabin became our special place to be together and be with the grandchildren there. They thought of it as a place where they were free.

DYANNA TAYLOR

I remember. My grandmother and I were together at our family cabin, and limping along the beach, she was photographing. I had a handful of shells and stones and thrust them out toward her, asking her to look. She said, "I see them, but do you see them?" I said, "Yes, I see them." Then she said sternly, "But do you see them?" and snapped the photo. I looked back at my palm, and from then on apprehended the world differently. Toward the very end of my grandmother's life, an unprecedented honor came to he an invitation to prepare a solo exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

WOMAN

This is really the pinnacle of achievement.ent. This is not just a matter of choosing which photographs of a life's work of tens of thousands, but it's also a matter of figuring out which photographs should talk to other photographs. Lange's photographs speak to us today not just because they're about our past but also because they speak to our present.

LANGE

Your file of negatives is your biography. There it is. I think we have a card on this. I think I've seen that on here.

MAN

I was a part-time student at the San Francisco Art Institute.

LANGE

"Next time, try the train." This is about 35...

MAN

She looked to me to be the photographer in the country who was concerned with the larger social implications, ramifications of images. We hit it off. I felt very blessed to be helping her accomplish what she wanted to accomplish. Uh, this one you said was during the Depression, when... During the Depression, yeah.

CONRAD

She was committed to a deadline that involved her looking over her entire life as a photographer. Probably never anybody asked me... We started by pulling out boxes and boxes of negatives. Some of them got thrown out on the spot. It isn't good enough. This goes in that early Utah. It was also an opportunity to put her affairs in order, and they were in considerable disorder.

LANGE

I can't just exactly say why I feel, at this point, with that show coming on, that I know that I have to look this stuff over that I've done. In 1902, when Dorothea was 7, she contracted polio. She was relatively lucky, but did end up with a disability. Afraid that her misshapen leg and foot would later make her unmarriageable, her mother urged her to disguise her limp, saying, "Walk as well as you can." Dorothea grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey. Her father had left the family. Probably some financial misfortune, but there could be another reason. We know so little because she never spoke of it. Little brother Martin, Dorothea, and their mother all moved in with her German immigrant grandmother. Dorothea remembered being mesmerized by clothes fluttering on the line. She looked out at them and said, "These are beautiful." And her grandmother said to her, "To you, everything is beautiful." I remember her showing me one time what a wonderful thing was an orange. Showing me. Making sure that I understood it.

STEIN

As a teenager, she played hookie a lot. And I really have a sense that she probably walked around New York and saw all sorts of things, including, perhaps, exhibitions.

LANGE

I decided, almost on a certain day, well, I was going to be a photographer. This was before I even owned a camera. My grandmother was very independent. She often walked the length of Manhattan and found herself drawn to the gallery of Alfred Stieglitz, where the work of photographer Paul Strand was also shown.

STEIN

She apprenticed to Arnold Genthe, who was committed to combining the practice of photography with something considered higher at the time, and that is fine art.

LANGE

A curious thing, isn't it, how a person will pick a profession out of the blue. But that's just what I wanted to be.

WOMAN

She was a very lovely young woman, but she knew that she walked with a limp. Dorothea's mother was not encouraging of Dorothea being a photographer. So it wasn't long before Dorothea came up with a plan to leave town with her friend "Fronsie." They decided they were going to go around the world. Dorothea had guts and she had curiosity. And she just decided to go. She and Fronsie headed west. They got as far as San Francisco, and the first day they were there, Fronsie was carrying the money, and she was pickpocketed. And they lost all their money. So they were stuck in San Francisco. Dorothea just went out and the very next day, she had a job at Marsh's, which was like a drugstore which had a photo-finishing counter in the back.

STEIN

Where she's taking in people's film, perhaps helping with processing it. Maybe just working the counter.

PARTRIDGE

While she was working at the photo counter, she met Roi Partridge, my grandfather, went home and said to his wife, Imogen Cunningham, another photographer... "By Jove, I met the most wonderful woman today! We must have her home for dinner." And they did. She hadn't been here for three, four weeks. They just tucked Dorothea into their San Francisco Bohemian life.

MAN

It was a city that was beautiful because it had been rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake. But it was also a city with a working-class history that was there below the surface. Along the waterfront, you had the dives and the boarding houses where the Longshoremen lived and where the bindlestiffs crashed in the bars at night. Still out of money, Dorothea sensed an opportunity in this vibrant city. With the support of her newfound artist friends, she convinced a backer to help her open a portrait studio. It was 1919, and she was 24.

WOMAN

Upstairs, she had a sitting area where she would photograph her clients.

MAN

San Francisco was a perfect place for a portrait photographer. You had the wealthy there in need of family portraits and corporate portraits, portraits of grandma and grandpa. You had wealthy patrons.

PARTRIDGE

Downstairs, she had a darkroom where she developed the photographs she took of them. When Dorothea was finished in the darkroom every day, she would go upstairs back to the sitting room and she would fire up this old Russian samovar and make a huge pot of tea. And then the Bohemians would gather. Clearly, she already had that kind of charisma that we would see later in her life. Her studio became something of an evening salon, where friends relaxed on her red velvet sofa, later dubbed "the matrimonial bureau" because of the many proposals made there.

LANGE

I was a young woman who had a portrait studio. I did all the work myself. It was a successful studio, but I worked 18 hours, 20 hours, every day. I really worked. I was determined that I could make that go, and I did. Very old portraits. Old portrait. These go way, way back. Why I kept these, I don't know. This goes up in the early portraits.

CONRAD

She worked, from the outset, with groupings of photographs. Take a whole bunch of pictures and put them on the wall and look at them and say, "yes, no, yes, no." Now, these start at the other end because I want to mix things -- I don't want so much Egypt. Working as a photographer, I had not participated in that process before, and I found it very interesting.

LANGE

Put it there, near it.

CONRAD

And she would go through a quick edit process, and pictures came down and put up another bunch of pictures. And you step back 15 feet and you reflect. By early 1920, Dorothea's studio was flourishing, gaining a reputation for naturalistic portraiture and as the place for San Francisco artists to gather.

WOMAN

One day she was working in the darkroom and she heard a very distinct "tap, tap, tap" overhead. But by the time she got upstairs, whoever's feet that had been, they were no longer there. She asked Roi Partridge, "Who is it who would be making that "tap, tap, tap"? And he said, "Oh, that would be Maynard Dixon -- he wears cowboy boots." And Dorothea was intrigued. The next time she was down in her darkroom working and she heard the "tap, tap, tap" of the boots, she went upstairs and met Maynard, who was dressed in a long cape, and he carried a cane and he had his cowboy boots. She was attracted and a little bit afraid of him. He was more than 20 years her senior. He was an exquisite painter. Very established as an artist. Dorothea would discover her muse in Maynard. Despite their difference in age, the attraction was undeniable, and within a year, they were married. She told a reporter, "My marriage with Mr. Dixon will not interfere with my work, as I shall continue in my profession." He opened her eyes to a way of living by your own values, living with what is important to a visual life.

LANGE

He had the finest studio of all the studios in Montgomery Street. And he had it for years and years. And I had a studio at 716. And there were big ship's timbers over the door.

WOMAN

She was able to support herself, and then sometimes Maynard when he wasn't bringing in a check. She very much wanted to see him pursue his own art and not become a slave to advertising arts.

MAN

Maynard had to make a living, and so a lot of his work was done to please corporate clients. But more than anything, I think he just wanted to be out in the landscape, preferably New Mexico, painting colored cliffs.

WOMAN

Maynard got her out into the Southwest. He loved to paint in the Southwest. He loved that open sky and the vista that was available for him there. So that gave her a whole part of the world she had never seen before.

STEIN

She was exploring, working outside the studio. There's a certain kind of exotic fascination. These are people who seem like they are timeless and Dorothea was always interested in capturing a sense of timelessness. I think she's interested in how they resist modern culture.

LANGE

The Kiva. K-i-v-a. How about one of just them? Steps going up. Big steps. Then there's two tin cans down there. It's the difference between a documentary photographer. Right there, if you want to define it. The man with a certain kind of training will never remove those two cans, and the other man must. See, Richard, what I'm talking about? See the magnificent scale of those steps? It really is a thing of very great proportion. And these wretched little cans down here, well, you accept it. If muses can be inanimate, Dorothea's muse was the camera. But she was to discover the muse in the great loves of her life -- two radically different men. My grandfather, Paul Taylor, born the same year as Dorothea, in 1895, later would challenge and inspire here.

MAN

When one was in the presence of Paul Taylor, he was thoughtful. He was very deliberate and disciplined. He saw injustice, and he sought to correct it using the tools he had and was always reaching out to other people. This is a powerful individual, and it wasn't just a resum, it was a life. Moved to enlist in World War I, my grandfather became a Marine captain and was stationed in France. To my surprise, I discovered he brought with him a small, folding Kodak camera to document what could not be described in words. He brought back images of the tragic battle of Belleau Wood, during which his battalion suffered heavy losses and he was severely gassed. Overcoming his injuries, he became a professor in labor economics at the University of California, married and began a family with his young bride Katharine. He wasn't to meet the photographer Dorothea Lange for another 12 years. Meanwhile, by 1925, Dorothea and Maynard's marriage, the envy of many San Francisco artists, became for Dorothea a contradiction. Creatively stimulating, it constricted by demands of family. She inherits a child from that marriage. The relationship between Dorothea and the child is difficult because they're both competing for Maynard. My mother's relationship to Dorothea was a very tempestuous one. She was an adolescent. Dorothea probably left something to be desired as the mother of a grumpy, rebellious teenager. At the time, people were not terribly well informed about how to raise children. I just don't think she was very nurturing. In May of 1925, Daniel Rhodes Dixon was born, Dorothea and Maynard's first child. Consie now had a stepbrother. And two years later, another. John Eagle Feather.

STEIN

Her son John has spoken about the fact that he didn't experience a lot of physical affection from her. She was a photographer who wanted to look, and she was much happier seeing Maynard doing the work of nurture. The photographs are full of the tenderness that characterized her later photographs of fathers and children. Maynard was free to continue living his Bohemian art life. He would go off on a painting trip saying he'd be back in a few weeks. But it was often months, sometimes without word. Old man makes babies. Disappears on painting trips, leaving her with the two babies and a rebellious teenager. Poor Dorothea was an artist and was trying to do her work, and here she was stuck with all these children to take care of, with a charming husband who bounced in and out every couple of months. Often as the sole parent, even when Maynard was at home, Dorothea became the one holding the family together through her portrait photography. My grandfather Paul wasn't the ideal parent either. Often away from Katharine and his children, he was devotedly researching farm labor in the Central Valley of California and New Mexico, pioneering a new kind of economics with a notebook and a camera. As the big plantations grew in California, growers wanted a cheap labor force and they started importing it. By the 1920s, when Paul Taylor really started his research, it was overwhelmingly Mexicans.

WOMAN

He learned how to speak Spanish and decided to go down to Mexico and start actually studying Mexican life, not just Mexican work.

MAN

Intuitively, without having a word to define what he was doing, Paul Taylor was engaged in social documentary photography. He realized how important the camera was to the kind of economics he was doing. And he used it as a form of visual note taking to supplement his research.

WOMAN

Recording what they were doing was very hard with words, and Paul understood that early on, that photography was a much better way to record activity and action. No one else was doing this.

MAN

The Mexicans come at a very important time in California agriculture, embarking on a massive period of expansion. California agriculture is not wheat and corn, it's fruit and vegetables. And most of that can't be mechanized. You have to have people waddling down the furrows, cutting that lettuce. It's stoop labor. It's hand labor. They were the first automobile migrants, because what made their lives possible was the ability to shift between jobs in automobiles and string together a long sequence of seasonal work. And this is where Paul Taylor first encountered the conditions of industrialized agriculture that would become a focus of his study for the rest of his life. I remember talking to him about being in Imperial Valley for the first time and how overwhelmed he was to see people riding out into the fields to pitch melons all day. No fresh water. There would be warm water. There were no toilets in the fields. And then returning to their barrios on the edge of town, and sometimes worse. Little brush shelters that they had erected.

WOMAN

What Paul saw was that these young men labored under intolerable conditions. Paul was outraged by this.

MAN

People don't realize how hardscrabble it was for everybody in the Depression. When we were young, we thought that Dory and Maynard really had this income security. In actual truth, they didn't.

WOMAN

Dorothea and Maynard just didn't know how to get by any longer. So they packed the kids and art supplies up and they took off for the Southwest. They go down to Taos, New Mexico. Dixon, of course, is painting. And the kids are being taken care of by Lange.

MAN

It was a dirt floor, an earthen floor. But they found a way. A little touch here, a little touch there. It was beautiful. Just beautiful. My grandmother recalled, "Paul Strand was al so photographing in Taos while we were there. With great purpose, he used to dr ive by almost every morning. It was the first time I observed a person in my own trade who was so intent on his purposes and so solitary, but he was no t living a woman's life. I photographed once in a while, ju st a little, but mostly tried to be of help to Maynard and took care of the children."

WOMAN

So they stuck it out there for a while and then did make it back to San Francisco. But by that time, their relationship was beginning to fall apart, and they both went and lived in their own studios and began what would be a long process for Dorothea of boarding her children out. They both needed to earn a living. They couldn't drag these small children around and so they put them out to board. It was very hurtful and very hard on the kids. During the Depression, it was the only recourse for people without any money.

MAN

To put the kids in somebody else's home for nine months -- which I guess it was that long sometimes -- must have hurt Dorothea as much as it hurt the kids. When you enter into the visual world, detaching yourself from all the holds on you, not taking a few photographs while you're going down to the co-op, or... but it is a mental disengagement so that you live for maybe two or three hours as completely as possible a visual experience, where you feel that you have lost yourself, your identity. You are only an observer. Only that. On Mother's Day, young son John presented his mother a bouquet of daisies. He later recalled, "Why didn't she accept my gift of the daisies? Instead, she took a photograph." 1933, the year President Franklin Roosevelt came into office, was one of the bleakest years of the Depression. Just looking out the window of her studio, Lange saw soup lines. I wonder to what extent the conditions propelled her out of that studio. There were new things to photograph, new ways to use her camera. Dorothea challenged herself. As she recounted, "The discrepancy between what I was working on in my portrait studio and what was going on in the street was more than I could assimilate. So I set myself a big problem. I would go down there. I would photograph. I would come back, develop, print, mount, and put the images on the wall, all in 24 hours, just to see if I could grab a hunk of lightning."

LANGE

When you're working well, all your instinctive powers are in operation and you don't know why you do the things you do. Sometimes you annihilate yourself. That is something one needs to be able to do.

STEIN

She had developed some negatives but had accidentally left one negative undeveloped in the film holder. Sturtevant went into the darkroom to develop his own work. He develops it. Rushed over to her, awed by the composition of her innovative "White Angel Bread Line." It changed my outlook. It changed my way of living. I made some... decisions on what I thought was a good way to be a photographer. And I saw certain possibilities.

WOMAN

Dorothea finds a soup kitchen that is handing out paper bags that have cheese and sandwiches, and she goes in and there are women. For social reasons, they couldn't be on a bread line. An early photograph Lange took is "Mended Stockings." What you see is the fine, fine detail, that shows how many times the woman has mended her stocking.

STEIN

The sense of the silk stocking which can't be replaced, that must be mended. All the signs of how people were having to stitch things together. Nothing could be disposed of in this time, and for Dorothea, this is really the intimate look that tells us about social experience in the Great Depression. Lange was already practiced in looking at individual faces. A motto that she had pinned on her darkroom wall, the words of Francis Bacon -- "The contemplation of things as they are is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention." And she took this quote and thought, one can see it even more with bodies.

LANGE

That really should go, though, with the unemployment lineup. You know, for the checks. That is part of that picture.

MAN

We don't even have this in yet.

LANGE

We have to. It's an important picture. The creative layout for the walls of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition was well underway by December of 1964. I think we can do them as the best visually. Then the Murray & Ready employment office down there, they needn't all be in, but they belong together. Put it that way, then. And we will see. This might not be a bad place for these to go.

CONRAD

When John Szarkowski came, there was an element of, "okay, we've got to dress up a little bit here, Richard." And I remember being a little surprised by this, but yes, I showed up with a tie and a jacket during John Szarkowski's visit.

WOMAN

The curator photographer at MoMA was John Szarkowski, and he twice came to California and spent long periods of time working with her about these choices.

LANGE

I like it very much. If we could do it on the basis of no business of my feelings about my work.

SZARKOWSKI

No, you have to give me credit for being able to look at these like you do. I want to have some feeling of the way this thing is developed for as you have, as you people have. Well, it could be. Well, you're here now, and we're going to have hours together.

Waves lapping, gulls calling

MAN

If you went down on the waterfront in San Francisco in 1934, you found a labor system akin to slavery. Every day, thousands of workers would shape up for work. There would be a huge crowd. A foreman would point -- "You, you..." -- and that's how you got your job to heft something off a freighter. It was going to explode in the 1934 Longshoremen strike. And when it exploded, Lange was there, in the middle of all this stuff that's going on.

ANNOUNCER

1934. Today the eyes of America are on our own labor troubles like the San Francisco general strike. 2,500 guardsmen move in.

MAN

They were shooting people on the waterfront in San Francisco. And she wouldn't take me. And I was ready to help her carrying a tripod. It wasn't safe. Dorothea said, "I wasn't used to jostling about in groups of angry men with a camera, but it needed to be done." She's capturing the speeches and the protests. One of her earliest and most famous photographs is of the speaker behind the microphone addressing the May Day crowd. Paul Taylor was doing a story on the Longshoremen strike. Ironically, Dorothea Lange was also there, photographing. But they never met. Willard Van Dyke, a colleague of Dorothea's, is impressed by her new documentary work and creates a show of it in his gallery.

WOMAN

Willard says to Paul Taylor, "You should come down and look at this exhibit." Paul sees immediately that her work is extraordinary and noticed a photograph that Lange has taken of the speaker. Gets Lange's number, calls her up and says, "Can I use your photograph?" And she says, "Yes," and that's the first time they talked. One of the remarkable things about "Survey Graphic" is that they acknowledge that Lange took the portrait. That was rare at the time. In October of 1934, my grandfather began a project with the California State Emergency Relief Administration documenting the working conditions of farm labor. He had an unorthodox idea.

MAN

The bureaucratic system had no place for a photographer, it had no concept of its benefit or its use. Taylor found a way to deceive the system by hiring Dorothea, "a photographer," masking the word "photography" -- insert in lieu thereof "typist." You know the phrase that they always put in the personnel contracts -- "and other duties as assigned"? Bring your camera.

WOMAN

Paul and Dorothea started going out in the field together. And they took very different talents and skills. Paul is writing down what everyone's saying. He would interview people. The questions were respectful, designed to find the heart of the experience. And she got to see that happen for the first time. It was a match made in heaven because Paul's work needed this type of visualization. And what it allowed Paul to do was to make a much bigger social impact. For Dorothea, the first trip is shocking. They head down Highway 99 into the Imperial Valley. She is simply floored by the level of poverty that she is witnessing for the first time in this state that she's adopted. From the time Dorothea Lange started working with Paul Taylor, her understanding of what she was photographing expanded and it became not just these individuals she was photographing but part of a larger view of American society. She is seeing with her photographer's eye. He's seeing with his economist's eye. And they're together 24 hours a day. There can't help but be some chemistry and some exchange that's going on. Dorothea is still married to Maynard and Paul is still married to Katharine.

MAN

Paul Taylor also has a family of his own and a marriage that's tottering.

WOMAN

At first she saw her role as a photographer only. She then developed a series of photographs with captions. The captions were written longhand and some of them contain quotes from the people, and others were descriptions of the conditions faced by people. These then became a government report like no government report had ever been. And they were remarkably effective. He understood his writing could get really dry. But with her photographs, he could then put the quotations of the family members, and the photograph made the quote come alive. After one of their longer work trips, they headed back to Berkeley. They took their time going over the Tehachapi Pass. It was undeniable. They had fallen in love. Compelled by a vision of what they could do together, each had found their muse and their equal.

MAN

They find something in one another that allows them to continue without diminishing their passions. When he saw her images, he put away all of his photographic work and concentrated on his intellectual life. Taylor later in life said, "In Dorothea I found my photographer." When Dorothea and Paul fell in love, they fell in love deeply, irrevocably, 150%. It meant that both of their marriages had to end, which was very difficult for everyone. She thought that Maynard was better -- greater, if you like -- than he ever managed to achieve. She was never able to get at Maynard's real innards. He withheld them. When, on that Sunday morning,

I went to their bedroom at about 9

00 in the morning, there they were, in bed together, naked. That was the moment at which Dorothea chose to tell me that they were going to get a divorce. Everyone was unhappy. And new lives for Dorothea and Paul required dismantling their old ones. Both couples divorced. And, in December of 1935, in the middle of a work trip, Dorothea and Paul married in an Albuquerque, New Mexico courthouse.

WOMAN

Not only did she have two small children with Maynard, but then in her new marriage she inherited three children, and she showed that her skills had in no way improved. She really was driven, in a way that we give tremendous permission to men for, but absolutely no permission to women. I was 5 years old when I met Dorothea in 1935. We all spent the first year of their marriage in foster homes. Because, I think especially Dorothea said, she wanted Paul and her to have the first year just to work and to get used to being married, I suppose. So that's what happened. Dorothea was having a lot of trouble with her son Daniel. She was in agony about her inability to help him, redoubled by the fact that she was so much away.

MAN

Daniel, at that time, was desperately, desperately mad.

WOMAN

He started acting out in huge ways, like taking his mother's camera and hocking it. That's a pretty big statement right there.

DANIEL

Paul heard me call her an "old sow." You know, you think of him as being kind of deliberate in his movements. But this was not deliberate. He moved from where he was to where I was like a bolt of lightning. And he grabbed me by the throat and shoulder and he threw me down the stairs. Nobody called his wife an old sow. Oh, boy. I believe that he was a romantic man. He had a deeply romantic passion for and belief in justice. You can't have that kind of belief unless you're romantic. And he loved her, fiercely. Despite those complicated and disturbing early years, my uncle Daniel, having found success as a writer, returned to the family fold, sometimes as Dorothea's colleague and sometimes her confidant.

LANGE

I need to speak with you because you are one of those who, from time to time, have understood me, I'm happy to say, as well as anybody. I know that when people come to this exhibit, people who've heard of me before, they will be thinking that they're going to see an exhibit of what's called documentary photography. But this cannot be. I want to extract the universality of the situation, not the circumstance.

DANIEL

How are you gonna get it done in the time you have left? I don't trust the time. I really don't trust it, and I know how you work. I think the time has come for you to make some decisions. I know. I well know. I have to close the doors and bar the windows, unhitch the telephone and face it myself -- I know that. All right.

MAN

John Szarkowski drew her out. He was very helpful in trying to understand what she wanted to accomplish and in trying to implement it. You know, he's the curator of the show.

WOMAN

He was shaking up the entire photography world. And he saw in Dorothea's work that he could make a statement about what was possible with photography. The idea of a photograph being in a museum was a kind of complicated issue. It took a while for us to get out of the magazine context and take the photograph and just put the photograph itself on the wall and examine it. He recognized that Lange's photographs didn't have to have all this context to get what she was after, that you could admire her photographs for themselves.

MAN

Most of what we want is here, isn't it? I had no idea exactly what I wanted. I was trying to do the best I could with the materials I had. I didn't have it close. You know, the materials you don't have aren't important. They are to me. Another natural disaster coincided with the Depression -- the Dust Bowl.

WOMAN

There were storms of dust that were so dense that you could not see your hand in front of your face. And farmers reported that their land, literally, was blown away. And then, in many cases, just packed their cars and left. It was pointless to stay. People were absolutely ruined by it. It wasn't one year's bad crop or even two years' bad crop. It was year after year after year. The migration tended to go to the west. They came from Nebraska. They came from South and North Dakota. They came from New Mexico, they came from Texas. The migration was composed of people who became called "Okies," but only a small minority of them came from Oklahoma.

MAN

In this case, instead of the covered wagon, it was the covered jalopy. As a result of the creation of the highway system, they were able to pack up and move to a place that seemed to be a better land where opportunity is awaited, in California.

LANGE

You could use the covered wagon and then either those cars bogged down in the mud or that group of cars which represents more people. Is that when people really began arriving? That car that we see the back of, that was the first car I saw that came out of the Dust Bowl. And that was the day the darn thing was discovered, what was happening -- nobody knew it. And then there was a rush. Never has stopped, that influx.

WOMAN

Paul and Dorothea were the first to witness and to understand the causes of this huge migration, and Paul was unusually creative in trying to understand it. At the Yuma, Arizona crossing into California, he hired a gas station attendant. He said, "I'll pay you a certain amount of money if you will simply keep a tally of how many cars filled with these people are coming into California." And we are talking about several hundred thousand people entering California, hoping to stay there. This was a major problem for California to absorb. Lange and Taylor were in the middle of this influx, putting a face on westward migration. Who were these folks and where did they come from? Well, they were basically white Americans. Hardworking family folks. They weren't coming to feed off the state. They were coming to work and find a home. They hoped to reestablish themselves as family farmers. And, of course, they're expecting this California dream.

MAN

"People aren't friendly in California like they are back home, but they appreciate the cheap labor coming out." "We ain't no paupers, we don't want no relief. But what we do want is a chance to make an honest living like what we was raised."

WOMAN

One of the reasons that people were migrating was not only the drought but the mechanization of farming. And there's that amazing photograph called "Tractored Out." What you see is this marooned house surrounded by this endless sea of furrows. There's not a person living in that house. It's uninhabitable. The furrows go right up to the door. "On this plantation, 22 tractors and 13 four-row cultivators have replaced 130 families. Tractored out." Lange's photographs from the '30s are full of hope, not just despair. Everyone trying to find the American dream. Some of them finding it and others, you just think, boy, just can't imagine how they're going to get there. She took a series of photographs of a family in Yakima, Washington, and when I first saw the photographs, I looked at them and I said, "What's that big object that's cutting across on a diagonal?" You have to go to her caption. "Note: Still carrying a roll of kitchen linoleum three years on the road." And that roll of linoleum became memory of home and dream of home. During the 1930s, there is no greater value in society than the role of mother. The conditions that the women face make motherhood impossible. You can't take care of your children in even the most basic ways. Working with Paul Taylor, Lange had an understanding of what she was seeing. She could photograph a shanty, and what she was really photographing was the house that wasn't there. She could photograph a door frame, and what she was really photographing was the door that wasn't there. She could photograph the stovepipe and what she was really photographing was the hearth that wasn't there. The reason, I would argue, that Lange saw this so clearly is that she faced a number of her own struggles as a mother. She was a working woman who was on the road. She probably felt she should have done a better job, but she was busy trying to change the world.

ANNOUNCER

A New Deal beginning to roll. A running river of social legislation. Facing a country in trouble, President Roosevelt engineered legislation creating programs collectively known as the "New Deal." Among them, social security and a program to reduce chronic rural poverty -- the Resettlement Administration. Later it was renamed the Farm Security Administration. The FSA. Paul Taylor was, of course, very well connected with all agricultural matters in the federal government. And he took her photographs to Washington, showed them to the new head of this photographic unit, Roy Stryker, who hired her on the spot, because he'd never seen documentary photography that had that kind of emotional power. Roy Stryker had a visionary photographic idea -- to introduce America to Americans.

MAN

Stryker saw in her an incredible talent. She was photographing a region where he didn't have any other photographers. And she was a completely independent spirit.

LANGE

The assignment was, "See what you can bring home." See what is really there. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What actually is the human condition?

WOMAN

What she produced was really stunning. People were not accustomed to seeing beautifully composed photographs of people who were working in the dirt.

MAN

One of my favorite images is the six Hardeman County tenant farmers. It's hard enough to take a good portrait of one person. To get six people in a row, presenting themselves to you as powerful people who are nevertheless in a state of distress, that's a real accomplishment.

WOMAN

Lange was also the only photographer based on the West Coast. The time it took for her to send negatives to Washington and then wait for them to come back so she could actually see her work was often months. The trips were absolutely grueling. No air-conditioning, sleeping in cheap motor courts. She sometimes hired Rondal Partridge as an assistant out of her own stipend, since the federal government wouldn't pay for that.

MAN

Ahh! You'll love it. You will love it. Wait till you see it. I will never forget driving at about 19 miles an hour down a country road, and she said, "Ron, slower. Slower. Ron, drive slower." Because she was looking at every camp and every pot and every tent, until she could find where she could make her way. Motels then were called auto courts. Welcome to Back Breaker's Acres. I could have stayed here myself. No insulation. We holed up in motels that had cracked linoleum floors with piss marks in the corner because they wouldn't go out to the bathroom that's outside. That's the toilet. We're living on $4 per day per diem from the government. We didn't feel deprived. We just felt that we were accomplishing something and providing a service that everybody needed. The wonderful word that she said was "gov'ment." "We're from the gov'ment, and we're interested in when you're going to get work or how you're going to get by." The photograph you have to use of mine is the little kid being photographed at the camp. And Dory's got a tripod and the camera's on it and she's using the Graflex. But the tripod is the story. She put up the tripod, she got the kids there. Then she takes the camera that's flexible for getting the moment and uses it. I have an invisible coat that covers me. When I was a child, I became acquainted with the New York Bowery. A lame little girl walking down that street, unprotected, was an ordeal. And I learned to be unseen at that age. And that has stayed with me all my working life. Sometimes you just fool around with the camera or you sit on the steps for a while and enjoy the afternoon air. Before I ask questions, I tell them who I am, why I am there, how many children I have, how old my children are. I can then take out a notebook and write down exactly what I've been told without ever feeling that I am imposing. She was very, very conscious of the exact words that people said, and she would remember them and suddenly break off in the middle of shooting and rush back to the car, sit in the front seat, and write down these notes. The quote was probably something -- "Well, it's root, hog, or die." Race back to the car. "It's root, hog, or die." What a beautiful statement, you know? How clear, how concise it is to their condition. You can see in my notebooks, written at the time, lines, excitement in getting it down quickly while it still... the rhythms of it is generally what you have to get down. "If I could get my hands on an acre of land, I'd take to digging it with my fingers." The tears come to my eyes, it's so intense. Write it down. She responded to her job in the Farm Security Administration with a great sense of responsibility. She corresponded regularly with her boss, Roy Stryker, who would send her requests for certain types of photographs. But she also was her own woman, and she said later, "You know, we were out in the field and sometimes you would find things of importance that no one knew about." Driving north alone, after photographing for a few weeks, my grandmother recalled -- "It was raining. The camera bags were packed. And I had on the seat beside me the rolls of exposed film ready to mail back to Washington. A crude sign flashed by on the side of the road -- 'Pea Pickers' Camp.' I didn't want to stop, and didn't. And then rose an inner argument. 'How about that camp back there? Are you going back?' Without realizing what I was doing, I made a u-turn on the empty highway and, following instinct, not reason, I drove into that wet and soggy camp, like a homing pigeon. The pea crop at Nipomo had frozen, and there was no work for anyone. I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother." For many years, the standard interpretation was that she made five images. Then a sixth image was discovered. And then a seventh image was discovered. She ended up, at the end of that whole sequence, with a masterpiece of photography. The career of that photograph is extraordinary. It was published in a local paper. Immediately, donations of money poured into the pea pickers' camp. Stryker thought, "This is the greatest photograph we have produced." It was published all over the country in newspapers, magazines, used over and over again.

WOMAN

I believe that there was one Chicano poster, a Cuban poster, and certainly the Panthers as well used it. It has enough modernity to it and speaks to a condition of modern disintegration of families as well.

MAN

It's probably the most recognized photograph in American history.

LANGE

I see it printed all over, prints that I haven't supplied. It doesn't belong to me anymore. It belongs to the world. She, that one picture, belongs to the public, really. Florence Thompson was the woman in the photograph. In 1958, Florence and her family came across the image in the magazine U.S. Camera. They resented the notoriety and liberal use of the photo for which they had seen no remuneration. But neither had Dorothea. However, late in Florence's life, donations poured in when a sympathetic public learned of her terminal illness.

MAN

She realized how important that image was and what it meant to people and its importance to our understanding of the Great Depression. Florence Thompson's headstone reads, "Migrant

Mother

a legend of the strength of American motherhood." My grandfather continued to fight for FSA-built worker camps to alleviate the appalling living conditions of migratory laborers. Repeatedly rejected, he sent Washington another series of reports he and Dorothea created in efforts to gain funding for the housing he felt would improve their lives. Although his vision had been far greater, his persistence saw 15 camps and 3 mobile camps built in California.

LANGE

Tom Collins, camp manager. Intensely close to the people. When he hoisted the American flag every morning over that camp, it was his camp, and he protected it from the outside world and he just was master. And John Steinbeck somehow or other encountered him. And Tom Collins is a big figure in the book. Tom is that camp manager in "The Grapes of Wrath."

WOMAN

One of the most memorable Depression images is of two people walking on the road with a big billboard for the railroad, suggesting the gap between affluence and complacency. Look again. Look underneath the ad, and you will see the reality of what's being experienced in the Depression. Maybe the best one is the one of a gas station near Salinas. "Air -- This is your country. Don't let them take it away from you." I think of that every time I'm at a gas station and now see that we have to pay for air. Every summer, through 1939, Paul and Dorothea drove all the way across the country to the southeastern states. She and Taylor were very keen to discover how our society, which had developed a mythology about farming, was in the process of radical change. After slavery was ended, the South developed a system called sharecropping, which means that you give the owner of the land a share of the crop. The overwhelming majority of the sharecroppers -- who were both white and black -- were heavily indebted to a plantation owner. Lange took a picture of power and power relationships and subservience. A plantation owner standing in a very kind of aggressive posture. You can see that on the left edge of the picture is a little bit of Paul Taylor, who is helping her by conversing with this guy so that he's willing to keep standing there. But behind him, sitting on the steps, are his sharecroppers. The spatial relations reflect the power relations of the society. "They're fixin' to free all us fellas. Free as for what? Free as like they freed the mules. They're aimin' at keepin' fellas such as us right down to their knees. Aimin' at makin' slaves of us. We got no more chance than a one-legged man in a foot race." It's very important for them to be photographing the terrible poverty, but also the sustaining role of those communities and the cultural richness that she found there. There's a picture, for instance, of a very ancient black graveyard swept as though it was an African graveyard. Those kinds of touches were important to both of them. There's this wonderful picture of the water boy who is so proud of his job. He had a role there, and she saw that. She saw him in his stature. She said that these communities were rooted in the earth, like a tree, like something that was embracing.

LANGE

You want to see a beautiful negative... just for the fun of looking at a beautiful negative? This is a beautiful negative.

MAN

It sure is.

LANGE

Isn't that lovely to look at? If you're a photographer, what pleasure a nice negative is. Oh, my, yes. Oh, my.

WOMAN

Lange's method to combat the racism that she saw in the South was to create these portraits. She didn't beg people to smile. She often conversed with people, or, if she was lucky enough to have Paul with her, she got him to converse with people so people relaxed. Through conversation, you could see their animation. These were solid citizens. Dorothea's job for the FSA was on again, off again, laid off, and then rehired by Stryker. But even when not collecting a salary, she continued to add to her body of work. In the end, she had photographed in over 30 states. Finally, in January of 1940, Stryker let her go for good. His FSA budget had been cut and his photographic unit was down to two photographers. It was a tough loss. She had lost the sense that what she would make would appear in a variety of national contexts. She never enjoyed that so fully again. Later, in a letter written to Stryker, Dorothea wrote -- "Once an FSA guy, always an FSA guy. One doesn't easily get over it." Lange and Taylor tried to condense it all into "American Exodus," this huge population shift and its consequences. As the soil erodes, so does society. That becomes the book "American

Exodus

A Record of Human Erosion." Lange and Taylor were creating a conscience that the country needed. An American conscience. They rented an apartment around the corner from their house in Berkeley, with no furniture and basically using the floor as her layout for the images, and going there day after day and shuffling the images back and forth.

WOMAN

And then coming back and adding captions. The photographs themselves carry the story. The captions extend and enrich the story. "I seen our corn dry up and blow over the fence back there in Oklahoma." "Lots of 'em toughed it through, until this year." "What bothers us travelin' people most is we can't get no place to stand still." One chapter on the Dust Bowl is punctuated at the end by, on one page, a windmill that's battered, and on the other, a woman, her hand to her head and her elbow jutting out like the windmill. And you see these two photographs together and you realize that one is a metaphor for the other. Lange said about pairing photographs that sometimes they're balanced. Sometimes one is subservient to the other. "Sometimes," she said, "they come together and they make a loud noise." "American Exodus" is one of the most important photographic books of the 20th century. It was very influential. Life magazine, Look magazine were just getting going at the time, and then "American Exodus" just turned things upside down. Oh, the end pages are extraordinary! The book itself is embraced by, is enclosed by the words of the people. Lange and Taylor thought it was absolutely critical to reproduce the words as they wrote them down on the spot.

MAN

"I come from Texas and I don't owe a thin dime back there." "Brother is picking 75-cent cotton, they starved," and I watched her write that one down. "Blowed out, eat out, tractored out." "Yessir, we're starved, stalled and stranded." Whew! "Starved..." Oooh!

LANGE

Is it in here?

MAN

It's not in here. Wait a minute, it's in the end paper. There it is. "An Arkansas family in California. Son to father -- 'You didn't know the world was so wide.' Father to son -- 'No, but I knew what I was going to have for breakfast." "One mule, single plow. Tractors are against the black man. Every time you kill a mule, you kill a black man. You've heard about the machine picker? That's against the black man, too. A piece of meat in the house would like to scare these children of mine to death. These things are a-pressin' on us in the state of Mississippi. If you die, you're dead, that's all." That's all. The irony for my grandparents was that "American Exodus" was published just as World War II broke out in Europe. It didn't sell. World events eclipsed "American Exodus." Manzanar. A place my grandmother came to know. She said, "On the surface, it looked like a narrow job. It had a sharp beginning and a sharp end. Everything about it was highly concentrated. Actually, it wasn't narrow at all. The deeper I got into it, the bigger it became." In the winter of 1941, Japan shocked the world when it bombed Pearl Harbor. Nationwide, fear surfaced against the Japanese and President Roosevelt took swift action.

LANGE

This is what we did. How did it happen? How could we? Now, I have never had a comfortable feeling about that war relocation job. The difficulties of doing it were immense. The billboards that were up at the time, I photographed. Savage, savage billboards.

MAN

The American public needed to know about this chapter. The whole relocation was known, really, to a small number of people on the West Coast. Executive order 9066, signed by Franklin Roosevelt, was a very antiseptic-sounding process to remove Japanese-American citizens from their homes in California, Washington, and Oregon. Ripping people off the land because of what they look like. My grandparents were enraged by the racist hysteria and loss of family friends. Everything's taken away from them -- their business, their livelihood. You can see they're still proud, though, the people. They're very proud and dignified during this tragic moment in their life where everything's turned upside down. There's a picture that Dorothea Lange shot of my grandparents and my dad and my aunt after they left their homes to go to the internment camp. The military didn't know anything about Dorothea, essentially. They were looking for a photographer, and here was someone who was in California. She'd already worked for the government and had a reputation as being a very hardworking, responsible photographer. What the military wanted from her was a set of photographs to illustrate that they weren't persecuting or torturing these people who they evacuated. With some misgivings, Dorothea took the job, hoping to expose what the government was doing to its own citizens. Christina Clausen, once Dorothea's portrait subject, had become a family friend. She offered to be Dorothea's assistant. I immediately began working with her, because it was an intense pressure to get going. This internment was a military action. It involved rounding up 120,000 people immediately. This was only happening in scattered spots all along the West Coast. It was very hush-hush. The papers barely mentioned it. The public didn't realize what was going on. They were ripped out of their homes and it was so hard to photograph that. It was so hard because those people were stoic. They were told that, "You go like we tell you to. It's part of fighting the war." And they went, they went quietly. They were not crying. They were... they were being good citizens. Dorothea and Christina spent weeks witnessing Japanese-Americans losing everything they knew. Pets, gardens, livelihoods. Their homes. Every person had a tag with a number. The head of the family might be 10351-A. The patriarch would be A, and then the mother would be B, and then the children by age, you know, C, D, E, F, depending on how many children there were. Can you imagine having a paper tag with your number on it, that's who you are now? Most of the internees were second generation Japanese-Americans. They were American citizens, and there they are having their citizenship rights taken away from them. You had thousands of young Japanese-American men who were fighting in the military. One of Dorothea Lange's early photographs was of a young soldier who got a furlough to come home to help his lone mother pack up. My dad went in the service and my two uncles were drafted so they went into the Army, fighting in Italy and France, for America.

Whistle blows

MAN

We had witnessed that evacuation by train from Woodland. And it was too far away from Berkeley to get home, and we stayed in a hotel that night. I went down to the lobby with Paul's little portable typewriter and was typing up some stuff, and when I went back to the room... she was in a paroxysm of anxiety. I can remember very well what she said. "Oh, I have such a belly ache." She was terrorized. It was the tearing up of their homes that really got to her. People were being moved to permanent camps. And the first permanent camp was Manzanar. In the desert, pretty far to the east, and far from Berkeley. It's called "internment camps." I guess, government-wise, that's what they call it, but it's really like a prison camp behind barbed-wire fence with guards. The buildings at Manzanar were long barracks that had from 7 to 12 units in each one. No insulation. In the heat of the summer, you get temperatures like 120. But in the cold of the winter, it is absolutely freezing. The camps are, of course, guarded. And there are military police all over. They wouldn't allow her to photograph the armed guards or the watchtowers. She was repeatedly asked to show her credentials. She was often followed around by a censer. She photographs in the nursery sheds under lighting filtered through slats, making it look like they were behind bars, an image that one of the censers found so offensive that he would not release it.

WOMAN

This was a woman who was not willing to photograph just what they told her. When the higher-ups really took a serious look at these photographs, they fired her. After they fired her, the U.S. military impounded the photographs and would not release them. They really didn't see the light of day for many years. Dorothea hung on as long as she could and was relieved when she was fired. She wrote in her journal, "World in agony, much energy lost. Some work accomplished. Paul, my haven, my love, my anchor, making lists and cleaning house. Feel inferior, and am." The intensity of the work with the Japanese was probably the beginning of her ulcers. During the war, Dorothea and Paul were living on the bend of Euclid Avenue in a beautiful old house, brown-shingled and wonderful. Wonderful oak trees, which Dorothea loved. And they had built Dory a studio in the backyard. A short descent down a mossy brick path from the main house, the studio was spare, illuminated by soft north light from slanting windows. A haven for Dorothea. She kept it simple and uncluttered, keeping only what was essential to the process of her photography, including a darkroom. The oaks embrace that studio. She felt kindred to those trees, claimed the trees and she were the same age and that they understood her.

LANGE

I have photographs of the trees that I live with here. The photographs are in different moods. I will perhaps use three of the life of those trees. Dark and deep and troubled.

WOMAN

There was no mistaking that it was Dorothea's house. She was very particular about all of her belongings and about where things went. So I learned an enormous amount from her about how to create a space. I made a comment about something, and she said, "Oh, Margot, I was wondering when you were going to learn to see."

LANGE

Where is the tea, Margot? Is it cut up?

MARGOT

It's in the soup. Oh, it's all ready done? I was going to give you a hand. One should have deep thoughts under all circumstances. No time for fooling, Margot, I always said.

Laughter

WOMAN

When I was a child, I was terrified of Dorothea most of the time. And I can't remember my father ever giving himself to a belly laugh. I don't think he ever did his whole life. I can, but his were silent. He would smile and quake. Whereas Dorothea was raucous sometimes.

Laughter

MAN

The house was a product of that marriage. And inside it -- the rooms, the furniture, the lights coming in the living room, the silence -- it was magical. There was a bond between them that was ironic. She called him "his honor." "His honor didn't come home for supper last night because he was working late," that kind of thing. And she would express mock exasperation with him, which sometimes masked real exasperation but turned it into something good-natured. Say, "Oh, Paul! Oh, Paul, listen to that!" And her impatience with him was wonderful because he loved it. It was obvious to me that they were meant for each other. Paul Taylor was absolutely smitten and never stepped back an inch. He was steady as a rock. He was her rock.

WOMAN

It was a very difficult decade for Dorothea Lange. The bleeding ulcers were really draining her strength. She sometimes just was exhausted. She was in terrible distress by 1945. Things got worse and worse and worse. And they operated on her for gallstones and she didn't have them. The indomitable spirit that she had. As soon as she could wobble onto her feet, she would plunge into work. My grandmother wrote in her journal, "have had a physical breakdown. Great difficulties and troubles. Maynard is dead now, but not gone. The children are on their various ways. Paul marches through his life and shares it with me in so far as I can and will. No longer feel inferior, though often weak, vague and ignorant. Again, another start." She started photographing with Pirkle Jones, a young photographer, on a project at the Berryessa Valley north of San Francisco, which was going to be flooded by a dam under construction. 1960. Strewn across my grandparents' dining table were photographs which haunted my young mind. The image which grabbed me and wouldn't let go -- a terrified white horse, running. 11 miles long and 2 1/2 miles wide, Berryessa Valley and the town of Monticello were part of California legend. Families who had lived there for generations, had raised pears and grapes, alfalfa and grain for their cows and horses in its productive soil and nearly perfect climate. "Death of a Valley""Death of a Valley" illustrates an aspect of Lange's work that people have really not noticed at all. An environmentalism. Lange had the idea, not of photographing the building of the dam as another heroic project, but looking at what the life was like in this valley, the valley that would be flooded and destroyed by the dam. There's this wonderful photograph of a woman holding out her hand as if in welcome, and the text says, "The valley held generations in its palm." They photographed the last harvest, people still working their fields. They photographed houses being moved to higher ground. The cemeteries being unearthed and graves moved. And then you turn the page, and there's a photograph that just spreads across the center line. They sky is darkening and you get the sense that things are turning for the worse. And then you turn the page again and then you see these photographs that were left. It shows how disruptive it is to leave one's home. A caption in "Death of a Valley" reads -- "The big oaks were cut down. Cattle had rested in their shade and on old maps and deeds, they had served as landmarks. Orderly destruction, scheduled down to the last fence post. Bulldozers took over. Clearing Monticello reservoir site. Specifications number 200C-311. Buildings shall be removed completely, or leveled. The reservoir site shall be cleared of all trees, stumps, brush, and all fences shall be removed. All shall be piled to be burned in such a manner that the piles will be as nearly consumed in one burning as possible." The valley was empty. The winter rains came. Water flowed over the land like a river and covered the highway which ran the length of the valley. It covered the town site. All the landmarks disappeared. No hum of insects, no smell of tarweed. The water rising." That community never recovered. A major loss for the state of California, for family farms, for small communities. All in the name of progress, of course. She's never easy, she's never sentimental. She's a thinker as well as a person responding with her feelings.

LANGE

At this time, we are creating this environment almost without scrutiny in every direction that you look. The camera's a powerful instrument for saying to the world, "This is the way it is. Look at it. Look at it."

WOMAN

Lange was right there at the beginning of the environmental movement, contributing to its literature. My grandfather had begun a battle he would fight for the rest of his life, supporting small family farms against the illegal allocation of water to large agribusiness interests. interests. He would go to these community meetings, and there were tons of corporate lawyers there and he would be the only one representing the people of California who needed that water. He was an activist, and yes, she was, too. However, Dorothea's health had become precarious and Paul was spending more time as her caregiver.

CONRAD

When she accepted the invitation to do the Museum of Modern Art retrospective, she felt healthy enough to where she thought she could carry this thing off. She could be feeling absolutely miserable and still be in charge.

LANGE

You remember this one?

CONRAD

Dorothea was on a pretty strict regimen of soft food and meds every few hours. And it was Paul that was the provider, and he did it in his very quiet way.

DIXON

The times she got really sick, she didn't have strength to go out on the streets anymore. But she still always had a camera around her neck, and she then began the assignment of photographing her own family and her family life. And part of that was this place as well.

Gulls calling

DIXON

My grandparents needed a respite and with a grandchild or two in tow, would get away to their one-board-thick cabin on the coast. It had an enchanted feeling, where the world outside was suspended. But it wasn't a place where you came to seek solutions. And certainly it's true that when she came here, she was a much more relaxed, spontaneous person than she was over the hills and far away.

LANGE

Then I began to wonder what it was that made us all feel, the minute we went over the brow of that hill, a certain sense of freedom. And I kind of looked at that. I tried to make up my mind what it was. This element of what that special thing is really took hold of me.

MAN

She did bring her camera, but she didn't come here with a shooting schedule. They just let the time and the tides flow. But time was closing in on Dorothea when a final opportunity arose. "Now or never," my grandmother wrote in her journal. "Decisions are ill-mannered, intrusive, brash, inconsiderate. That exact moment when the cloud shadows pass over the mountain peak, the decision must be made."

LANGE

I said to the doctor, "Shall I go?" And he said, "What's the difference whether you die here or there -- let's go!" In '63, in spite of everything, I went around the world with Paul.

WOMAN

Paul Taylor was a land reform expert for the United Nations and foreign aid. As was typical of Paul, he always wanted Dorothea with him.

MAN

She's no longer the government photographer. She's a wife accompanying an economist.

STEIN

What lunacy that the Ford Foundation and others didn't say, "You should work as a couple, as you worked in the '30s." She's seen as Taylor's wife, who has a camera.

Birds chirping

STEIN

"I'm writing from a strange and large wooden house with huge porches surrounded by jungle. I never thought I'd be in a place like this. The gentleman whom I love so much does his very best to make everything as right for me as he can. My struggles with my innards continue and there are some bad moments. But Paul and I survive it and we are happy in the same room together. It is not easy for me to work on Paul's expeditions. It's only grab-shooting. Travel is fast. That suicidal taxi ride. Paul sat there and laughed, serene in the fact that we are insured. But all I could muster was, "Mother of God!" No chance to discover for myself what I am in the midst of and work it through. I am confronted with doubts as to what I can grasp and record on this journey. Here is a very ordinary woman in a strange land. She has a camera around her neck, poor health, and is lame. But the pageant is vast and I clutch at tiny details, inadequate." There is that lifelong sensitivity to the body that makes this very different from your standard tourist snapshots. "I'm thin as a rail. I have to hold up my clothes with safety pins. The bedspread is gritty and I lie in this agreeable disagreeable room and look over my negatives. Why do I photograph? How much is vanity or self-justification? Faced with all these international negatives, and behind them all the other negatives I've made, order begins to come out of this life."

MAN

One wonders to what extent it's a visual journey for her, that all of this is her own drive to explore the human condition. "Later, while Paul sleeps, I ask myself, for what have I lived? This is the year, in the midst of my suffering, I became an artist in the world. A small artist, but for the first time in all the years, I can say I'm beginning to be an artist." "My energies are short and limited because of my illness. But I believe that I can see, that I can see straight and true and fast. This has been an exercise in vision, and for this photographer, it may be closer to the final performance." There were these categories, these drawers, where, over time, photographs landed. "I like this image. Where does it belong...?" She described as making sentences out of photographs, and maybe, possibly, if you could really be good at it, you'd make a paragraph out of it.

LANGE

We take the old woman, whose life is almost finished and has all that work behind her. She goes in...

CONRAD

Sometime in the late spring, early summer of '64, she began to have more and more bouts of throat constriction and pain, and it was determined that she, in fact, had cancer. At that point, she'd already invested a good deal of time in getting this Museum of Modern Art show done. And it was full steam ahead. To see me struggle this way is not so good, is it?

Telephone rings

CONRAD

This is very challenging under my present circumstances. I have cancer of the esophagus, and I'm not going to be here. We are trying to make that show add up to not a succession of extra-fine photographs. I don't care about the photography, I only care about what the camera can do. So, I work for the exhibition and contemplate things as they are. From the moment that the cancer was diagnosed, she knew that there was a deadline. That either the show was going to be completed in that time or it wasn't going to happen. And she pressed herself. She would just keep on going. My grandfather wrote John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art -- "Dear John, amid the ups and downs, today is on the 'up' side. Dorothea looks forward greatly to your coming -- almost literally 'lives for it.' My estimate still holds -- chance is 50-50 we will get her to New York for the opening in January." In late summer of 1965, John Szarkowski came for a final time to work with Dorothea.

MAN

When we got down to the nitty-gritty of it, she was one of the most strong-minded people I've ever met. As walls developed, as themes developed -- pairs of pictures, groups of photographs coalesced around each other and made visual sense. Her confidence grew. It was, "Okay, full-bore, let's go." As the show took shape, it was really an interesting trip to conceive of it as some kind of integrated visual event.

LANGE

Once you've seen a pair like this, you miss it. It's only really half a sentence. "You know what today is? Today is the first day of autumn. Have you felt it? Today it started.

The summer ended this afternoon at 2

00, all of the sudden. The air got still, a different smell. A kind of funny, brooding quiet. Today it happened. I was out and I was just so aware of it. Can you feel it? Today is the day." Dorothea never made it to the exhibition. She died three months before. At her side until the end, my grandfather told us later, her last words were, "Isn't it a miracle that it comes at the right time?" After a moment, he added, "It was the greatest thing in my personal life to live 30 years with a woman like that." My grandfather lived another 20 years. He never stopped fighting for the rights of migrant workers and for the fair distribution of water to small farmers in California. From him I received the gift of Dorothea's camera soon after she died, an enduring expression of their confidence. Our family scattered Dorothea's ashes near the cabin from the rocks above the sea. To learn more about Dorothea Lange and other American masters, visit pbs.org/americanmasters or find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. "Dorothea

Lange

Grab a Hunk of Lightning" is available on DVD for $24.99. A companion book is also available for $50 plus shipping. To order, call 1-800-336-1917.