"I had to get my camera to register the things that
were more important than how poor they were -
their pride, their strength, their spirit."
Dorothea Lange, as quoted in Elizabeth Partridge's book
Restless Spirit: The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange, 1998
“Do
you know my wife, Dorothea Lange?” the old man asked me in the present tense,
although the woman, best known for her Dust Bowl portrait “Migrant Mother,” had been
dead more than 10 years. It was the summer
of 1976. The man was Paul Taylor,
professor emeritus of Economics at UC Berkeley, and I had walked across campus to
his office with him at his request instead of studying for a meteorology
midterm. When I said “No,” he began
showing me her photographs that he kept in his file drawers. Thus began my lifelong relationship with
Paul, although he has been dead now for almost 35 years.
One Sunday he called me to come to
his home in the Berkeley hills. I was
preparing to update the Arvin-Dinuba study originally undertaken by one of his graduate
students in the 1940’s, Walter Goldschmidt.
Paul had supervised the original study and kept it alive by citing it
continually in his efforts for enforcement of the acreage limitation provisions
of federal reclamation law. An update
was overdue.
When I arrived, Paul handed me a
black leather box that, when opened, contained one of Dorothea’s cameras. The lens slid out on a track followed by
accordion-like bellows attached to a square box which she held while she
squinted through the rangefinder on top.
When it wasn’t mounted on a tripod, she balanced the extended camera on
her knee. It is the camera most often shown
in the documentaries about her career, which started in the bread lines and street
protests on San Francisco’s wharf during the Great Depression, moved to the
streams of migrants coming into California from the Dust Bowl, then the
evacuation of Japanese-Americans to internment camps during World War II.
That her hands had made use of this
camera to capture what her heart and mind saw through her eyes was powerful,
even a little intimidating. I protested,
knowing I would never have the nerve or the expertise to use it. He insisted I take it. That camera, and the memory of the gift, have
kept me inspired over the intervening years, when I might have allowed doubt to
wipe away the importance of the work Paul and I did together. I have long thought it was the most important
possession I owned.
A couple of weeks ago I heard myself
think that I didn’t need to keep it with me anymore. Now that I’m finishing the book on Paul’s
contributions, I realized that I might be able to give it to a museum where
others could be similarly inspired. Just
days later, on the weekend of Oct. 7-8, it was stolen from my house, along with
my flute and autoharp, my jewelry box full of earrings from Long’s Drug and
some family treasures, as well as my HP All-in-One printer that I bought at
Target on sale for $35 four years ago.
They took all my other cameras as well, including my grandfather’s
Brownie and my Aunt Hazel’s Argus rangefinder in the red plaid camera bag she
loved. It was painful.
But, in looking
for the proper description of the historic camera, I found this quote of
Dorothea’s, one she used often. “The
camera,” she said, “is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a
camera.” Dorothea’s images have taught
us how to see for years, and continue teaching us today. That camera did its work well past its useful
life. I just pray that it’s somewhere
teaching someone to see again.
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Trudy
Wischemann is a remedial documentary photographer who writes. You can send her your favorite camera stories
c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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