Paul's Camera

Published Nov. 8, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette


     Two weeks ago I wrote about the loss of a camera that had been given to me by Paul Taylor 35+ years ago.  I called it “Dorothea’s” camera because I believed it had belonged to his wife, Dorothea Lange.  It matched photos of one she used in the field when the two of them documented the stream of immigrants into California who’d been displaced from their land in the Dust Bowl.

     The camera was returned to me last week, intact.  The story of how it was returned will have to wait until the case of the other missing items is resolved, but it’s one I will chalk up to Lindsay’s inherent goodness when the time comes.  Our town is still a place where love can do its work.  Make no mistake about that.

           

     Before it reappeared, I was searching for people who might be able to ID the camera and establish its worth.  I found Elizabeth Partridge, author of Restless Spirit:  The Life and Work of Dorothea Lange (1998).  She’s also the daughter of Rondal Partridge, who had been Dorothea’s field assistant.  When the camera came home, I saw that it was a Zeiss IKON, not the Zeiss Jewel shown in her book.  I emailed her to report the distinction and the good news.

     She wrote back instantly on her iPhone, but referred to the camera as “Grandpa Paul’s.” Then she reminded me of his photographic work before he met Dorothea:  “Paul’s early work, though no great shakes in terms of beautiful photos, was so brave and thoughtful of him to dare to do.”

           

     The revelation that it might be Paul’s camera rather than Dorothea’s riveted me.  It sent me back to the one book I own where his photographs are shown, a book of farmworker photographs by Ken Light, Roger Minick and Resa Tansey called In The Fields (1982.)  Paul had written the introduction with labor historian Anne Loftis and included some of his photographs from his extensive study of Imperial Valley farm labor conditions in the late 1920’s.  But they also included a shot of a billboard for Tagus Ranch advertising for cotton pickers in 1927, just five years before the cotton strikes in Pixley and Corcoran. Paul had been here in our valley, too.

     What was really brave about Paul was not so much that he took and used photos, but his whole approach, which could be called “ethnographic” in academic terms.  Economics, his field, was becoming so statistical that it is almost unrecognizable as a social science today.  But Paul asked questions of the people he studied and wrote down what they said, and he photographed the places they lived and worked, a form of shorthand notetaking that carried these conditions 90 years into the future.  His economic analysis of the Imperial Valley is now highly esteemed.

           

     I’m keeping Paul’s camera with me until I’ve finished the work he sent me to do.  Onward, friends.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Trudy Wischemann is a remedial researcher who writes to stay sane.  Thanks to John Kirkpatrick for his sympathetic phone call last week.  Send your favorite camera stories c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247or leave a comment below.

 

 

Dorothea's Camera

Published in edited form Oct. 25, 2017 in Tulare County's Foothills Sun-Gazette

"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.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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.