August, 2014

My Father and Dorothea Lange

For my birthday in 1981, Mother gave me a Dorothea Lange catalog from the Oakland Museum.

There on page 56 was my father speaking into a microphone against a dramatic sky.  The photo is taken from slightly below – adding to the  drama and power.

The newspaper in his pocket of 1934 underlines the time of the San Francisco General Strike.  Daddy was a radical and a labor leader and was speaking to a huge mass on Market Street. Lange took several photos of the rally that day;  this one ended up in several books and journals.  The birthday gift to me was a total surprise. My father died in an auto accident when I was 17 and I never knew of that photo by the famous photographer.  Mother never told us about it.  There was, in her mind, a reason for her secrecy … but that’s another matter.  A friend arranged to have a print made for me by Lange’s own printer and here, circa 2005, is my brother Bryan, clowning in front of it.

The Lange spirit continued.  At a dinner party in 2013  a friend mentioned an article in the New York Times Real Estate section about a celebrity apartment with a painting on the wall that seemed to be the photo but not quite.

The actor/artist celebrity –  Matthew Modine – confirmed in correspondence with me that the painting was indeed his and inspired by the Lange photo he saw in a book.  His for-sale apartment was in Chelsea just a few blocks from my own.  Here I had lived all these years practically next door to a painting of my own father on somebody’s wall!  From 1934 to 2014, the Lange photo and its aura persist for me.

Homage to Lange: