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    Home » Sedona Lit: Evolving into Invisibility – Dorothea Lange in Arizona
    Elizabeth Oakes

    Sedona Lit:
    Evolving into Invisibility – Dorothea Lange in Arizona

    November 21, 2016Updated:November 19, 20163 Comments6 Mins Read
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    Sedona Lit is a series by Dr. Elizabeth Oakes, an award winning poet and former Shakespeare professor. A Sedonian of three years, she will highlight the literature, written or performed, of Sedona, past and present.

    photo_elizabethoakes_216By Elizabeth Oakes
    (November 21, 2016)

    In the year I’ve written this column (the first one was November 23, 2015), I’ve been continually surprised at the number of famous people who found their way to Arizona in its first year of territory and statehood. All were changed by the experience radically and forever. Such a one was the photographer Dorothea Lange, whose work evolved in subject and form.

    In 1918, Lange and a friend set out on a trip across the continent – from New York to California – as a precursor to the obligatory trip abroad that young, well-off women took to become more sophisticated before settling into marriage. It took six weeks by train as they made several stops, but in those days first class meant first class – ironed sheets, real china and silver at meals, and fancy menus.

    20161121_oakes1They crossed the Rio Grande at El Paso and traveled through eastern Arizona – Tucson and Yuma – where the giant saguaro and the red mesas were like a different planet. Although not particularly interested in photography at this point, Lange ended up working in a photo developing shop in San Francisco.

    There, her eyes opened to a new way of seeing by her journey, she had an epiphany: “I realized something that’s never left me – the great visual importance of what’s in people’s snapshots that they don’t know is there. They never see them in any way but personal.” This, she said, “guided me finally into documentary work.”

    By 1921, she was the go-to photographer for upscale San Franciscans. She was twenty-six years old, and she would eventually see beyond the social register to the human condition.

    Various philosophers – Plato is often mentioned in this connection – have spoken of the good, the true, and the beautiful as lodestars of the imagination. John Keats, a poet of the English Romantic period, ended “Ode to a Grecian Urn” with these lines: “Beauty is Truth, Truth beauty – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Lange’s aesthetic would eventually become not surface beauty but what we might call the true essence of a scene through the black and white tones of a photograph. She is there as recorder, not as interpreter, not even as artist.

    In 1922 Lange and her husband, the artist Maynard Dixon, spent four months on Navajo lands near Kayenta, Arizona. In Lange’s words: “We went into a country which was endless, and timeless, and way out and off from the pressures that I thought were part of life.” She wore a silver Navajo bracelet that she bought during that period every day for the rest of her life.

    20161121_oakes4Lange and her husband came back to Arizona in 1923 and camped out in style, with tents like Chinese pagodas, caviar, wine, etc. – today we call it “glamping.” Nevertheless, she embodied the land itself in “Hopi Man,” with his face like the land itself, with arroyos, rivulets, baked earth, and eyes like caves. He and his world are fractals of each other.

    Ten years later she went through a crisis, realizing that she had to be free, a not easy move since her business helped support the family. Nevertheless, she decided she would “only photograph the people that my life touched.” The openness and the differences of the southwest had worked their way into her consciousness. She wanted to photograph the “very large world out there that I had entered not too well.”

    Lange is famous for photographing the “Okies,” those who left the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma for California, whom John Steinbeck fictionalized in The Grapes of Wrath. In 1939, she took another government job photographing migratory laborers for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics. These photos, thought of as even “grittier” than the earlier ones, are the ones based in Arizona.

    20161121_oakes2In the photos I’ve included from this group, Lange wrote the captions herself. Of “South of Eloy, Pinal County, Arizona,” she records, “Ten-year-old migratory Mexican cotton picker. He was born in Tucson. He is fixing the family car. He does not go to school now, but when he did go was in grade 1-A. Says (in Spanish) ‘I do not go to school because my father wishes my aid in picking cotton.’ On preceding day he picked 25 pounds of Pima cotton.” I wonder what happened to this boy.

    Another, “Eloy, Pinal County, Arizona,” depicts a truckload of migratory workers looking for all the world like immigrants in steerage arriving at Ellis Island. About them, Lange wrote, “Truckload of cotton pickers just pulled into town in the late afternoon. Fresh from Arkansas. ‘We come to help folks pick their cotton.’

    There is a word from literary and political theory that has recently entered mainstream parlance – the Other (with a capital O). It is the term for those who are seen as “not like us,” as not belonging. Often they are invisible until their numbers or power reach critical mass; then the dominant culture does see them but only as a threat and retaliates with discrimination in its various forms.

    20161121_oakes3Lange wanted to be a professional see-er,” she said earlier in her career. By this she may have meant she did not want to see just the personal – not just her view, conditioned by her experiences and her culture – but the essence of the subject, an essence she shared with them, as we all do.

    In these Arizona images, Lange has “entered into” that world so completely that she has disappeared. She has disappeared, but in doing so, she has made these “invisible” people visible and permanent. The personal submerged (even that of the subjects), the good, the true, and the beautiful appear in ways we don’t usually recognize, trapped as we are in our own culture, consciousness, and aesthetics.

    One can imagine that the formal portraits of the wealthy of San Francisco still hang in someone’s home, the name and genealogy known. However, her images of these migratory workers, who came, worked, and left no trace, are the only reminder they were here. Only the land remains, and Lange seemingly had little interest in landscape, only the people who moved across it.

    Lange died in 1965 at the age of seventy. She was here –

    Note: Some other Arizona photographs are “Hopis on a Trail to Plaza,” 1920s; “Pinal County, Arizona,” 1940; “South of Chandler, Maricopa County, Arizona,” 1940; “On Arizona Highway 87, South of Chandler, Maricopa County, Arizona,” 1940s.

    Note: The most famous of her Dust Bowl photographs, “Migrant Mother,” has been reproduced many times, even as a postage stamp. The mother, her face strong but drawn by worry, looks off into the distance, as her children, facing the other way, burrow into her. Another iconic one,“White Angel Breadline,” taken in San Francisco in 1932, depicts a man, his face overshadowed by his hat, holding his cup, turned a different way from the other men.

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    3 Comments

    1. Joe Nolan on November 22, 2016 8:28 pm

      Great piece about a great artist. So interesting that she came from an opposite world to her subjects, but still, seemingly, connected to them with such emparhy.

    2. Elizabeth Oakes on November 26, 2016 8:59 pm

      Thanks, Joe! I am more interested in her work after writing this about her!

    3. Randall Reynolds on November 27, 2016 11:33 am

      Another great overview Libby– enjoyed this very much and reminds me of so many ‘who came before’ that truly appreciated the stark beauty of Arizona. These ‘pioneers’ of experience and documentation (not unlike yourself) have left us 9and those who follow) a wonderful gift! Terrific! This is the world Helen Frye loved so much– and indeed she spent much time canvasing the reservations alone searching for the essence that was.

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    Paid Political Announcement by Samaire For Mayor

     THE MOMENT IS UPON US

    Dear Sedona,

    The moment is upon us. The time for a united effort to shift the focus back to our community is now.

    The ability to thrive in our community, our environment, our workforce, and the tourist industry, is entirely possible because we have all the resources needed for success.

    Still, we need a council that isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions, that makes decisions based on data and facts, and through discussion, rather than moving and voting in group unison as they so regularly do.

    This is my home. I have been a part of the Sedona community for 28 years. I witnessed the road debacle, the lack of planning, the city circumventing the local businesses ability to thrive, while making choices to expand the local government and be in direct competition with private industry.

    I am a unique candidate because unlike the incumbents, I don’t believe the government should expand in size, nor in operations, nor would I attempt to micromanage every aspect of our community.

    City government should stay in its lane and allow the competitive market of local private industry to prosper. And it should defend our community from corporate takeover and infiltration of our town.

    I do not agree that we should sign onto International Building Codes and regulations by signing Sedona up to the ICC. It is imperative that we remain a sweet, rural community.

    Where are the arts? Where is this organic thriving element that we allege to be animated by. Where is our culture? Where is our community?

    The discord between the decision making process and the desires of the community have never been more clear. It has been nearly a decade in the making.

    It is time for a new era of energy to take charge. An energy that is reflective in the ability to succeed rather than be trapped in out of date consciousness.

    It has been a great honor meeting with each of you. I hear your concerns over the insane and out of control spending and I echo them. A budget of $105,000,000 in a town of 9700 residents is completely unacceptable. A parking structure (that looks like a shoe box) originally slated to cost 11 million, now projected to cost 18 million, is incomprehensible. Especially, considering there is no intention of charging for parking.

    For those who are concerned that I lack the political experience within our established system- that is precisely what Sedona needs… Not another politician, but instead a person who understands people, who listens to the voices within the community, and who will act in service on their behalf with accountability, for the highest good of Sedona. What I am not, will prove to be an asset as I navigate the entrenched bureaucracy with a fresh perspective. Business as usual, is over.

    Creative solutions require new energy.

    Every decision that is made by our local government, must contemplate Sedona first.

    • Does this decision benefit the residents?
    • Does this decision benefit the local businesses?
    • Does this decision actually help the environment?
    • Will this decision sustain benefit in the future, or will it bring more problems?

    What we have now is a city government that expands to 165 employees for 9700 residents. Palm Desert has 53,000 residents and 119 city employees. Majority of our city department heads are not even in town. I find this problematic.

    Efforts towards championing in and courting new solutions for our medical needs are imperative. We are losing our doctors. We must encourage competition with other facilities rather than be held hostage by NAH, who clearly have their own set of dysfunctions.

    We must remember that so many move to Sedona for its beauty, hiking, and small town charm. Bigger, faster, and more concrete does not, in broad strokes, fit the ethos of Sedona.

    The old world must remain strong here in balance, as that is what visitors want to experience. Too many have noted that Sedona has lost its edge and charm.

    As Mayor I will preserve the rural charm of our community, and push back against the urbanization that is planned for Sedona.

    As mayor I will make it a priority to create opportunities to support our youth.  After school healthy, enriching programs should be created for our kids, and available to the Sedona workforce regardless of residency and regardless of school they belong to.

    As Mayor, I will create an agenda to deliberately embody the consciousness of our collective needs here, allowing private industry to meet the needs of our community rather than bigger government.

    I hope to have your vote on Aug 2nd. I am excited and have the energy to take on this leadership role with new eyes, community perspective, and the thoughtful consciousness that reflects all ages of the human spectrum.

    Thank you deeply for your consideration.

    Sincerely,

    Samaire Armstrong

    Sedona elections
    Armstrong vs. Jablow: The Main Event
    Ready to Rumble

    By Tommy Acosta
    In the Blue Corner stands Scott Jablow and in the Red Corner of the ring stands Samaire Armstrong, ready to rumble to the bitter end in their fight to become the next Sedona mayor. Jablow weighs in with 1,137 primary election votes (36.13%) under his belt, having wielded his advantage as sitting Sedona City Council vice-mayor to his favor. He brings his years of serving in that capacity into the fray and waged a solid fight in his campaign to make it to the run-off. Armstrong, however withstood a blistering smear campaign from the other opposing candidates and their supporters to make it to the final bout with 967 votes under her belt (30.73%), an amazing feat for a political newcomer. Unfortunately, for the other two candidates, Kurt Gehlbach and sitting mayor Sandy Moriarty, neither put up enough of a fight to make it to the championship bout. Read more→
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