Daniel Dixon, son of photographer Dorothea Lange, is in Ireland to revisit the scene of some of her most famous pictures - and of his own reconciliation with her, he tells Gerry Mullins.
The chance to join famed photographer Dorothea Lange on a month-long photographic assignment to Ireland 51 years ago was more than just a free holiday for budding writer Daniel Dixon; it was also a chance to rebuild the relationship with his mother that had been broken for most of his life. This week Dixon returns to Ireland for the first time to deliver four audio-visual presentations to audiences in Dublin, Galway and Ennis about his mother, her work, and her relationship with Ireland.
Dorothea Lange's name is synonymous with America's Dustbowl era, when she made iconic photographs of migrant workers and farmers during the Great Depression. Prior to this she had been a successful portrait photographer in San Francisco, but in 1933 she took her camera on to the streets for the first time to document the tide of migrant workers who were leaving Oklahoma, Arkansas and other impoverished regions in the American South, and washing up on the streets and fields of California. Outside her office she photographed a destitute man waiting for nourishment at a soup kitchen run by a local wealthy lady known as "the white angel". That photograph, White Angel Breadline, is seen as the beginning of what we now know as photojournalism.
Lange's other great image of that era, Migrant Mother, taken in 1936, is one of the most famous photographs ever taken. It has been reproduced in hundreds of publications, and was even altered to show the woman as black in order to bring forward its message to differing audiences. Five years ago the United States Postal Service used it on a commemorative stamp.
Like many children of famous parents, Daniel Dixon in his formative years had many moments when he wondered which was more important to his mother: her career or her children. He and his brother were farmed off to relatives and friends while Lange and her painter husband, Maynard Dixon, spent months away from home working on assignments and commissions.
"She was a mother that I didn't often see when I was growing up, the mother who frequently wasn't there when I needed her," says Daniel Dixon. "Because she was usually away on one of her field trips, or entombed in her darkroom . . . These absences and withdrawals sometimes lasted for weeks. And they hurt."
As a 15-year-old the neglected and spiritually wounded Dixon dropped out of school, slept rough, ate out of dumpsters and otherwise went hungry. In a symbolic act, one night he broke into his mother's darkroom, stole her cameras and sold them. For 10 years he was homeless, a nuisance who would show up occasionally at his mother's home for the wrong reasons. There was a certain irony that while Lange championed the cause of the poor, the dispossessed, the lonely and the hungry, her son slept outside in parks and doorways nearby.
In 1950, aged 25, a dishevelled Dixon showed up at his mother's back door.
"It was early winter, and I was sick and half-starved," he says. "She had warned me that I was not welcome on the property, but this time she brought me in and put me to bed. She made chicken soup for me. I stayed in bed for weeks and gradually we began to talk. I asked her if anyone had written about her personally, as opposed to her work, and she said that nobody ever had. So I decided to write an article about her."
DIXON'S ARTICLE ABOUT his mother was published in the prestigious Modern Photography magazine, for which he received $500. The sum was large enough for him to rent a small apartment, buy a typewriter and sow the seeds of a writing career. Lange responded by throwing work his way, and he began to collaborate on her assignments. In 1954 he got a big break when his mother invited him on a trip to Utah for Life magazine, along with fellow photographer Ansel Adams. Dixon's career was in the ascent.
The same year Lange persuaded Life to send her and Dixon to Ireland, to make a photographic study of Irish rural life. She was now a grandmother and he a father, but it was the first time outside the US for both of them. They arrived in Dublin from California in early September and photographed in the city centre around Trinity College and St Stephen's Green. She dropped into the Irish Folklore Commission and got advice from its director, Seámus O'Duilearga.
After a few days they hired a car, drove to Ennis and booked into the Old Ground Hotel. Using that as their base, they visited and photographed in the narrow streets of Ennis, and at the market that has been held in the town for 300 years. They drove into the countryside and found Michael Kenneally working land on the side of Mount Callan, which had been his family's farm for four generations. He farms the same land to this day, and is often asked to pose in the same field in the same position so Dorothea Lange fans can recreate her photographs.
At the school nearby Lange photographed 10-year-old Bridie O'Halloran, in a dress made from flour bags, sporting a broad smile and bright red hair. When the photo appeared in Life magazine the following year, it prompted a stream of fan mail from several countries. She received money, gifts, and even a marriage proposal.
Lange wanted to photograph Irish people who were about to emigrate, so she visited Ennis photographer Dennis Wylde to see if he had recently taken any passport photos. He brought her to the O'Halloran family on Mount Callan, where two of the four daughters were preparing to leave for the US. She photographed three generations of the O'Hallorans: cooking by the turf fire; milking cows in the middle of a field; and huddled together for their first and last family photographs.
Dixon's favourite memory is of the fair in Tubber, where they "encountered the snaggle-toothed old farmer holding aloft two sheep".
"That whole day at the market was grand," says Dixon. "It rained, then it didn't rain, and these old fellas sloshed around in their Wellingtons. Dorothea moved between them easily and naturally, snapping here and there."
IT WAS AN important time for both Lange and Dixon. For her, the trip marked a new beginning in her relationship with her son. They became colleagues and friends, and by the time she died in 1965 they were companions. Dixon regained a mother and also solidified a career in journalism. He was now making a living from writing, working with two of the world's greatest photographers (Lange and Ansel Adams), and on international features for one of the world's best magazines. He later moved into advertising and directed an advertising agency until his retirement in Los Angeles in 1995.
Just 19 of the 2,400 photographs taken in Co Clare were published in Life magazine; another six were included in Lange's retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1965. The archive was revived in the 1996 book, Dorothea Lange's Ireland, and the subsequent documentary film, Photos to Send.
Dixon now lives with his third wife, Dixie Caulder, in the Californian seaside town of Carmel; yes, the place where Clint Eastwood has a restaurant and Doris Day can be seen walking her dogs. Across the US they have presented a slide show on Lange's work, with Dixon narrating and Caulder reading Lange's words.
"I frequently come across people who my mother photographed," says Dixon. "These are the merchant prince families of San Francisco, who tell me their photos are their family's prize possessions. But in Ireland I look forward to hearing the actual people in the photos speak. I know Dorothea would have been delighted to meet them again . . . She felt she had been an honourable witness to their lives."
• Gerry Mullins is the author of Dorothea Lange's Ireland, and co-producer of the subsequent documentary film on Lange's Irish work, Photos to Send. He will be making four audio-visual presentations on his visit to Ireland: Dublin City University, May 4 (lunchtime); National Museum of Ireland, Kildare Street, Dublin 2, May 5, 7pm; the Centre for the Study of Human Settlement, NUI Galway, May 10, 3pm; and on May 12 at 7.30pm, the County Library in Ennis, Co Clare, where many of the people photographed by Lange are expected to attend. Admission to each event is free