Dorothea Lange

platinum or gelatin silver print, inscribed 'photo by Dorothea Lange / From my collection' and signed by Rondal Partridge in pencil on the reverse, matted, circa 1922

The photographer to Rondal Partridge

Edwynn Houk Gallery, Chicago, acquired from the above

Andrew Smith Gallery, Santa Fe

Private Collection, acquired from the above

Christie's New York, 6 October 1998, Sale 8982, Lot 177

Acquired by the present owner from the above

This photograph is on a sturdy lightweight paper with a matte surface. The image is composed primarily of deftly modulated gray tones, and this—along with the print's matte-surface—gives it a platinum-like appearance. The one suggestion that this is a gelatin silver print is the very slight curl at the edges. Platinum prints tend to lie completely flat, whereas gelatin silver prints are sometimes subject to curling or rippling due to expansion or contraction of the paper's gelatin binder. The print is in essentially excellent condition. The faint small dark spot on the left side of the image appears to be a deposit of ink, or perhaps stray retouching. When the print is viewed very closely, some faint warm-toned discoloration can be seen at the very edges. None of these issues is immediately apparent, and they do not undermine the overwhelmingly fine appearance of this print.
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This carefully executed study of the sunlit walls of an adobe building in Taos, New Mexico, was made early in Lange's photographic career.  Although Lange would later become known as one of the century's great photographers of people in straitened circumstances, this early photograph shows her considerable skills at formal composition.  She would subsequently use these skills to reinforce the humanitarian agenda of her photographs, and they are very much in evidence in images such as, for example, White Angel Breadline (see Lot 34) or Death in the Doorway.  By contrast, the rigorously composed study offered here functions as an expertly realized exercise in pure photographic composition.     

Born in Hoboken and educated in New York City, Lange began photographing in the early 'teens after graduating from high school.  A formative experience was working in the New York studio of Arnold Genthe.  Later, in 1917, she studied under Clarence H. White at Columbia University.  The influence of these photographers, both of whose work was poised between Pictorialism and Modernism, can be seen in the image here.  While the photograph has a Pictorial softness, the composition is austere and minimal, bordering on the abstract.  Consisting almost exclusively of mid-gray tones, this expertly rendered print nonetheless conveys a sense of depth, space, and light.

Lange made a number of trips to the Southwest in the early 1920s in the company of her first husband, the painter and illustrator Maynard Dixon (1875 - 1946).  Known primarily as an artist of Western scenes and people, Dixon made frequent forays from the couple's San Francisco home to Arizona and New Mexico in search of subject matter for his work.   Lange had set up her own photographic studio on Sutter Street in 1919, and her work up to that point was largely commercial portraiture.  On her trips to the Southwest with Dixon, Lange focused her camera upon the Indians she encountered in the pueblos, as well as on their adobe architecture.  Examples of her 1920s work in the Southwest are rare, and while the photograph offered here is not reproduced in the Lange literature, a very similar study is illustrated in Dorothea Lange: Eloquent Witness (Chicago: Edwynn Houk Gallery, 1989, p. 14). 

This photograph comes originally from the collection of Rondal Partridge (b. 1917), son of the photographer Imogen Cunningham and the artist Roi Partridge.  As a young man, Partridge worked for Lange during her years as a government photographer, sometimes as a driver and assistant in the field, and also as a printer.  Partridge remained close friends with Lange throughout her life.