Report from Santa Fe; Dyanna Taylor

You You Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico and organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future and by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Tau's New Mexico.

I'm Lorraine Mills and welcome to report from Santa Fe. Our guest today is Diana Taylor, cinematographer, filmmaker. Thank you for joining us. Thank you, Lorraine. Well, I've wanted to do this for a while. You wear many hats, but I want to talk a little bit about your filmmaking hats because you've won five Emmys. You've done so many pieces you've done for HBO, ABC, special about Anna Perna, about the women's expedition to the Himalayas. A wonderful piece called Blessed is the Match and you've been given a Lifetime Achievement Award by the New York Film and Television People, Peabody Award. I mean, thank you for joining us. Thank you. But another hat that you wear is from your family. That's true. And your grandmother is Dorothy Elang, was Dorothy Elang, the iconic incredible woman photographer. So thank you for joining us. Thank you. Big footsteps, big footsteps that I'm having to fill. Well, I'm very interested because I know that she was a tremendous influence on you.

And you've been putting together pieces sort of a granddaughter's recollection. I have. And so, what was it like having a grandmother like that? And what did she teach you about photography? And how did she teach you to see? Well, when I was really young, I assumed that everyone's grandmother took photographs. I mean, it never occurred to me that grandmothers didn't photograph or that there were grandmothers that didn't photograph. So I took all of it quite for granted, you know, for many years. And I also took for granted that everywhere in the house, every time I was at her house. And in my life, constantly, there were photographs which reflected her work and that I was constantly exposed to them. And books that she was a family of man in which she had many photographs. Wonderful book. Wonderful book. You know, every year, as I grew up a little 1-year-old, 7, 8, 9, 10, I'd look at that book again and have a different feeling about it each time I saw it. And then, at one point, she, well, at a number of points, she would challenge me as a young woman who was full of energy and demanding as a kid.

And a little while, the tomboy, I was a lot to manage. She would challenge me to slow down and look, which at first I didn't really understand and only took it as a reprimand. But later, saw that she was actually asking me to go further with what I was experiencing. So one day, I, knowing that she often photographed us, the children, the grandchildren who were around. I, I knew that she did this and I wanted to please her. And I had found a group of beautiful stones. Beautiful in my estimation, but mostly I wanted to win her approval. And so I brought my handful of stones and I thrust them out in front of her and said, you know, grandma, look at this. She said, yes, I see it. Do you see it? And I said, well, yes, I see it. She said, but do you see them? And she took the photograph of my hand, outstretched.

And I remember, but I was deflated somehow. I didn't understand it. I didn't feel that she was really approving of me, even though she took the photograph. And I went away pondering this, do you see them? And what she was asking me to do was to really, really take in what my hand, the palm, the shape of the stones. Why I had chosen them. And so I wanted a way thinking about that. And I think that was really the moment. I know that that was really the moment that began to change me. Uh-huh. Some of her quotes about seeing. And she said, when should really use the camera as though tomorrow you'd be stricken and blind? Yes. Well, that's intense. And she said, to live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable. And she said that she the best photographer of the century in my humble opinion. That she'd only touched that visual plane.

And so here you were a child with your gift of stones. And she's saying, really, really see. Really, really see this. And another thing you have heard you speak before talking about that if you'd asked her, you would probably have been the least likely grandchild to go into to become a photographer. Right. Here you are. Thirty, thirty some of the years of being a filmmaker and a cinematographer. That's true. And it was something I couldn't avoid somehow. I inherited her cameras when I was 14. I felt compelled to start using them right away and experimenting with them and built a little dark room in the basement of our house in San Francisco, which was really funky. And my patient mother put up with me, my father had already passed away. So my dear mother was putting up with the basement being filled with chemicals and water running and all this stuff. And me being down there for hours where you really lost track of time. But that period of time, although it was rich in some way, Dorothea was already gone.

My father was gone. I felt my work was never very profound and it was very intimidating to me to try to, I kept thinking I was going to produce work that was going to be profound if I put my head to it. Well, I really couldn't. I wasn't mature enough. My dark room techniques weren't very good. And so by the time I went to college, I cast it away. I decided that I was never going to shoot stills again. It was a sad moment actually. I thought, I'm not going to do this. I can't do this. But fortunately, at the University of California, I took a small class in filmmaking and cinematography and felt liberated somehow. It was like a perfect fit for me that I could suddenly shoot in color and I can shoot in motion. And so that was the beginning of my career. What was the shift that you had these, I'm sure, wonderful black and whites from your early period? Yes, sort of. And then suddenly that you didn't have to stay on it, that you could have the moving image. I think for me, internally, the shift was just a moment of freedom.

Yeah. Is that I could see in the way that she'd asked me to see. But I could see not in the way that she had to see, but I could see in my own way. And I've gone back, of course, to shoot stills later, took me 15 years to go back and start shooting stills again, actually. But I was able to, in the meantime, start shooting things that were motion pictures. And I wasn't competing with her and I didn't have to match her and I didn't have, I could do it all on my own. Or you didn't have to be as perfect as she was. As she was. And she was a perfectionist indeed. Yes. Well, one of her quotes that I love that a camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera. That's right. And I just see such an almost zen, be here now, experience of what is in front of you. And let's talk a little about her life because she did. She was a portraitist. She was a portraitist. Oh, really? Of high-end San Francisco people who paid to have her picture taken. And then she evolved into the documentary work and the migrant workers and the depression.

A couple of pictures I'd like to show of her. Okay. This is the cover of Linda Gordon's biography. But it's, you can see her on top of the car. And I found myself many a time on top of a car shooting too. Right. Taking the pictures. And another picture that I really, really love of her. This was a book written by a friend of yours. It was a portrait. Dorothy Elaine, a visual life. And I love that picture of her. She's just so lovely. It's right when she met my grandfather. Right then. Well, let's talk a little about her life. She's born in 1895. And a little about her illness because she really framed a lot. It really framed a lot. She was, she was born in Hoboken, New Jersey. And her father left the family when she was quite young. And so she was raised by her mother and grandmother who were both very Germanic and interesting women, powerful women. And she had a visual sense very early on.

But also developed polio when she was seven. Her grandmother always said a wonderful thing about her. She said this girl can see. She said that about her. Wow. Yeah. This girl has eyes in her head. Her grandmother said that many, many times about her. But the polio was, she recovered from the polio with a pretty severe limp in her right leg, a withered right foot, which I think affected her in many, many ways. Later in terms of the work that she was able to capture as well as what she saw. And I think that polio also allowed her to go into lives. The people that she photographed trusted her because she had a disability. And it made her very sensitive to people who had issues in their lives. It were difficult. But anyway, she had the polio. And then left Hoboken against her mother's wishes when she was 21. And decided she was going to go around the world with a friend, literally.

And they were going to go around the world. And they ended up in San Francisco, I think seven weeks later. And in fact, they came through New Mexico and stayed for a week on some ranch in the South. I've never quite found the ranch. But anyway, ended up in San Francisco where they were pickpocketed. And that moment forced her to get a job at a five-in-dime on Market Street called Marsha's in San Francisco, where she became the countergirl behind the photographic area of Marsha's. And so she began to meet the photographers there. Wow. And that was really where she got her start. And she worked with her, was friends with imaging, coming him, Ansel Adams. The Westerners. All of them. And Paul Strand. They described that warmth that she had, that she had a way of being with people, very charismatic, that people would just open up to her. Yeah. Well, that's really important when you're in really alien turf. Yeah.

And what's interesting is that she got two of the clients who came to Marsha's, literally sponsored her to open her for studio. And very quickly, she developed a rapport with some of the wealthy in San Francisco. And then her name spread and pretty soon the wealthy of San Francisco were coming to get their photographs taken by her. And she did very unique portraits. So in this portrait studio, she would create different kinds of environments. And they were very realistic. I mean, they were of the time, sort of gauzy and all that. But nonetheless, she really captured people's true selves. And that was her gift. And they trusted her for that. But then she couldn't stand it any longer. And she wanted to go out in the streets where she felt things were really happening. Well, actually, that was the really interesting. Yeah. The first, the angel. White angel breadline. Yes. How do I have it here? Yes, I do. So this was one of her first sorties out into the streets. Yes, it was. And again, an iconic photograph. Can you tell us a little about this? To white angel breadline. White angel breadline. The white angel breadline was named for a woman that they called the white angel,

who basically had formed a breadline for the men during their depression, who were in the tenderloin and in the district in San Francisco behind her studio. And she began to go down there, seeing the men there. And she found that, that particular man that day holding that tin cup in his hand, looking away from the others quite dejected and took that photograph. But you know, she had already married Maynard Dixon. Right. Right. The great painter who was 20 years her senior. She met him through Imogen Cunningham and Roy Partridge. And there's a great story about that too. In her studio, they would have great teas in the evening. And people would come to her studio and she'd still be down in the dark room. And she would hear her friends gathering up above and finally come up and join them. And one day she heard the click of Maynard Dixon's boots across the floor. And she later on said, who was that? Who wore those boots on the floor? And Roy Partridge said, oh, that belongs to Maynard Dixon. And she met him then the following.

She didn't meet him that night. He left by the time she went upstairs. But she met him a week. And she tuned right into him. Yes. And they fell in love and were married for 15 years. And they did live in New Mexico. They did. I'd like to show some of her New Mexico pictures. And then we'll go back to her iconic pictures. They did live in Taoist. She did Maynard. And so these pictures are just beautiful. Look at that. So can you talk about the one with the chickens and then the one in Hopi if you could? I just know that these are very early efforts on her part to begin to document what she saw when she was on this amazing trip. And you know, she was now the mother of two boys. Two very rare and bunch of little boys. And so she had great frustration that she couldn't do more with these, the things that she saw around her. She, I think she would have photographed night and day had not been for the boys. But she was a very committed wife and mother. And was struggling with it that she was very committed but also very struggling with it, I think. And he was out painting these wonderful, wonderful paintings.

And she was home with the kids and doing some photography. Some photography. We have to go to Maynard mother. Okay. They're a real iconic piece. And I'd like you to tell the story, but also there was a series. She actually did six of these pictures. We'll show them why you talk about. I'm going to show three of them. Okay. So Dorothea was alone on assignment in California. And she'd been out on her own photographing for three weeks. And she was returning home on a very rainy March afternoon. And saw a sign for the pea pickers. And passed the sign and kept driving over 20 miles. And then just kept talking to herself. I should go back. I wonder what's there. I'm too tired. I've done my work. Maybe I should look. I know this particular issue. You know, should you go back and look. And so she turned around after 20 miles and went back. And drove into this muddy road with the rain coming down. And there was this incredible woman sitting there in a lean to

with her six children at the time. And she gradually progressed toward the woman. And ultimately, that was the final photograph. It's hurt with her two children. Well, it is the iconic picture whenever, you know, these days, they're talking about the... We could be back in a depression again. Whenever people think of these times, they think of her work. And the immediacy, she said. I read that she said she never snuck a picture of somebody. She always was very upfront. And if you didn't want your picture taken, she wouldn't do it. Sometimes she'd get the kids. And the kids would be so happy to be photographed. They'd take them to the mom. But... She also... I mean, she also wouldn't... When she approached the subject, you know, she'd sometimes talk to them about the weather, about, you know, what's happening in your life. She would talk about her own life. She would talk about her own children. She would talk about her own polio. She would disarm them by sitting down and fussing with her equipment until they kind of got used to this little woman sitting there,

looking very kind of, you know, not very complicated and certainly not very challenging. And then she would sort of pick up the camera and approach them. And that was how I think she got such beautifully direct work with people's faces in particular. Absolutely. Incredible portraits. Also, I'd heard that because she was not so tall, that she kind of shot up... Absolutely. ...into even the most haggard, you know, this hungry, sad face made them look monumental because... Precisely. Well, because she was short and she was using a box camera and all of you camera where she looked down. So that also made her less threatening, if you think about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right, she wasn't holding a camera up into someone's face. Right, she was pushing down. She was pushing down. Putting her gaze, looking down, holding the camera, you know, chest height or so, and short anyway in stature. And so that made all of the photos looking up at these people sort of give them a nobility in a sense of pride. And she did a beautiful job at that, actually. This is a picture that she took of a family going to New Mexico.

And it's kind of the archetypical okey shot. And she really, really spoke up for the dignity. No matter how these people had suffered and they didn't bring this on themselves. No, they did not. But she was able to show the dignity and the concern of the, you know, the parents particularly for these kids. And it did border a little bit on the political. This is one of my favorites. It says, can you read it? This is air. It's an air sign. This is your country. Don't let the big men take it away from you. I mean, this was already an issue where? In the 30s. In the 30s. Where corporate interests were affecting the small guy. Yeah. And she was already pointed in it. She was already on that one. I love that one. Yeah, I like that one too. I actually have it hanging in my studio. Oh, great. Great. Well, she, another part of her work were the commentaries that she wrote.

And she was one of the first to really do captions. And she would write. She would talk to these people. And she'd race to write down their exact words. And you know, she learned that from my grandfather. So she and Maynard split up after 15 years of marriage. They sort of went their separate ways after the depression. And she was discovered, actually, by my grandfather. She had gone out into the street and had photographed in San Francisco, the men of the tenderloin, the white angel breadline, the great strike of 34. And there was a small exhibit of her work in my grandfather, discovered her work, and asked her to go on assignment with him. And he had already been photographing in his own right for 15 years before that, interestingly. And captioning work also. And help the two of them together were the perfect match. Because he helped her understand the importance of documenting what people said verbatim. But that freed him to do his, he was an economist,

looking at land tendency, looking at the small family farm, trying to keep the small family farm alive, and working for the government, essentially. And essentially, he hired her to work for the government and then also got her hired for the Farm Security Administration. I think that she described that she had to write down that she was going to be a typist. Yes, that's right. Because if they were laugh, if he wanted to hire a photographer. They had to call it yes. And so he was a social scientist, a university professor. And I know he said in one of the reports to the people who were going to give money to the migrant workers because they were starving. He said, you know, if we wait for your figures to come in. Exactly. Everything I've warned you about will be done, and it'll be too late. So he would produce her photographs of these families. And anyone who saw the photographs would pass money for the camps and to help these people. Right. What a huge thing. It was a huge thing. And the two of them traveled thousands of miles together over a period of four years crisscrossing the country.

They came through New Mexico four times. But they went as far as the Carolinas, actually, to photograph and documented everything that they saw. And it was quite a body of work, I have to say. And the migrant mother photograph, interestingly, immediately brought aid to the area in California where she had been working it immediately brought aid there. I'd like you to tell the happy ending to the migrant mother's story. Of course, the picture itself was used and abused. It was like the open source, wasn't it? And so you had mentioned that even the black panthers put the scroll on her. Yeah, the nation magazine is used. The New York Times has used it for showing her as a non facelifted migrant mother and a facelifted migrant mother shot there. Yeah. That's really cool. But she's been used again and again and again for many, many causes. And also likened to a Madonna, if you will. So there's been that whole use of that image as a Madonna, as a black Madonna, Hispanic Madonna, so forth.

It turns out that her name was Francis Thompson. No one knew her name for many, many years. But they kept seeing her image being used her family. She did have these six children. And one of her daughters finally came forth and identified her. And I think her grandson, too, did an article for a newspaper about her. And they were really had been quite put upon by the fact that their mother's image had been used so much. Yeah. And she was very, very unhappy about that. But toward the end of her life, she became very, very ill. And there was another newspaper article about her. And the fact that she'd become very, very ill. And people from all over the country who identified her with this image sent money to the family. And they ended up with a really wonderful small bank account to help her through that illness and to help the family. So she ended up getting a good reward at the very end of her life. I just love to hear that because the pain in her face.

And I know that at the time that Dorothy had taken the picture, she had just sold the tires from her car to feed the kids. So she was going nowhere. Yeah. And they were living on frozen peas in the field, or she said birds that the children happened to kill. They had nothing. They had nothing. So it's wonderful to know the virtue of art. At the very end. What the goodness it came from this photograph. So I would like to just take a minute and talk about your childhood with her because you shared, she had a retreat called Steep Review in this wonderful cabin. And the pictures, their wonderful pictures of you there and all the grandkids as wild kids at the beach. And yet everything was very simple. What? And this was her sanctuary. Yeah. It was about your time there. It was a place that we went frequently. Many weekends, it was close enough to San Francisco that we could all pile in various cars and go easily.

It was only an hour and a half away. And it was extremely simple. Dorothea had become very ill at the end of her life. For the last 20 years, she suffered with various stomach ailments and then ultimately died of esophical cancer. So in these final years, going to this cabin, which had cold running water, no electricity, it was very simple, one and a half rooms. On the edge of the sea was a respite and a refuge. I think that she cherished and that she also had turned her eyes, which had been, you know, she'd seen everything in the world, including traveling internationally with my grandfather. Now she turned it back on to where she lived and to her children and grandchildren and the things around her that meant something to her. And that experience became something very important for me because I began to see the value in simple things and in beautiful things in a shell and a stone. There was no television, there was no radio.

We all were together. We would tell stories. We'd play games. She even had a studying geometry. She'd have us practicing our instruments. You know, we were together in a different kind of way. We'd walk on the beach. She, with her limp in her cane. And your grandfather carrying back stones? Stones. My grandfather always carried stones. Yeah. And a diabolical teeter toddler. And that thing really looked dangerous. Any child protective people would have shut down that teeter toddler. But I noticed her photographs at that time are these almost zen-like teblos of just like the tea kettle and the stove. The kerosene lanterns. The kerosene lanterns. Yeah. And wonderful pictures of you reading. Yeah. And just the, you know, she said that you guys, you children were allowed to be completely free. Yeah. And that was what we learned there. Yeah. We weren't corralled in any way and no one looked over our shoulder. They really trusted us to be wise enough to not hurt ourselves. And it was plenty dangerous.

High tides, huge waves, big cliffs, you know, crazy rocks, you know, slippery things. But they just let us go. And she loved, she found great joy in watching us feel so free there. And I think she, she of spirit felt very free there too. And unencumbered by a lot of her concerns and worries. Mm-hmm. I think she, as a quote, wanted to just, just for one year, she said, I would like to just be able to follow my own dictates, follow my own heart. And it seemed like that's what she could do at the cabin. Yeah. Well, you were very, very lucky. I know you lived there after she passed away. I did. I did. I went and lived there for a year by myself at a very young age. I was 17 to 18. Uh-huh. My mother, bless her heart. Let me go. Live there. No telephone. Of course. You know, no electricity. And it was, it was the most formative experience. Mm-hmm. And I still yearn for that quiet place in that gorgeous natural world, the natural world talking to me. Well, there's a quote that you have. And I hope you do continue working on a piece.

I, you had a title tentative, grab a hunk of lightning. Grab a hunk of lightning. Can you tell us the whole quote that's from? It's her quote, grab a hunk of lightning. And it's the moment where she decided that she was going to go out into the streets of San Francisco. She was going to leave the safety of the studio. She was going to go out into the streets, photograph what she saw there, bring it back, process it, print it, and put it on the wall in 24 hours. Yeah. And she was going to grab a hunk of lightning. Well. And that's, that's her very word. She wanted to prove that she could, that that work meant something. And interestingly, the clients who came to look at that work. Uh-huh. Esther, why are you, what, what, how would you ever use this? Or what would you ever do with this? And of course. And of course, it formed our world. Yeah. I want to leave our audience with this image, the famous migrant mother. And I want to thank you. You have grabbed a hunk of lightning. You travel all over the world doing your cinematography. I'm so grateful for you for taking the time to be with us today. Thanks, Lorraine. It's a privilege. Our guest today is Diana Taylor.

Thank you so much. You keep grabbing that lightning. And I'm Lorraine Mills. I'd love to thank you our audience for being with us today. And report from Santa Fe. We'll see you next week. Past archival programs of report from Santa Fe are available at the website report from Santa Fe dot com. If you have questions or comments, please email info at report from Santa Fe dot com. Report from Santa Fe is made possible in part by grants from the members of the National Education Association of New Mexico, an organization of professionals who believe that investing in public education is an investment in our state's economic future. And by a grant from the Healey Foundation, Taos, New Mexico. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you.