Pakistan

From the Getty Museum record

> From Indonesia, Dorothea Lange and husband Paul Schuster Taylor traveled to India spending time in New Delhi and Calcutta, and then on to Pakistan. They arrived on December 3, 1958, and the next day she wrote to her son John and his wife, Helen: "Yesterday we arrived in Karachi, Pakistan. Get out the map again. We will be here until Dec. 24th or 25th. On that day we will be on our way again, via Kabul, Afghanistan to MOSCOW! That is, if we can get the Russian visa. The machinery has been set in motion. We will travel by jet from Tashkent to Moscow." > > As the days passed, Lange decided that she liked the dry climate and the flat-roofed architecture and would not mind staying on there. In another letter to her family she described, not without humor, the living conditions typical of their travel with the International Cooperation Administration (I.C.A.) and her own response to the city: "This is Karachi. We live with government friends. . . . in a gleaming white house about 3 miles out of the city. They have been here, working in Community Development I.C.A. for 4 years. They are ‘good' people. Methodists. Southern Methodists. Grace is said at every meal. This does not fit Karachi." > > "We came from New Delhi a week ago. This already seems six months ago. New Delhi is already fading, because this Karachi is a very rough and exciting place. Here are different people, desert people, the beginning of the Middle East. Here is a dry, brilliant country, (after our sojourn in the tropics this is a very great change.) blue and cloudless skies, no trees, and people straight out of our Bible stories. Here are camels used like horses in the downtown streets, and camel trains with jingle bells, camel drivers, covered women, covered school girls even, completely enveloped in a kind of tent . . . who peer out from behind little holes in their head covering." > > The men pictured here were part of an assembly with which Taylor conducted business. In a more formal group portrait, Lange photographed them all, with Taylor seated in front next to the senior statesmen. Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange,* In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), p. 86. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.