John Dixon, daughter Lisa, sons Gregor and Andrew, Berkeley, California / Third Born

From the Getty Museum record

> When her sons were very young, Dorothea Lange photographed them often, sometimes in the company of their father, the artist Maynard Dixon, listening to him read or watching him paint. During the depression, however, the boys were boarded outside San Francisco, the marriage dissolved, and Lange remarried and began a new career that kept her on the road much of the time. Few family pictures were made, the boys grew up, and in 1945 Lange's ill health confined her to bed. > > After Lange recovered, the family became an important subject again. Her sons had married, and during the 1950s they would give her four grandchildren. Daniel Dixon, in a contribution to the catalogue at the Oakland Museum in 1978, offers that his mother was recording "the family" as she photographed her sons and grandchildren. "I believe that my mother had given herself an assignment. Between bouts of illness, she was recording the growth of development of a young American family that just happened to be her own. The story is fragmentary. But the purpose is clear. The documentary photographer was still at a work." > > In 1954-55 Lange assisted Edward Steichen with the selection of image for an exhibition of 503 pictures by 257 photographers from sixty-eight countries. He would include nine of her works in *The Family of Man*, one of them being her 1952 picture of John carrying his first born, Gregor, through the doorway of her Berkeley home. In a deliberate way she continued this practice of representing her sons with their infant children. Three years after Gregor arrived, Andrew was born, and Lange recorded John carefully cradling the baby on his knee and examining him with concern ([2001.34.3](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/130772)). Andrew, who weighed eleven pounds at birth had an injured arm. The pregnancy was a difficult one for Helen, John's wife, who remembers how miserable she was that summer when Lange made the shape of them uncomfortable pregnancy a subject for her camera ([2000.43.12](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/129311)). Three years later Helen would deliver a daughter, Lisa. Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange,* In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), p. 76. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.