Dorothea Lange at Jeu de Paume and the Ballet

Yes folks, Tuesday October 16 was yet another beautiful warm, sunny day with a high of 26C. After breakfast we headed out and stopped for coffee at Le Peloton Café. We have a lovely walk heading across Île Saint-Louis and then up Rue du Pont Louis- Philippe, where we stop for our coffee.

Le Peloton Café

We passed a window full of amazing huge chocolate cakes at Jean Paul Hévin Chocolatier- Pâtissier.

Fantastical cakes

Beautiful flower shops abound

We checked out one of my favourite covered passages (or galeries)- near Rue du Louvre, just north of Rue Rivoli. It is the Galerie Véro-Dodat, built in 1826. At the height of their popularity in the mid 19th century, there were more than 150 passages in Paris. However, with the advent of the department store around 1850, the galeries began to decline. Today, eighteen passages remain.

Galerie Véro-Dodat- restored in 1997, beautiful floor and lighting

One of my favourite jewelry stores is located there. We checked it out and then carried on our walk.

Angelo Caputi jewelry store in galerie-- Italian jeweller, whose bracelets and earrings I have purchased in the past

We decided to stop for lunch before heading to our destination, Jeu de Paume, Paris's photography museum. With this wonderful weather, our strategy has been to wander the city and stay outside, heading to a museum for a late afternoon visit. We stopped at Café de Paris.

Lots of sun for our Club sandwich and frites

Clearing our table as we were leaving at about 3:30 p.m.

Just before we got to Jeu de Paume, which is located at one end of the Tuileries Gardens, we saw a wonderful Dubuffet sculpture. The Galerie national du Jeu de Paume became the centre for modern photography in 2004. The building was constructed in 1861 and had originally housed real tennis courts- the name of this game in French is jeu de paume.

Dubuffet sculpture near one side of the gallery

Jeu de Paume was used from 1940 to 1944 to store Nazi plunder and masterpieces from French Jewish families and noted art dealers who specialized in impressionist and post-impressionist works. Art dealer Bruno Lohse staged 20 expositions of the newly looted art objects, especially for Goring who selected around 500 pieces for his own collection. Modern art pieces (so-called "degenerate art") that had been looted were sold for foreign currency and scattered across Europe. Some of the unsold work (including works by Picasso and Dali) were destroyed in a bonfire on the grounds of the Jeu de Paume in 1942. French resistance curator Rose Valland, who was working at the Jeu de Paume, kept a secret list of all the works passing through, and most were able to be returned to their rightful owners/heirs.

Plaque on museum wall honouring Rose Valland- put up in 2005

Jeu de Paume functioned as a post-war museum between 1947-86, and housed many of the impressionist works which are now at Musée d'Orsay. From 1989, the building underwent a $10 million renovation. It reopened in 1991 as "France's first national gallery of contemporary art". In 2004, three photography institutions merged and the museum became the centre for modern and post-modern photography and media.

The main exhibit we went to see had just opened. It was entitled Dorothea Lange: Politiques du Visible (Politics of Seeing). It was a superb exhibit of her work. While I have always been a fan, I hadn't realized the depth of her work and the subjects that she had covered.

Dorothea Nutzhorn (1895-1965) was born in Hoboken, New Jersey to second-generation German immigrants. She took up photography at 18, and adopted her mother's maiden name, Lange, when she opened a portrait studio in San Francisco in 1918. In 1932, during the Great Depression, she shifted her focus from studio portraits to scenes showing the impact of the depression and social unrest in San Francisco. During this period she met Paul Schuster Taylor, a professor of economics at the University of California, and a specialist in agricultural issues, who later became her second husband. Lange's photos were used to illustrate his articles. They worked together for over 30 years and co-authored An American Exodus (1939) which documented social conditions in rural America.

The exhibit focussed on five specific series: The Depression Period (1932-34); her work for the Farm Security Administration (1935-41); The Richmond Shipyards (1942-44), the Japanese American Internment (1942) and a series on the Public Defender system (1955-57). Dorothea made special efforts to connect with her subjects and she took detailed notes of her encounters which provided very detailed captions to her photos and produced a form of oral history for future generations.

The following photos are largely taken by me at the exhibit, but with the reflection from the glass, I got some from the internet-- however, all were part of the amazing exhibit.

White Angel Breadline 1933 - Lange said she was compelled to photograph as a response to what was around her. She could see the evidence of the depression from her studio on Montgomery Street in San Francisco.

Line up at social security 1938

Man beside wheelbarrow, San Francisco 1934 - Lange wrote that she took this picture with his head down, his back against the wall, "with his livelihood, like the wheelbarrow, overturned."

Mass meeting of Works Progress Administration workers 1939

In front of city hall, San Francisco- protesting cut in relief appropriations by the US Congres

May Day listener, San Francisco 1934

Migrant worker on California highway 1935

There was one display table with numerous contact sheets from her work at the Farm Security Administration (FSA) between 1935-39. Lange travelled throughout the country and visited 22 different States (mostly in the west). She had two contracts with the FSA- one from 1935-37 and one from 1938 to the closure of the program in January 1941. Her FSA photographs were published in two volumes in 1980 along with her original captions for 1,311 photographs, many of which had never been reproduced before.

Alabama Negro working in field near Eutaw, Alabama July 1936-- Lange's notes say that there are 5 children between 7-14, all whom work. The tenant family earns about $150 a year and just barely lives.

There was a wall with perhaps the most famous of Lange's pictures, commonly titled "Migrant mother."

Destitute pea pickers in California. Age 32. [Commonly titled: "Migrant mother"] February or March 1936

Other pictures from the shoot- Lange noted she had 7 hungry children, They had just sold their tent in order to buy food. Of the 2500 people in this camp (in Nipomo, California), most of them were destitute.

From the negatives

Former Texas tenant farmers displaced by power farming, Goodlet, Hardeman Co., Texas May 1937

Theater in Leland, Mississippi [Rex Theatre for colored people, Leland, Mississippi] July 1937

Ex-slave with a long memory, Alabama 1938

Family on the road, Oklahoma June 1938

Unemployed lumber worker goes with his wife to the bean harvest. Note social security number tattooed on his arm. Oregon 1939

After her FSA work, Lange became interested in a new form of internal migration caused by the rapid expansion of industries. In 1944, Lange was commissioned by Fortune magazine to photograph the Kaiser Shipyard in Richmond, California. She captured the lives of those working at the shipyard.

Shipyard Construction Workers, Richmond, California vers 1944

One of the most powerful series was Lange's work on the internment of American citizens of Japanese descent, done in 1942. Over 110, 000 Americans of Japanese descent were moved from Pacific Coast military zones and "relocated" to ten remote camps in California, Arizona, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Arkansas and Wyoming. Lange was commissioned by the War Relocation Authority to cover the relocation procedure from March to July 1942. The Authority wanted to show that no one was mistreated. However, her sensitivity to her subjects came through in the photos and Lange was eventually fired from this position. Her negatives and photos were impounded and the images were only released for publication in 2006!!

Centreville, California May 9 1942

Untitled (Headlines, Oakland, California) February 1942

Evacuees among a contingent of 664, from San Francisco, awaiting buses April 1942

Assembly centre- awaiting registration - near former race track in south San Francisco April 1942

Preparations for evacuation two days hence of all residents of Japanese ancestry from Sacramento May 11, 1942

Doing laundry the day before the "relocation"

Children with name tags 1942

In a deliberatively subversive act against the War Relocation Authority (WRA), Lange collaborated with Caleb Foote, a Quaker and prominent opponent of the internment, to produce Outcasts!: The Story of America's Treatment of her Japanese-American Minority, a pamphlet attacking the government's treatment of Japanese American citizens. Not allowed to publish her photographs, Lange very nearly ran into trouble with the WRA. Luckily, it turned out the photos had been published before in a government report for a government Committee, which placed them in the public domain.

The last series was a commission by Life magazine in 1955 to cover the topic of the public defender system at the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, California. She was able to pinpoint issues of racial prejudice. While the assignment did not appear in Life, it was published in many newspapers and used by the national Legal Aid Society of New York to develop public services in the legal system.

Untitled (Pre-Trial Jail Cell, Alameda County Courthouse, Oakland 1957

Untitled- from the Public Defender series 1955-57

The exhibit seemed was very timely, given the present day poverty and racism in the United States. Displaced workers and climate change migration are all very relevant today.

After our visit to Jeu de Paume, which included two other small exhibits, we went to the Hemingway Bar at the Ritz Hotel. We had treated ourselves two years ago and decided it was time to return.

Outside the Ritz Hotel

It is a long walk through the Hotel to the Bar-- this time, an employee showed us the way

It is a small bar, with many photos of Hemingway-- including pictures from his 1944 "liberation" of the Bar

Colin Field- bartender extraordinaire-- he has worked there since 1994-- full of great stories

He took this picture of us behind the bar

My "clean-dirty martini" ready to drink- prepared by Colin

(allegedly the best dry martini in the world)

Alain with his long special cocktail called Serendipity - made with Calvados from Normandy, mint, Normandy apple juice and Champagne- originated in 1994

The drinks menu

Puttin' on the Ritz

After our drinks, we headed to the Palais Garnier where we had tickets to see the Ballet de L'Opéra's performance of Ohad Naharin's Deadance (excerpts from a number of his choreographed ballets). We had seen a performance in Toronto by the Batsheva Dance Company, where Naharin has been the Artistic Director since 1990. He stepped down as Artistic Director in 2018, but continues to serve as the Company's House Choreographer. The piece was brand new to the repertoire of the Ballet de L'Opéra. We had managed to get 12 euro tickets in the fourth level-- still very good views, and we had our binoculars with us. (We noted that our drinks at the Hemingway Bar were more than twice the price of the tickets- but total evening entertainment expenses were reasonable).