Dorothea Lange was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist,
best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration. Lange's
photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development
of documentary photography.
Early life Born of second generation German immigrants
on May 26, 1895, at 1041 Bloomfield Street, Hoboken, New Jersey, Dorothea Lange was named
Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn at birth. She dropped her middle name and assumed her mother's
maiden name after her father abandoned the family when she was 12 years old, one of two
traumatic incidents early in her life. The other was her contraction of polio at age
seven which left her with a weakened right leg and a permanent limp. "It formed me, guided
me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me," Lange once said of her altered gait.
"I've never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it."
Career
Lange was educated in photography at Columbia University in New York City, in a class taught
by Clarence H. White. She was informally apprenticed to several New York photography studios, including
that of the famed Arnold Genthe. In 1918, she moved to San Francisco, and by the following
year she had opened a successful portrait studio. She lived across the bay in Berkeley
for the rest of her life. In 1920, she married the noted western painter Maynard Dixon, with
whom she had two sons, Daniel, born in 1925, and John, born in 1930.
With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to
the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of
local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration,
later called the Farm Security Administration. In December 1935, she divorced Dixon and married
economist Paul Schuster Taylor, Professor of Economics at the University of California,
Berkeley. Taylor educated Lange in social and political matters, and together they documented
rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers for the next five years –
Taylor interviewing and gathering economic data, Lange taking photos.
Resettlement Administration From 1935 to 1939, Dorothea Lange's work for
the RA and FSA brought the plight of the poor and forgotten – particularly sharecroppers,
displaced farm families, and migrant workers – to public attention. Distributed free to newspapers
across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era.
Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother." The woman in the photo is Florence
Owens Thompson. The original photo featured Florence's thumb and index finger on the tent
pole, but the image was later retouched to hide Florence's thumb. Her index finger was
left untouched. In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience
taking the photograph:
I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not
remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked
me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction.
I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two.
She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and
birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There
she sat in that lean-to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that
my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it.
After Lange returned home, she told the editor of a San Francisco newspaper about conditions
at the camp and provided him with two of her photos. The editor informed federal authorities
and published an article that included the photos. As a result, the government rushed
aid to the camp to prevent starvation. According to Thompson's son, Lange got some
details of this story wrong, but the impact of the picture was based on the image showing
the strength and need of migrant workers. Japanese American internment
In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence in photography. After the attack
on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the prestigious award to record the forced evacuation of Japanese
Americans from the West Coast, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority. She covered
the internment of Japanese Americans and their subsequent incarceration, traveling throughout
urban and rural California to photograph families preparing to leave, visiting several temporary
assembly centers as they opened, and eventually highlighting Manzanar, the first of the permanent
internment camps. Much of her work focused on the waiting and uncertainty involved the
removal: piles of luggage waiting to be sorted, families wearing identification tags and waiting
for transport. To many observers, her photograph of Japanese American children pledging allegiance
to the flag shortly before they were sent to camp is a haunting reminder of this policy
of detaining people without charging them of any crime or affording them any appeal.
Her images were so obviously critical that the Army impounded most of them, and they
were not seen publicly for more than 50 years. Today her photographs of the internment are
available in the National Archives on the website of the Still Photographs Division,
and at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.
California School of Fine Arts In 1945, Lange was invited by Ansel Adams
to accept a position as faculty at the first fine art photography department at the California
School of Fine Arts. Imogen Cunningham and Minor White joined as well.
In 1952, Lange co-founded the photographic magazine Aperture. Lange and Pirkle Jones
were commissioned in the mid-1950s to shoot a photographic documentary for Life magazine
of the death of Monticello, California and of the displacement of its residents by the
damming of Putah Creek to form Lake Berryessa. The magazine did not run the piece, so Lange
devoted one whole issue of Aperture to the work. The photo collection was shown at the
Art Institute of Chicago in 1960. In the last two decades of her life, Lange's
health was poor. She suffered from gastric problems, including bleeding ulcers, as well
as post-polio syndrome – although this renewal of the pain and weakness of polio
was not yet recognized by most physicians. Death and legacy
Lange died of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965 in San Francisco, California at age
70. She was survived by her second husband, Paul Taylor, two children, three stepchildren,
and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. In 1972 the Whitney Museum used 27 of Lange's
photographs in an exhibit entitled Executive Order 9066. This exhibit highlighted the Japanese
Internment during World War II. In 2006, an elementary school was named in
her honor in Nipomo, California, near the site where she photographed "Migrant Mother".
On May 28, 2008, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver
announced Lange's induction into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum
for History, Women and the Arts. The induction ceremony took place on December 15 and her
son accepted the honor in her place. In 2014, American Masters – Dorothea Lange:
Grab a Hunk of Lightning premiered August 29 on PBS. Directed and narrated from a uniquely
intimate perspective by Lange's granddaughter, Peabody- and five-time Emmy award-winning
cinematographer Dyanna Taylor, the film combines family memories and journals with never-before-seen
photos and film footage as well as newly discovered interviews. A companion book, Dorothea Lange:
Grab a Hunk of Lightning, by Elizabeth Partridge, was published in 2013 and is the only career-spanning
monograph of Lange's work in print. See also
Marion Post Wolcott References
Further reading Dorothea Lange Color by Neil Scott-Petrie
ISBN 978-1495477157 Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, "An American
Exodus. A record of Human Erosion", facsimile of the original edition, Sam Stourdzé, Paris:
Edition Jean Michel Place, 1999, ISBN 978-2-85893-513-0 Anne Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look: Dorothea
Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field, University of Chicago Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-226-31606-2
Sam Stourdze, "Dorothea Lange, The Human Face", Paris: NBC Editions, 1998
Geoffrey Dunn, "Untitled Depression Documentary" 1980
Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life New York, 1978, ISBN 978-0-8156-0622-2
Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange, Encyclopedia of the Depression
Linda Gordon, "Dorothea Lange: A life Beyond Limits" New York, 2009, ISBN 978-0-393-05730-0
Linda Gordon, Paul Schuster Taylor, American National Biography
Gordon, Linda; Okihiro, Gary Y., eds.. Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of
Japanese American Internment. New York: W. W. Norton and Company. ISBN 0-393-33090-7.
Jayne McKay and Daniel Dixon, DVD, Maynard Dixon Art and Spirit
External links Oakland Museum of California – Dorothea
Lange Online Archive of California: Guide to the
Lange Collection 1919–1965 Dorothea Lange at the Museum of Modern Art
Photo Gallery of Dorothea Lange at the library of congress
Dorothea Lange – "A Photographers Journey" – Exhibition at Gendell Gallery
1964 oral history interview with Lange Dorothea Lange Yakima Valley, Washington Collection,
Great Depression in Washington State Project. http:lacrossehistory.orgcached/DorotheaLange.pdf,
David Joseph Marcou's Oct. 2009 article with endnotes 'Migrant Mother, Florence Thompson'
and the 'Nisei Internees'. ^ "Dorothea Lange's Documentary Photographs".
J. Paul Getty Museum. Retrieved January 22, 2013.