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Dorothea Lange was born Dorothea Nutzhorn on May 26 1895, in Hoboken, New Jersey, U.S. Lange was an American documentary photographer famous for her portraits of displaced farmers and Dust Bowl migrants during the Great Depression. Her photos were among the first examples of documentary photography and photojournalism.
Early Years
At age seven, Lange survived a severe polio case, leaving her with a lifelong limp. Her father abandoned the family in 1907 when she was 12, and her mother reverted to her maiden name of Lange. At age seventeen, Lange began working as an office assistant for famous photographer Arnold Genthe and taking photography classes. In 1919, at 24, Lange left home with a friend to travel the world. However, the U.S. had just entered the war, which ruled out European travel. So instead, she planned to travel to Mexico, Hawaii and the Far East.
California Bound
However, a thief scuttled her travel plans a second time. Arriving in San Francisco, a pickpocket stole all their money, leaving Lange and her friend stranded and penniless. Lange then went to work as a photo finisher at a five-and-dime store. Within a year, she opened a portrait photography studio. Her skill brought many of the rich and famous of San Francisco to her door. Through her work at the studio, she met her first husband, wilderness painter Maynard Dixon. Together they had two sons before separating, reportedly due to his long absences and rumours of infidelity. They finally divorced in October 1935. In December that year, she married economist Paul Taylor.
A social Conscience
While Lange had a successful career as a portrait photographer in San Francisco, she saw her photographs as tools for social change rather than art. Lange, therefore, began photographing life outside the studio. She took to photographing the unemployed men wandering the streets of San Francisco. Her images, showing the men’s desperate condition, were publicly exhibited and received immediate recognition from the public and other photographers.
The Great Depression
The Great Depression had begun in 1929 and, by 1933, was at its height. Seven thousand banks (one-third) of the banking system had closed. Within the U.S., fourteen million people were out of work bringing hardship, homelessness and poverty to millions. People evicted from their homes were sleeping in parks, sewer pipes and numerous shanty towns. “Hooverville” became a common term for a shanty town, named after Herbert Hoover, President at the start of the depression and widely blamed for it.
Lange visited a nearby breadline she had heard about with her Graflex camera. The breadline had been set up by a woman known as the “White Angel” to feed the many hordes of unemployed. This visit resulted in another iconic image: ‘White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco’, The photograph of a man turned away from the hungry crowd; his interlaced hands and set jaw personified collective despair.
Documenting the Dust Bowl Migrants
Lange’s photographs brought her immediate recognition, especially her image “white angel breadline”. It led to her being offered a commission as a Field Investigator for the Federal Resettlement Administration. The U.S. Agriculture Department hoped that Lange’s powerful images would bring the conditions of the rural poor to the public’s attention. So, throughout the summer of 1936, Lange drove through the South, photographing tenant farms and sharecroppers.
Dust Bowl Migrants
AP reporter Robert Geiger coined the term “dust bowl” to describe the land after years of drought. Following ten years of drought and subsequent dust storms, many sharecroppers and tenant farmers abandoned their land. Some battled on. However, they too were forced out when the banks foreclosed. As a result, around one-quarter of the population of the Great Plains (Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma, and northeastern New Mexico) were rendered homeless. They packed everything they owned into their cars and trucks and headed west toward California, which was touted at the time as Eden for hard workers. Leaving the drought-ravaged Midwest behind them, the migrants were viewed by Californians as disease-ridden intruders who would sponge off the government.
Unlike our current view of migrants being from other countries, these ‘migrants’ were fellow Americans moving from Great Plains to California. They were disdainfully called ‘Oakies’ and despised by Californians because their circumstances forced them to live in filth and squalor in shantytowns along irrigation ditches and roadsides.
The Migrant Mother
At the end of her trip through the south, as she returned home to the Bay, Lange was hot, tired and missing her sons. Driving down the road, she saw a sign reading, “PEA-PICKERS CAMP,” in Nipomo, California. Though she drove past the sign, it tugged her back, and she turned the car around and returned to the camp. There she encountered Florence Owens Thompson and her children. This led to the most famous image of the depression, if not her career.
“I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother as if drawn by a magnet,” she later recalled. “She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding field and birds that the children killed.”
Dorothea Lange
The image Lange took that day, ‘Migrant Mother’ became one of the most iconic and reproduced images in the history of photography. (Unfortunately, as Lange had been working for the U.S. Government then, she didn’t own the image and received no royalties from it).
Lange’s career continues to rise
Lange’s first exhibition was held in 1934, cementing her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer. In 1939 she published a collection of 112 photographs in the book An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. It is considered a masterpiece of the documentary genre. Her second husband, economist Paul Taylor, provided the text. In 1939. John Steinbeck visited the migrant camps with Lange and used her images as research when writing his seminal novel the ‘Grapes of Wrath’. John Ford also used her images as research when he turned the book into a film.
In 1940, Dorothea received a Guggenheim fellowship that gave her enough money to live for one year and focus on her art. So, Lange invited her son Daniel and friend Ansel Adams to join her in photographing Mormon communities in America.
The War Years
However, as World War II escalated, Dorothea and Ansel put the project on hold. They wanted to do something they considered more important. So the War Relocation Authority hired the two colleagues. Their brief was to document the experience of Japanese Americans in internment camps following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour. Dorothea opposed internment policies but felt it was important to witness and document the truth of the camps.
When working for the War Department during WWII, she was forbidden from documenting the Japanese internment camps in any way that suggested they were anything other than organized and dignified. She found creative workarounds, such as photographing the shadow of a barbed-wire fence rather than the fence itself.
Literary Ladies Guild
Japanese Internment Campos
The army instructed Lange to capture all steps in the process of the camps. But she was too good at her job. Her photographs showed Japanese parents and children in horrific and heartbreaking conditions. This was not the PR the U.S. Army wanted, and they refused to share Dorothea’s photographs with the public. Censored and forgotten, no one saw her Japanese internment photographs for decades.
Finally, in 2006, her work was celebrated when Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, edited by historians Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro, was published.
Post War
Following the end of World War II, Lange returned to her projects creating several photo essays for Life magazine, including Mormon Villages and The Irish Countryman. In 1953–54 Lange worked with Edward Steichen on “The Family of Man,” an exhibition organised by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Included in the exhibition were several of her photographs. Over the next ten years, Lange travelled with her husband Paul, who was now a diplomat, photographically documenting countries throughout Asia, notably South Asia, the Middle East, and South America.
Final Exhibition
In 1965 Lange was diagnosed with inoperable esophageal cancer. At the time she was preparing for a retrospective exhibition of her work to be held at MoMA the following year. Her one-woman show was only the sixth ever dedicated to a photographer. And the first ever for a woman photographer. Dorothea Lange died, aged 70, on October 11, 1965. The exhibition opened to wide acclaim three months after her death