Tag:photojournalism
Gerda Taro was a German-born war photographer best known for her coverage of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s. Born Gerta Pohorylle in Stuttgart, Germany, she was professionally known as Gerda Taro. She was one of the first female war photographers and is considered a pioneer in the field. Unfortunately, she was also the first woman war photographer to die in the field.
Early Life
Pohorylle was born to a middle-class Jewish family on August 1st, 1910. In 1929, with her father’s business failing due to economic conditions in Germany, the family moved to Leipzig, seeking a fresh start.
As Germany descended further into economic and political chaos, antisemitism intensified. In 1933 she was arrested after distributing anti-Nazi leaflets. At age 23, to escape Hitler’s Germany and the persecution of the Jews, she fled to France, joining the thousands of political and intellectual exiles also seeking refuge in the country. Her parents also left for Palestine, and her brothers went to England. She never saw her family again.
Inventing Robert Capa
In Paris, Pohorylle met Endre Friedmann, a Hungarian jew and became his assistant. Friedmann taught her photography, and they fell in love. In 1936 they invented the pseudonym Robert Capa for Friedman, and Friedmann claimed to be his agent. Both Friedman and Pohorylle took news photographs and sold them as the work of the non-existent American photographer Robert Capa. The ruse was a way of overcoming the rising antisemitism in Europe and breaking into the lucrative American market with a more commercial name.
The name Capa came from Friedmann’s Budapest street nickname “Cápa”, which means “Shark” in Hungarian. However, their secret did not last long, and Friedmann then officially adopted the more commercial name “Capa” as his own. Meanwhile, Pohorylle took the name Gerda Taro. Her name came from avant-garde Japanese artist Tarō Okamoto and Swedish actress Greta Garbo. Robert Capa and Gerda Taro worked together as photojournalists to cover the events surrounding the coming-to-power of the Popular Front in 1930s France.
Spanish Civil War
Just two weeks after the outbreak of the Spanish civil war, the couple moved to Barcelona, arriving in Barcelona on August 5th 1936. Over the next twelve months, Taro photographed the civilian population’s suffering and soldiers on the frontline. In February 1937, Taro and Capa travelled to the Andalusian coast and the city of Malaga, covering the thousands of civilians fleeing a nationalist advance. In May, she photographed the civilian population after they had endured the nightly bombing of Valencia.
Battle of Brunette
The battle of Brunete was pivotal for the Spanish civil war. General Franco’s forces had retaken the town, and the republican troops were retreating. General Walters warned Taro to get out of Brunette as her safety could not be guaranteed. However, Taro refused to leave and continued shooting. as bombs fell and planes strafed the ground. Witnesses said she was smiling and taking photo after photo, which she said were her “best pictures yet”.
Running out of film, she hopped onto the running board of General Walters’ car carrying wounded soldiers. Unfortunately, an out of control tank crashed into the side of the car and crushed her abdomen. Nevertheless, she was still conscious when she arrived at the British hospital in El Escorial. New Zealand surgeon Dr Douglas Jolly operated on her. However, she passed away that night.
Epilogue
Gerda Taro had been due to return to France the next day. Unfortunately, her photographs of the battle and equipment disappeared soon after the collision with the tank. Taro was considered a martyr to the anti-fascist movement, and the French communist party provided her with a magnificent funeral that drew thousands of people; she was laid to rest at Pere Lachaise Cemetary in Paris on what would have been her 27th birthday.
Margaret Bourke-White stands out as one of the most iconic photographers of the 20th century. Her work paved a path for women photographers who came after her. Born in 1904, she died in 1971 after a protracted battle with Parkinson’s. Bourke-White was a woman of firsts. She was the first Western photographer permitted to enter the Soviet Union and the first female photographer for Life Magazine. She was the first woman to make the cover and did it on their first issue. Additionally, she was the first female war correspondent credentialed to work in combat zones during World War II.
As an accredited photojournalist, she captured images of the Partition of India and Gandhi at his spinning wheel. During her storied career, she was stranded on an Arctic island, her boat was torpedoed, and her helicopter caught fire. When the germans bombed Moscow, she was there too. Yet, she survived it all, earning her the nickname ‘Indestructible Maggie’ from her Life colleagues.
The Early Years
Margaret Bourke-White was born in the Bronx on her parent’s wedding anniversary on June 14, 1904. Her father, Joseph, was an inventor and printing engineer from a Jewish Orthodox family. Her mother, Minnie, a Protestant, was the daughter of an Irish ship’s carpenter and an English cook. The family moved to Bound Book, N. J., when Bourke-White was very young, and she was homeschooled.
Her mother stressed the value of courage, determination, and fear of nothing. Bourke-White took it to heart and constantly challenged herself. Her father, Joseph, was an avid photographer and naturalist who took her with him when photographing. His work improved the four-colour printing process that is used for books and magazines. Bourke-White helped her father develop his images in the family bathtub. However, she didn’t take up photography until after her father’s death in 1922.
University Studies
Bourke-White entered Columbia University in 1921 before transferring to the University of Michigan. There she met Everett Chapman, an electrical engineering graduate. They married on June 13, 1924. Next, the pair transferred to Purdue University in Lafayette, Indiana, before transferring to Western Reserve University in Cleveland. Unfortunately, the marriage broke down after two years. Newly separated, Bourke-White moved to Ithaca, N.Y., to attend Cornell University for her senior year.
Photography
While at Cornell, Bourke-White began by selling pictures of the school buildings and grounds to the Cornell Alumni News and fellow students. After several architects praised her photographs, she travelled to New York City. She walked unannounced into an architect’s office to get an unbiased opinion of her portfolio. Impressed, the architect assured her she could find work with any architectural firm in the country.
“Saturate yourself with your subject, and the camera will all but take you by the hand and point the way.”
~Margaret Bourke-White~
In 1927 she graduated from Cornell and finalised her divorce. Bourke-White then legally reverted to her maiden name and added her mother’s maiden name with a hyphen. She then took a boat to Cleveland, wanting to photograph the steel mills and set up her studio.
In 1928 she opened a proper studio in Cleveland’s landmark TerminalNearfar from the tower, stretching to Lake Erie’s edge, was an industrial wasteland known as The Flats. To her, it was “a photographic paradise.”
“I did my processing in the kitchenette, the rinsing in the bathtub, and the living room served as reception room when the in-a-door bed was pushed out of the way.”
~Margaret Bourke-White~
The Steel Mills
The steel mills were off-limits to women. Undaunted, she worked hard to convince the company’s head Elroy Klaus to allow her access to the sites. Bourke-White received many objections from the night supervisor, who complained she was distracting the workers because she was “crawling all over the place […] and the men are stumbling around gawking up at her. Someone is going to get hurt, and besides, they’re not getting any work done”. However, she persevered and captured the gritty reality of what the steel mill was like creating beautiful images of the industrial machinery.
After months of experimenting and discovering a new printing paper, she produced impressive pictures of the steel-making process. Her photographs of the mills and those she took of the construction of the Fort Peck Dam brought her to the attention of Henry Luce from Life magazine. Luce consequently hired her as a photojournalist, making her the first woman photojournalist hired by the magazine. Her image of the Peck Dam also graced the first ever cover of Life magazine.
The Chrysler Building
In the winter of 1929-30, Bourke-White was given the job of photographing every phase in the construction process. The Chrysler building was reputed to be the tallest in the world. However, sceptics alleged the steel tower at its top was nothing more than an ornament designed to give it to record height. Bourke-White’s photographs proved that the tower was “integral to the architecture”.
Working in freezing winds, she had to position herself on a swaying tower, eight hundred feet above street level, to get the desired shots. Bourke-White rose to the challenge.
“with three men holding the tripod so the camera would not fly into the street and endanger pedestrians … my camera cloth whipping and stinging my eyes as I focused … I tried to get the feel of the tower’s sway in my body so I could make exposures during that fleeting instant … when … the tower was at the quietest part of its sway”
~Margaret Bourke-White~
Louisville Floods
In 1937 the Ohio River flooded Louisville, Kentucky, in one of the United States’ greatest natural disasters. Today, it remains the greatest flood to hit Louisville, exceeding even Katrina. Seventy percent of Lousiville was submerged, forcing 170,000 residents to flee their homes. Life magazine despatched Bourke-White as a staff photographer, her plane landing minutes before the airport runways flooded. She then waded through the city and floated on rafts to get the shots she wanted.
The result was her now famous photograph of African-American flood victims waiting for rations and relief. Ironically they were queued up under a billboard that said: ‘World’s Highest Standard Of Living / There’s No Way Like The American Way. Her image highlighting the inequality of the time became famous. Bourke-White told stories in pictures, one shot at a time, with each image forming part of the bigger story. This technique became known as the photographic essay.
The Depression Years
During the mid-1930s, like Dorothea Lange, she photographed the drought victims of the dust bowl. While working at Life, Bourke-White began collaborating with Southern novelist Erskine Caldwell, the author of Tobacco Road. Together they worked on a book documenting the impact of the -Great Depression on the South. At the height of the Great Depression, Bourke-White and Caldwell travelled the back roads of the Deep South. They drove through Georgia, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee, documenting sharecroppers’ living conditions. In their book: Have You See Their Faces, Caldwell wrote the text, and Bourke-White photographed the lives and living conditions of the country’s poorest citizens. Published in November 1937, the book achieved critical acclaim and tremendous success. However, it also attracted criticism for reinforcing stereotypes.
The PRE War Years
by Margaret Bourke-White. 1938
In 1938 Life magazine sent Bourke-White and Caldwell to Czechoslovakia and Hungary to document the rise of Hitler and Nazism. Bourke-White and Caldwell spent about six months on various assignments, collecting material for the book later published as North of the Danube.
Bourke-White and Caldwell married in Silver City, Nevada, on February 27, 1939. Life sent Bourke-White to England to photograph the country’s preparations for war. She was then sent to Romania, Turkey, and the Middle East. Returning to the States, she and Caldwell embarked on a cross-country reunion trip, working together to document American life. They followed this up with a trip around the world. Bourke-White packed five cameras, twenty-two lenses, four portable developing tanks, and three thousand peanut flashbulbs. Her luggage weighed 600 pounds.
Moscow Bombing
They stopped in the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. When Germany attacked Moscow, bombing the Kremlin, Bourke-White was the only Western photographer in the city. Initially, she photographed the bombing of Moscow from the roof of the American embassy because the blackout wardens forced everyone underground during the raids. When the embassy was hit, she moved to the balcony of her hotel room.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection
As the balcony of her hotel room faced the Kremlin and Red Square, she set up multiple cameras on the balcony when the raids began, then rushed to the underground shelters. After the all-clear was given, she returned to close the shutters and develop the film in the bathroom. For twenty-two nights, Bourke-White risked her life while photographing the raids and scooping every other publication. During that time, she also photographed Josef Stalin.
The War Years
Back in the United States, in 1941, the U.S. entered the war. Shortly after their return, Life sent Bourke-White back to England to photograph the American B-17 bombers headed for war. Caldwell asked for a divorce, which became final in 1942.
Bourke-White became the first female war correspondent accredited by the military. In 1942 LIFE Magazine negotiated with the Pentagon, which gave the magazine and the Air Force rights to any photographs she made. In another first, U.S. Air Force designed the first uniform for a female war correspondent for her. She was the first woman to accompany Air Force crews on bombing missions in 1942.
While crossing the Atlantic to North Africa, her transport ship, the SS Strathallan, was torpedoed and sunk. She escaped with others on a lifeboat, continuing to photograph her ordeal with her Rolleiflex, the one camera she managed to save. Rescued, she covered the Allied infantrymen during the Italian war’s end. While in Italy, she repeatedly came under fire. She then covered the siege of Moscow, and towards the war’s end, she crossed the Rhine River with General Patton’s Third Army.
Buchenwald
Margaret Bourke-white / Getty Images
Bourke-White photographed some of the most appalling scenes of the war. From Nazi officials and their families dead by suicide to a small Nazi work camp where the Jewish prisoners had been set on fire. She was with the army for the liberation of Buchenwald Concentration Camp two hours after the Nazi guards fled. Her photographs of the skeletal survivors and stacks of human bodies gave the world one of the first horrible views of what would come to be called the Holocaust. She distanced herself from the horrors she saw by concentrating on her photographs. Only later, developing her prints, did she acknowledge the horror she had observed. Her father was Jewish, a secret she kept from all but three or four close friends. After Germany’s surrender, she published Dear Fatherland, Rest Quietly: A Report Ovariousse Of Hitler’s Thousand Years. in 1946.
The Dear Fatherland book saturated with her anger, her hatred of Germany, her commitment to democratic ideas, and her despair over American indifference to the moral implications of the war”.
Vicky Goldberg, Margaret Bourke-White Biographer
India and Post War
In 1946, after World War II, she travelled to India. She became well known for her photographs of Dr Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, father of the modern Buddhist Movement, and India’s leader, Mahatma Gandhi, at the spinning wheel. Bourke-White also chronicled the violence that erupted at the partition of India and Pakistan. That division of the Indian subcontinent into Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan resulted in a mass migration10 million people fleeing for their lives. Sixty-six of Bourke-White’s photographs of the partition violence were included in a 2006 reissue of Singh’s 1956 novel about the disruption, Train to Pakistan. On Margaret’s last day in India, she met with Gandhi. Just a few hours later, on his way to evening prayer, he was assassinated.
Margaret Bourke-White—The LIFE Picture Collection/
Korean War
After two years in India, she went to Korea to photograph the American troops on the frontline. This would be one of her last major assignments for Life magazine. Bourke-White spent nine months in South Korea, travelling through the wilderness, surviving typhoons, gunfire, and ambushes, and photographing guerilla warfare. Finally, she returned home in January of 1953 with the powerful story of a Korean family she reunited with the son they had presumed dead for two years.
Margaret Bourke-White The LIFE Picture Collection
Later Life
While reporting the Korean War, she noticed a dull ache in her left leg and arm. When she returned to the U.S, she consulted a neurologist. A diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease followed in 1954. By 1957, despite physical therapy, she was unable to continue working. Nevertheless, she kept her illness a secret for fear of not being given any more Life assignments. She fought Parkinson’s for almost 20 years, enduring arduous rehabilitation therapy and two risky brain operations to halt the disease’s progress. Finally, in the summer of 1971, she fell and was taken to hospital.
Bourke-White lost her battle against Parkinson’s disease on August 27, 1971, aged 67. Over her life, she published 11 books and pioneered quality photojournalism and photo essay. The International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum inducted her in 1990, followed by the Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame in 2015.
Henri Cartier-Bresson was a French photographer considered the founding father of photojournalism. He was also one of the first true street photographers using 35 mm film and pioneering the genre of street photography. He viewed photography as capturing a decisive moment. The “decisive moment” refers to capturing a fleeting and spontaneous event, where the image represents the essence of the event itself.
“I suddenly understood that a photograph could fix eternity in an instant.“
~Henri Cartier Bresson~
The Early Years
Cartier-Bresson was born on August 22, 1908, at Chanteloup, near Paris. His father was a respected and wealthy textile merchant, and he was given a strict Roman Catholic education. Cartier-Bresson’s uncle was an accomplished painter, and under his influence, he studied in Paris with Cubist painter and sculptor Andre Lhote from 1927-28. In 1929 Cartier-Bresson studied literature and painting at the University of Cambridge. While, as a young boy, he had used a Box Brownie, it wasn’t until 1930, after seeing the work of Eugene Atget and Man Ray, that he took a serious interest in photography.
In 1931, during a year on the Ivory Coast, he began recording his experiences. While on the Ivory Coast, he contracted blackwater fever (a form of malaria). Fearing he was dying, he sent a letter home instructing his grandfather to bury him in Normandy while Debussy’s String Quartet was played. His uncle replied his grandfather “finds it expensive and prefers that you return home first”. Fortunately, Cartier-Bresson recovered.
The Unseen Photographer
In 1932 Cartier-Bresson purchased his first 35mm Leica. The small size appealed to him, as he wished to remain silent and unseen when taking photographs. To become even more anonymous in the scene, he covered the bright silver parts of the camera with black tape to make it even less visible. On occasion, he even hid the camera under a handkerchief. Throughout his life, Cartier-Bresson mainly stuck to three fixed lenses – 35mm, 50mm and 135mm.
Between 1932 and 1935, he travelled throughout Eastern Europe, Spain and Mexico. In 1932 Cartier-Bresson took two of his most famous images – The cyclist caught gliding down a cobbled hill at the base of some stone steps in Hyères and The man jumping over a puddle behind the Gare Saint-Lazare.
His first photojournalism images were published in 1937 when, under assignment from the French weekly Regards, he covered the coronation of King George IV and Queen Elizabeth. However, Cartier-Bresson photographed the crowds and people, not taking a single image of the King and Queen. Also, that year, he married a Javanese dancer named Ratna Mohini. They divorced 30 years later.
The War years
Cartier-Bresson joined the French Army’s photographic unit at the outbreak of WWII as a corporal. His work, at this time, involved filming and photographing artillery fire, road bombardments and troop movements. However, in 1940, he was taken prisoner by the Germans. After three attempts, he escaped in 1943 and returned to France with forged papers.
Before being captured, he had buried his beloved Leica on a farm in France near the Vosges mountains. So one of the first things he did after escaping was to return to the farm, dig up his camera, and return to Paris to join the resistance. Finally, after four years of occupation, on August 19, 1944, French Resistance forces and Allied troops began their liberation of Paris. Robert Capa, Henri Cartier-Bresson and George Rodger (who would come to be three of the four founders of Magnum Photos) were all there recording the retreat. They documented the historic scenes as the city transformed from a place of oppression to one of freedom.
Founding Magnum
In 1945, Cartier-Bresson and the U.S. photographer Robert Capa, David Seymour and Ernst Haas founded the photographers’ cooperative Magnum Photos. The photographers owned the rights to their images, a novel concept at the time. Under the umbrella of Magnum, Cartier-Bresson concentrated more than ever on photojournalism. He travelled through India, China, Indonesia, and Egypt.
“Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organisation of forms which give that event its proper expression.”
~Henri Cartier-Bresson~
Like Margaret Bourke-White, he was in India to photograph India’s independence from Britain. While there, he photographed Mahatma Gandhi barely 15 minutes before Gandhi was assassinated. The material from those years, plus Europe in the 1950s, became the subjects of several books published between 1952 and 1956. These publications cemented Cartier-Bresson’s reputation as a master of his craft.
Fame and Glory
In 1955, France honoured him when a retrospective exhibition of 400 of his photographs was held at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. The show then travelled through Europe, the United States, and Japan. At the end of the exhibition, the photographs were consigned to the Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library) in Paris for posterity. He was also awarded the Overseas Press Club Award and Prix de la Societe Francaise de Photographie.
In 1963 he travelled to and photographed in Cuba, followed by Mexico in 1964 and India in 1965. Then, during the student revolt in Paris in May 1968, he was there with his 35-mm camera. In 1966, after being a photographer for 30 years, he left Magnum and gave up the camera. For the rest of his life, he concentrated on landscapes and portraiture, but with a pen and paintbrush. In 1967 he married Magnum photographer Martine Franck, and the couple had one daughter, Melanie.
“I have always been passionate about painting,” writes Cartier-Bresson. “As a child, I painted on Thursdays and Sundays, and dreamed about it every other day.”
~Henri Cartier-Bresson~
FRANCE. Paris. 1992.
Cartier-Bresson died in Montjustin (Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, France) on August 3, 2004, aged 95. No cause of death was announced. His wife, Martine Cartier-Besson, passed away in 2012 from Leukemia.
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.
Gift of Paul S. 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
Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress prints and photographs division, Washington D.C. 20540 USA
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
