Tag:the great plains

DOROTHEA LANGE (1895-1965). American photographer. Photograph by Paul Taylor, 1934

Dorothea Lange – The First Photojournalist

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.

​Ex-Slave with a long memory​, 1938 The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor
​Ex-Slave with a long memory​, 1938 The Dorothea Lange Collection, the Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland.
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.   

Dorothea Lange. Employment Agency, San Francisco. 1937
Dorothea Lange. Employment Agency, San Francisco. 1937
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.

“White Angel Breadline,” San Francisco, California, 1933. Photo: Dorothea Lange

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.  

Family walking on highway, five children. Started from Idabel, Oklahoma. Bound for Krebs, Oklahoma. Pittsburg County, Oklahoma. In 1936 the father farmed on thirds and fourths at Eagleton, McCurtain County, Oklahoma. Was taken sick with pneumonia and lost farm. Unable to get work on Work Projects Administration and refused county relief in county of fifteen years residence because of temporary residence in another county after his illness.
Family with five children walking on the highway. In 1936 the father farmed at Eagleton, McCurtain County, Oklahoma. He was taken sick with pneumonia and lost the farm. Unable to get work in Work Projects Administration and refused county relief in the county of fifteen years of residence because of temporary home in another county after his illness, by Dorothea Lange
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.

Shantytown in the 1930s - Dorothea Lange
Migrant workers camp on the outskirts of Marysville, California
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.

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, photograph by Dorothea Lange, 1936; in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (neg. no. LC-DIG-fsa-8b29516)
Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

“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
Original caption: Oakland, Calif., Mar. 1942. A large sign reading'I am an American' placed in the window of a store, at 13th and Franklin streets, on December 8, the day after Pearl Harbor. The store was closed following orders for persons of Japanese descent to evacuate from certain West Coast areas. The owner, a University of California graduate, will be housed with hundreds of evacuees in War Relocation Authority centres for the duration of the war. CREDIT DOROTHEA LANGE/LIBRARY OF CONGRESS PRINTS AND PHOTOGRAPHS DIVISION WASHINGTON, D.C. 20540 USA
Original caption: Oakland, Calif., Mar. 1942. A large sign reading ‘I am an American’ was placed in the window of a store, at 13th and Franklin streets, on December 8, the day after Pearl Harbor. The store was closed following orders for persons of Japanese descent to evacuate from certain West Coast areas. The owner, a University of California graduate, was housed with hundreds of evacuees in War Relocation Authority centres for the duration of the war.
Dorothea Lange/Library of Congress prints and photographs division, Washington D.C. 20540 USA
A grandfather and his grandson at the Manzanar Relocation Center. Photo by Dorothea Lange.
A grandfather and his grandson at the Manzanar Relocation Center. Photo by Dorothea Lange.
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. 

Enforcement of Executive Order 9066. Japanese children made to wear identification tags, Hayward, California, 1942. Photo by Dorothea Lange.
Enforcement of Executive Order 9066. Japanese children made to wear identification tags, Hayward, California, 1942. Photo by Dorothea Lange.

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.

Jane Yanagi held her mother’s hand on the way to an assembly center at a racetrack; her mother bore a son in a horse stall. Dorothea Lange
Jane Yanagi held her mother’s hand on the way to an assembly centre at a racetrack; her mother bore a son in a horse stall. Dorothea Lange
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.

Damaged Child, Shacktown, Elm Grove, Oklahoma, 1936, by Dorothea Lange
Family of Man Exhibition: Damaged Child, Shacktown, Elm Grove, Oklahoma, 1936, by Dorothea Lange
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

Dorothea Lange preparing for her one-woman career retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in her home studio, Berkeley, California, 1964. Photo: ©1964, 2014 Rondal Partridge Archives
Dorothea Lange preparing for her one-woman career retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in her home studio, Berkeley, California, in 1964. Photo: ©1964, 2014 Rondal Partridge Archives
Dorothea Lange 1895-1965
Dorothea Lange 1895-1965
© Bevlea Ross