Dorothea Lange

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Dorothea Lange in 1936; photographer: Paul S. Taylor

Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential documentary photographer. Lange is best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography.

Born in Hoboken New Jersey, Lange developed polio at age 7, in 1902. Unlike so many other victims, in this age before any treatment was available, she emerged with a weakened and wizened right leg and dropped foot. Although she compensated well for her disability, she always limped and she believed that her disability was the most important influence on her character.

Lange learned photography in New York City in a class taught by Clarence H. White, and informally apprenticed herself to several New York photography studios, including that of the famed Arnold Genthe. In 1918 she migrated to San Francisco where she opened an extremely successful portrait studio, and she lived in the bay area for the rest of her life. She married the noted western painter Maynard Dixon with whom she had two sons, Daniel Dixon, born 1925, and John Dixon, born 1928. With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street.

Her searing studies of the unemployed and the homeless immediately captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration. In 1935 she divorced Dixon and married progressive agricultural economist Paul Schuster Taylor, Professor of Economics at the University of California Berkeley. Taylor was responsible for a great deal of Lange's education in social and political matters, and they worked together documenting rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers for the next five years--Taylor interviewing and gathering economic data, Lange photographing.

From 1935 to 1939, 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 of charge to newspapers across the country, her poignant images quickly became icons of the era.

This photograph, known as Migrant Mother, is probably Dorothea Lange's most famous. It depicts destitute pea pickers in California, centering on a mother of seven children, age thirty-two, in Nipomo, California, March 1936. The woman in the picture is Florence Owens Thompson, whose husband and sons had gone to get help for their broken down car.

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.

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 (Nisei) to relocation camps in the American West, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). She covered the round-up of Japanese Americans, their evacuation into temporary assembly centers, and Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps. Her photograph of young Japanese American girls pledging allegiance to the flag shortly before she was abducted to the camps [3] is a haunting reminder of this policy of detaining people without charging them with any crime or affording them any appeal.

Her images were so obviously critical that the Army impounded them.[2] Today her approximately 800 photographs of the internment are available in the National Archives. These photographs are available on the website of the Still Photographs Division of the National Archives, and duplicate set of prints exists at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1947 Lange was part of the group that founded the photo agency Magnum, and in 1952 she was one of the founders of the distinguished photographic magazine Aperture.

In the last two decades of her life, Lange's health was poor. She suffered from bleeding ulcers and from post-polio syndrome--although this renewal of the pain and weakness of polio was not yet recognized by most physicians. She died on October 11, 1965, at the age of seventy.

References

Milton Meltzer, "Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life," New York, 1978; Linda Gordon, "Dorothea Lange," "Encyclopedia of the Depression;" Linda Gordon, "Paul Schuster Taylor," "American National Biography;" Linda Gordon and Gary Okihiro, "Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment."

2 [Civil Control Station, Registration for evacuation and processing. San Francisco, April 1942. War Relocation Authority, Photo By Dorothea Lange,From the National Archive and Records Administration taken for the War Relocation Authority courtesy of the Bancroft Library, U.C. Berkeley, California. Published in Image and Imagination, Encounters with the Photography of Dorothea Lange, Edited by Ben Clarke, Freedom Voices, San Francisco, 1997]

3 [Pledge of allegiance at Rafael Weill Elementary School a few weeks prior to evacuation, April, 1942. N.A.R.A.; 14GA-78 From the National Archive and Records Administration taken for the War Relocation Authority courtesy of the Bancroft Library. Published in Image and Imagination, Encounters with the Photography of Dorothea Lange, Edited by Ben Clarke, Freedom Voices, San Francisco, 1997]

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