Dorothea Langeborn; May 26, 1895, Hoboken, New Jersey, U.S.

She was an American documentary photographer whose portraits of displaced

farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary and

journalistic photography.

Cam

era:

4x5

Gra

flex

RB

Ser

ies

D

1936

In 1913, Dorthea decides to become a photographer.

She trains under Arnold Genthe, most well known for his photographs of Chinatown and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.

Lange continues with her studies in photography at Columbia University

in New York City under Clarence H. White.

Clarence H. White, Self portrait Ring Toss, Clarence H. White

During the Great Depression, Lange began to photograph the unemployed men who wandered the streets of San Francisco; pictures such as White Angel Breadline (1932)

These photographs led to a commission in 1935 from the Federal Resettlement Administration, established by the U.S. Agriculture Department.

They hoped that Lange's powerful images would bring the conditions of the rural poor to the public's attention.

The photograph that has become known as "Migrant Mother" is one of a series of photographs that Dorothea

Lange made of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in February or March of 1936 in Nipomo, California.

“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.”

An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion.

“…and yet, even in the face of such fate I firmly believe that these people

retained their pride, resolution and courage.”

D. Lange, 1935

(left) “Ruby” from Tennessee, daughter of migrant worker living in American River camp near Sacramento, Nov1936

(above) Children in a Democracy. A migratory family living in a trailer in an open field. No sanitation, no water. They come from Amarillo, Texas. 1940

(Below) CocaCola baby bottle: Mother & children, Tulelake, Siskiyou County, CA

If Dorothea Lange was alive today, she

would probably be out in United

Nations Plaza, talking with and

photographing the homeless. Shy as

she was, Dorothea Lange was always

interested in people: either her rich

clients who sat for their portraits in

her early career, or the migrant

workers from Oklahoma she spent

time with in later years.

There were three rules to which Dorthea always adhered; “Whatever I photograph, I do not molest, tamper with or

arrange. Second; a sense of place. Whenever I photograph, I try to picture as part of it’s surroundings, as having roots.

Third; A sense of time…I try to show it as having it’s position in the past or the present.”

Between Weedpatch and Lamont , Kern County, California. Children living in a campBy Dorothea Lange, April 20, 1940

Olivehurst, Yuba County, California. One of the new settlers.

Left- Edison, Kern County, California. Potato picker, she is 52-years-old, has 8 children. Born in Tennessee, she lived and was married in Oklahoma, then came to California. Family became migratory agricultural workers and after four years settled in Kern County. She says, "I have a house and flowers." She and her husband work in the field at 35 cents an hour, 10 hours a day. This class of people is known to the present migratory workers as "locals." Right - Grayson, Stanislaus County, California. He came to California in 1936 from Albermarle County, Missouri. He is living in a self-built shack in Grayson, a shacktown community...He has a job working in hay on nearby ranch. His grandfather, who has four sons and two daughters, all of whom now live in California, says: "They wasn't raised to go chasin'. They was raised to stay home."

Country store (Dorothea Lange, 1939) Gordonton, North Carolina

Sharecropper kids, 1939

Dorthea came to the Relocation Administration with a sure sense of social justice and of how photography could reveal inequality.

In the early ‘40’s, yet another government agency, the U.S. Army’s Western Defense

Command, hired her to document the uprooting and incarceration

of the Japanese Americans.

Internment without Charges

She could not support the government’s actions. She was highly critical of what

she saw, and her photographs reflected those views.

Instead of circulating Lange’s photographs, the

government impounded them during the war, later slipping

them, without fanfare, into the National Archives.

American Oakland 1942: Japanese-American business owner forced to give up his store.

Lange took over 800 photographs of the evacuation and imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Included

are pictures of the California camp Manzanar. Because of the war departments

embarrassment over the debacle, few remain.

Due to the stark photographs of the victims of the Great Depression of the 1930s that were made by Dorothea Lange, she became a major influence on succeeding documentary and journalistic photographers. She has been called one of the greatest documentary photographers of the United States influencing such

successors as Lee Freidlander and Garry Winogrand.

Lee

Fre

idla

nder

Garry Winogrand “Women are Beautiful”

A quote by the Elizabethan writer Frances Bacon was pinned to her darkroom door;

“The contemplation of things as they are, without error or confusion, without substitution or

imposture, is in itself a nobler thing than a whole harvest of invention.”

After completing two years (1943-1944) with the Office of War Information and receiving a Guggenheim fellowship award , she and her partner and husband

Paul Taylor travel through Europe, Asia, Indonesia and Egypt,

Dorthea Lange dies in October of 1965 in her hometown, San Francisco, California.

Paul Taylor, one of Lange's last photographs

Bibliography

ArtStor. September 2011. http://www.artstor.org/index.shtml

BING Images. n.d. http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=dorthea+lange&view=detail&id=CF02359159F467E8628014F942219CD827CEBBC9&first=0&qpvt=dorthea+lange&FORM=IDFRIR

The History Place http://www.historyplace.com/unitedstates/lange/index.html

Freedom Voices Photolistwww.freedomvoices.org/pholist.htm

Marian, Mary Warner. Photography a cultural history. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 2002.

Stepan, Peter. 50 Photographers You Should Know. New York: Prestel Publishing, 2008.