Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange in 1936; photographer:
Born	May 25, 1895(1895-05-25) Hoboken, New Jersey
Died	October 11, 1965 (aged 70) San Francisco, California
Nationality	American
Field	Photography

Dorothea Lange (May 25, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, 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.

Biography

Born Dorothea Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey on May 25, 1895, she was the daughter of Joan Lange and Henry Nutzhorn.^[1][2] Dorothea developed polio in 1902, at age 7. Like many other polio victims before treatment was available, she emerged with a weakened and wizened right leg, and a permanent limp.^[2] When she was 12 years old, her father abandoned her and her mother, leading her to drop her middle and last names in lieu of her mother's maiden name.^[1][2]

Lange was educated in photography in New York City, in a class taught by Clarence H. White. She was informally apprenticed to several New York photography studios, including that of the famed Arnold Genthe. In 1918, she moved to San Francisco, and by the following year she had opened a successful portrait studio.^[3][2] She lived across the bay in Berkeley for the rest of her life. In 1920, she married the noted western painter Maynard Dixon, with whom she had two sons.^[4]

With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

In December 1935, she divorced Dixon and married agricultural economist Paul Schuster Taylor, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley.^[4] Taylor educated Lange in social and political matters, and together they documented rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers for the next five years — Taylor interviewing and gathering economic data, Lange taking photos.

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 to newspapers across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era.

Lange's Migrant Mother, Florence Owens Thompson

Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother". The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson, but Lange apparently never knew her name. The original photo had Florence's thumb and index finger on the tent pole, and was retouched in an attempt to hide Florence's thumb. Her index finger was left untouched (lower right in photo).

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.

According to Thompson's son, Lange got some details of this story wrong, but the impact of the picture was based on the image showing the strength and need of migrant workers.^[5]

Children at the Weill public school in San Francisco pledge allegiance to the American flag in April 1942, prior to the internment of Japanese Americans.

A Japanese American unfurled this banner the day after the Pearl Harbor attack; Lange photographed it in March 1942, just prior to the man's internment.

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 rounding up of Japanese Americans, their evacuation into temporary assembly centers, and Manzanar, the first of the permanent internment camps. To many observers, her photograph of Japanese-American children pledging allegiance to the flag shortly before they were sent to internment camps 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. Today her photographs of the internment are available in the National Archives on the website of the Still Photographs Division, and at the Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.

In 1945, Lange was invited by Ansel Adams to accept a position as faculty at the first fine art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts (CSFA). Imogen Cunningham and Minor White joined as well.^[6]

In 1952, Lange co-founded the photographic magazine Aperture. In the last two decades of her life, Lange's health was poor. She suffered from gastric problems, including bleeding ulcers, as well as post-polio syndrome — although this renewal of the pain and weakness of polio was not yet recognized by most physicians.

Death

Lange died of esophageal cancer on October 11, 1965, aged 70.^[4][7] She was survived by her second husband, Paul Taylor, two children, three stepchildren, and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Legacy

In 1972 the Whitney Museum used 27 of Lange's photographs in an exhibit entitled Executive Order 9066. This exhibit highlighted the Japanese Internment during World War 2.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced on May 28, 2008 that Lange will be inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts. The induction ceremony will take place December 15th and her son will accept the honor in her place.

References

Further reading

• Geoffrey Dunn, "Untitled Depression Documentary" 1980
• 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
• Gordon, Linda; Okihiro, Gary Y., eds. (2006), Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment, New York: W. W. Norton and Company, ISBN 0393330907 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Dorothea Lange

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Dorothea Lange

• Oakland Museum of California - Dorothea Lange
  • Online Archive of California: Guide to the Lange (Dorothea) Collection 1919-1965
• Gallery of all Lange FSA photographs at the Library of Congress
• Dorothea Lange - "A Photographers Journey" - Exhibition at Gendell Gallery
• 1964 oral history interview with Lange
• "Migrant Mother" as an iconic image -- excerpt from a book
• Article About Migrant Mother: The True Story
• The 'Other' Migrant Mother photograph
• Selection of photographs in the Victoria and Albert Museum's collection
• Dorothea Lange: “Fotógrafa del pueblo” en espagnol
• 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.
• 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 the Photography of Dorothea Lange, Edited by Ben Clarke, Freedom Voices, San Francisco, 1997

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