(b Hoboken, NJ, 26 May 1895; d Marin County, CA, 11 Oct 1965). American photographer. From 1914 to 1917 she attended the New York Training School for Teachers and there decided to become a photographer, partly influenced by visits to the photographer Arnold Genthe. From 1917 to 1918 she attended a photography course run by Clarence H. White at Columbia University, NY. Lange moved to San Francisco in 1918, and in 1919 she set up a successful portrait studio where she took works such as Clayburgh Children, San Francisco (1924; Oakland, CA, Mus.). In the late 1920s she became dissatisfied with studio work and experimented with landscape and plant photography, although she found the results unsatisfactory. With the Stock Market crash of 1929 Lange decided to look for subjects outside her studio. Turning to the effects of the economic decline she took photographs such as General Strike, San Francisco (1934; Oakland, CA, Mus.). She had her first one-woman show at the Brockhurst Studio of Willard Van Dyke in Oakland, CA (1934), and in the same year met the economist Paul Schuster Taylor, under whom she worked for the California State Emergency Relief Administration in 1935. Later that year she transferred to the Resettlement Administration, set up to deal with the problem of the migration of agricultural workers. She continued to work for this body, through its various transformations (including its time as the Farm Security Administration), until 1942. One of her most famous photographs from this project is Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936; Washington, DC, Lib. Congr.), which depicts an anxious, distracted mother and three children. In 1939, in collaboration with Taylor, who provided the text, she published An American Exodus, which dealt with the same social problems. In 1941 she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, and this allowed her to take a series of photographs of religious groups in the USA, such as those of the Amish people (1941; Oakland, CA, Mus.). In 1942 she worked for the War Relocation Authority and from 1943 to 1945 for the Office of War Information in San Francisco. Illness prevented her working from 1945 to 1951, after which she produced photographs of the Mormons and of rural life in Ireland for articles in Life in 1954 and 1955. In 1958-9 she worked with Taylor in East Asia and in 1960 accompanied him to South America. She worked in Egypt and the Middle East in 1962-3, producing such photographs as Procession Bearing Food to the Dead, Upper Egypt (1963; Oakland, CA, Mus.) in the detached, documentary style that characterizes all her work.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

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Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) was one of the best of the American photographers who used their art to document, and ultimately to alleviate, the human suffering caused by the Great Depression of the 1930s. As she viewed it, photography was not an end in itself, but a means of exploring the world so as to improve it.

Born of second generation German immigrants on May 26, 1895, in Hoboken, New Jersey, Dorothea Lange was named Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn at birth. She dropped her middle name and assumed her mother's maiden name after her father abandoned the family, one of two traumatic incidents in her early life. The other was her contraction of polio at age seven which left her lame throughout her life.

She attended public schools in New York City and from 1914 through 1917 was enrolled in the New York Training School for Teachers. At about this time she decided to become a professional photographer.

Lange worked in the photography studios of Arnold Gen the and Charles H. Davis and attended Clarence H. White's photography class at Columbia University before moving to San Francisco, where she established a portrait studio in 1919. In 1920 she married Maynard Dixon, a painter. They were divorced in 1935.

Her successful portrait business came to an end during the Depression, as she turned her attention to people caught in the trap of desperate poverty by a combination of a collapsed economy, natural disasters, and technological obsolescence. One of her best known pictures, the first to become widely recognized, was "White Angel Breadline" (1932), made outside her studio in San Francisco. A crowd of recently unemployed men are shown waiting for a handout; the centerpiece is a single figure of an elderly man hunched over a railing, holding a cup between his hands. The picture became one of the earliest of the decade to illustrate the plight of American lives disrupted by economic hardship.

Some of her work was exhibited at the Oakland studio of photographer Willard Van Dyke, who also wrote about her pictures in Camera Craft. At about the same time she began an association with Paul S. Taylor, a University of California sociologist and economist who began to use her work to accompany his studies of populations displaced by hard times. They were married in 1935, shortly after her divorce from Dixon, and collaborated on An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939).

As a result of the growing recognition of the quality of her work in 1935, Lange was invited by Roy Stryker to join the photography unit of the federally sponsored Resettlement Administration (soon to be named FSA, the well-known Farm Security Administration), under Stryker's direction. The small group of photographers, which included such notables as Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn, remained in existence until 1942, when it was transferred to the Office of War Information. Some of Dorothea Lange's finest work, including the famous "Migrant Mother" (1936), was produced for FSA.

During World War II she was hired by the War Relocation Authority to document the internment of Japanese-Americans for the duration of the war. The work done in the camps was not seen publicly until years later in the exhibition and book by Maisie and Richard Conrat, Executive Order 9066 (1972). Lange also worked in the Office of War Information, her photographs appearing uncredited in Victory magazine.

In 1945 she photographed the United Nations Conference in San Francisco for the State Department; did assignments for LIFE magazine, including "Three Mormon Towns" (1954) and "The Irish Country People" (1955); and recorded "Death of a Valley" (1960) for Aperture. Her career was crowned at the end of her life with a retrospective exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art, which was shown in 1966, after her death from cancer in 1965.

Dorothea Lange was comfortable with everyone that she encountered, but particularly with the down-and-outers, the silent and invisible population suffering from circumstances beyond their understanding or control. Such people trusted her, and she viewed and exhibited them with compassion and respect. Her ease with subjects, dedication to the improvement of their lot, and mastery of her chosen form of communication help place her work among the most enduring of its kind.

Further Reading

The most extensive and authoritative study of Lange's life and work is Milton Melter's engrossing Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life (1978). Dorothea Lange also appears in Notable American Women (1980). The Museum of Modern Art publication that accompanied the exhibition of her work at the end of her life provides a cross-section of her production, which is explicated with an introduction by George P. Elliot. For a good example of her activities during the 1930s, see An American Exodus (1939), which she co-authored with Paul S. Taylor.

For more information on Dorothea Lange, visit Britannica.com.

Lange, Dorothea (1895-1965), American documentary photographer, who studied photography at Columbia University and worked as an assistant to Arnold Genthe before beginning a photographic trip around the world in 1918. When she ran out of funds in San Francisco, she remained, opened a photographic studio, and during the early 1930s began photographing homeless rural people flooding into the city from the Dust Bowl exodus. Her photographs brought her to the attention of Paul Taylor, an economist at California University, who hired her to create a documentary record to accompany his report on agricultural conditions for the California State Relief Administration, and subsequently married her. When Roy Stryker saw these images, he hired her as a staff photographer for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), for which she worked sporadically as Stryker's budget allowed 1935-9. During this period, she made many of her best-known photographs, including the image known as Migrant Mother (1936). She later also photographed for the San Francisco branch of the Office of War Information, 1943-5, recording the internment of Japanese-Americans and the founding of the United Nations. In 1954-5 she was a photographer for Life magazine, afterwards travelling extensively and producing photographic essays on Ireland, Egypt, and Asia.

Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother (Prairie Mother), 1936

— Constance B. Schulz

Bibliography

• Meltzer, M., and Lange, D., Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life (2000).
• Borhan, P., Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer (2002)

(1895-1965), photographer. Lange's pictures of migrant families dramatized the plight of agricultural workers during the Great Depression and lent support for New Deal legislation.

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, she early decided on a photography career and worked for portrait photographer Arnold Genthe before studying for a year with pictorialist Clarence White at Columbia University. She settled in San Francisco, married an artist, and opened a chic photography studio in 1919. Ten years later, while walking alone one day in the California hills, a sudden violent storm provoked a spiritual crisis. "It came to me that what I had to do," she recalled later, "was concentrate on people, all kinds of people, people who paid me and people who didn't." Within months, after the stock market crash, she began by turning her camera on the plight of the uprooted, homeless, and unemployed.

Drawn first to the streets of San Francisco, Lange was hired to photograph migrant workers for California's Emergency Relief Administration. She also joined such photographers as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston in the f.64 group, so named because members used the smallest possible lens opening to obtain depth and sharpness in their pictures. By 1935, her photographs came to the attention of Roy Stryker, then organizing his celebrated photographic section of the Resettlement (later Farm Security) Administration in Washington. Photographer and artist Ben Shahn recalled later that "Dorothea's work was sent in or brought in by somebody and this was a revelation, what this woman was doing." Lange soon joined Shahn, Walker Evans, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, and others in the organization. Their photographs marked the first time in American history that the government used art directly for propaganda purposes. Newspapers, magazines, exhibition rooms, and movie theaters were encouraged to display these images. Some 250,000 of their negatives are preserved in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

Lange later photographed the internment of U.S. Japanese-Americans and contributed photo-essays to Life magazine (where she was known as "Bourke-White West," referring to photojournalist Margaret Bourke-White). Although plagued by ill health, she traveled to Ireland, Asia, Egypt, and South America after World War II.

Her biographer David Scherman described Lange as "endowed with most of the acceptable stigmata of the certified genius, photography division." She was also, he contended, "alternately (but always theatrically) kindhearted and inconsiderate, implacably egotistical, domineering, contentious, apparently humorless, self-analytical ad nauseum," and "hardworking to the point of exhaustion." For Lange, her mission was the thing. "Among the tools of social science--graphs, statistics, maps, and text--documentation by photograph," she wrote in 1940, "now is assuming place." Documentary photography, she added, "invites and needs participation by amateurs as well as by professionals. Only through the interested work of amateurs who choose themes and follow them can documentation by the camera of our age and our complex society be intimate, pervasive, and adequate."

Bibliography:

Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life (1978); Karin Ohrn, Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition (1980).

Author:

William Welling

See also Photography.

1895–1965, American photographer, b. Hoboken, N.J. From 1916 until 1932, Lange operated a portrait studio. During the Depression she took her camera into the streets of San Francisco where she began to make exceptionally powerful images of people, which speak of the time and the world in which they were made; among the best known of these is White Angel Breadline (1933). During the 1930s, the state of California commissioned a report on the way of life of migrant laborers. Lange made the report in collaboration with her future husband, Paul Taylor, an economics professor. Lange's photographs emphasized the laborer's dignity and pride in an environment of starkest poverty. The report resulted in the establishment of state-built camps for migrants. From 1935 to 1942 she worked in the Farm Security Administration, documenting rural America. Her photographs were reproduced in thousands of magazines and newspapers, helping to create a national awareness of the farmers' plight and profoundly influencing American photojournalism by their simplicity and directness. At the outbreak of war with Japan, Lange documented the mass evacuation of Japanese-Americans to concentration camps. In 1945 she covered the United Nations Conference in San Francisco, and collapsed from overwork. She did not photograph again until 1951, when she began to travel, producing photo-essays for Life magazine, e.g., “Three Mormon Towns” (1954) and “The Irish Country People” (1955). Lange's books include An American Exodus (with Paul Taylor; 1939) and The American Country Woman (1966).

Quotes:

"The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera."

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