Dorothea Lange

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(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.

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.

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.

Quotes:

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

For other uses, see Lange.

Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange in 1936
Born	May 26, 1895(1895-05-26) Hoboken, New Jersey
Died	October 11, 1965 (aged 70) San Francisco, California
Nationality	American
Field	Photography

Dorothea Lange (May 26, 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.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Death 3 Legacy 4 References 5 Further reading 6 External links

Biography

Born Dorothea Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey on May 26, 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 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 and adopt 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.^[2][3] 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] One, born in 1925, was named Daniel Rhoades Dixon. The second child, born in 1929, was named John Eaglesfeather Dixon.^{[citation needed]}

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 1936, Migrant Mother, Florence Owens Thompson

Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother". The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson. The original photo featured Florence's thumb and index finger on the tent pole, but the image was later retouched 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 to relocation camps, on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). She covered the rounding up of Japanese Americans and their internment in relocation camps, highlighting 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.^[6]

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.^[7]

In 1952, Lange co-founded the photographic magazine Aperture. Lange and Pirkle Jones were commissioned in the mid-1950s to shoot a photographic documentary for Life magazine of the death of Monticello, California and of the displacement of its residents by the damming of Putah Creek to form Lake Berryessa. The magazine did not run the piece, so Lange devoted one whole issue of Aperture to the work. The photo collection was shown at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960.^[8]

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, age 70.^[4][9] 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 II.

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 took place on December 15 and her son accepted the honor in her place.

References

1. ^ ^{a b} Lurie, Maxine N. and Mappen, Marc. Encyclopedia of New Jersey. 2004, page 455
2. ^ ^{a b c d} Vaughn, Stephen L. Encyclopedia of American Journalism. 2008, page 254
3. ^ "Dorothea Lange". NARA. http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/picturing_the_century/text/port_lange_text.html. Retrieved 2008-06-29. "Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) announced her intention to become a photographer at age 18. After apprenticing with a photographer in New York City, she moved to San Francisco and in 1919 established her own studio." 
4. ^ ^{a b c} Oliver, Susan (2003-12-07). "Dorothea Lange: Photographer of the People". 
5. ^ Dunne, Geoffrey (2002). "Photographic license". New Times. http://web.archive.org/web/20020602103656/http://www.newtimes-slo.com/archives/cov_stories_2002/cov_01172002.html#top. 
6. ^ Davidov, Judith Fryer. Women's Camera Work. 1998, page 280
7. ^ Vernacular Language North. SF Bay Area Timeline. Modernism (1930-1960)
8. ^ BellaVistaRanch.net. Suisun History. Nancy Dingler, Part 3 - Fifty years since the birth of the Monticello Dam. Retrieved on August 17, 2009.
9. ^ "Dorothea Lange Is Dead at 70. Chronicled Dust Bowl Woes. Photographer for 50 Years Took Notable Pictires of 'Oakies' Exodus.". New York Times. October 14, 1965. http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10B12F73554177A93C6A8178BD95F418685F9&scp=4&sq=Dorothea+Lange&st=p. Retrieved 2008-06-29. 

Further reading

• Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor, "An American Exodus. A record of Human Erosion", facsimile of the original edition, Sam Stourdzé (ed.), Paris: Edition Jean Michel Place, 1999, ISBN 9782858935130
• Anne Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field, University of Chicago Press, 2008, ISBN 9780226316062
• Sam Stourdze (ed.), "Dorothea Lange, The Human Face", Paris: NBC Editions, 1998
• Geoffrey Dunn, "Untitled Depression Documentary" 1980
• Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life New York, 1978, ISBN 9780815606222
• 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 on The California Museum's California Legacy Trails
• 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 español
• 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
• [1], Illustrated Article on Quazen, 'Photographic Equality: Dorothea Lange, Her Migrant Mother, and the Nisei Internees,' Written by David J. Marcou; Article First Published Oct. 2009.

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