Dorothea Lange

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

Photographer

Early Years

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, as Dorothea Margeretta Nutzhorn, Lange early took her mother's maiden name. Disabled by the childhood polio that left her with a lifelong limp, Lange discovered her photographic vocation as she was finishing high school. She apprenticed herself to a series of Manhattan portrait photographers before moving to San Francisco in 1918 to embark on a career doing romantic photographic portraits. During the 1920s she made several long trips with her first husband, painter Maynard Dixon, to the Southwest to photograph.

A Change Wrought by Hardship

Dorothea Lange describes her transformative moment as occurring in 1932 when, from the studio where she sustained her portraiture business, she gazed out into the alley below and witnessed daily scenes of misery and poverty. "The discrepancy between what I was working on in my printing frames and what was going on in the street was more than I could assimilate. I knew that if my interest in people was valid, I would not only be doing what was going on in those printing frames," she wrote. Her first photograph in the documentary style that she was to hone to a fine art was titled "White Angel Breadline" (1932). She continued to photograph scenes of men on state relief, of street demonstrations, of the San Francisco waterfront strike of 1934, and had her first exhibit by Willard Van Dyke of Group f/46, who had a gallery in Oakland. The same year, in collaboration with Paul Taylor, a professor of labor economics and the field director of California's Federal Emergency Relief Agency (FERA) Rural Rehabilitation Division, who was to become her second husband, Lange made a study of the difficulties faced by the Dust Bowl migrants in California. Her photographs, while not referred to in the text, powerfully documented the misery of the workers. These efforts eventuated in her well-received book American Exodus (1939).

Farm Service Administration

Lange and Taylor's reports for FERA soon caught the attention of Roy Stryker, an economist for the Federal Resettlement Agency (FRA), and of the documentary filmmaker Pare Lorentz. Impressed, Lorentz invited Lange to shoot stills for a project on the creation of the Dust Bowl, The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). For his part, Stryker asked Lange to join his newly formed Farm Service Administration photographic division. By the end of 1935 Ben Shahn, Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, and Walker Evans had joined the staff, which, during the project's seven-year life, also included John Collier Jr., Russell Lee, John Vachon, Theodor Jung, Paul Carter, Jack Delano, and Marion Post Wolcott. Their task was to document not only the activities of the FRA, but American rural life in general. Lange's "Migrant Mother," a portrait of a dispossessed mother surrounded by her children, became the most widely reproduced of all FSA photos. Lange's photographs are notable for their respect for the integrity of the subject, their refusal to overly sentimentalize the poor, and their emotional complexity. Lange photographed California's Dust Bowl refugees, tenant farmers in the Mississippi delta, former slaves in Alabama, and Texas cotton pickers.

The 1940s and Beyond

Although she was let go by the FSA in 1939 as the project began to close, Lange was granted a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in 1941, which enabled her to create a series of photographs documenting life among three contrasting cooperative religious communities: the Mormons in Utah, the Amana Society in Iowa, and the Hutterites in South Dakota. Her deep concern about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II led her to document their lives in detention camps, work that eventuated in a 1972 book and traveling exhibit called Executive Order 9066. From this project Lange went on to work for the Office of War Information, creating photo stories about minority groups on the West Coast. Health problems interrupted her career in 1947; the work she did after this period was slightly less focused on specific social issues. She remained active until her death in 1965.

Sources:

Milton Meltzer, Dorothea Lange: A Photographer's Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978);

Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (Boston: Little, Brown, 1982);

William Stott, Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

Dorothea Lange 1895–1965, American photographer, b. Hoboken, N.J. From 1916 until 1932, Lange operated a portrait studio. During the Great 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, California commissioned a report on the way of life of migrant laborers, and Lange made the report in collaboration with her future husband, Paul Taylor, an economics professor. Her photographs emphasized the laborers' 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. One of the most famous images from this period is her iconic Migrant Mother, photographed in California in 1936. 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).

Bibliography: See biographies by M. Meltzer (2000) and L. Gordon (2009); studies by K. E. Becker (1980), P. Borhan, ed. (2002), R. Coles (2005), and A. W. Spirn (2009).

Lange, Dorothea (1895–1965) US photographer. Lange's portraits of urban poor and migrant labourers in California during the Great Depression, and her images of rural America taken for the Farm Security Administration (1935–42), are classics of documentary photography.