Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange (born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn; May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

Lange's photographs influenced the development of documentary photography and humanized the consequences of the Great Depression.

Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey to second-generation German immigrants Johanna Lange and Heinrich Nutzhorn.

She had a younger brother named Martin.

Two early events shaped Lange's path as a photographer.

First, at age seven she contracted polio, which left her with a weakened right leg and a permanent limp.

"It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me," Lange once said of her altered gait.

"I've never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it."

Second, five years later, her father abandoned the family, prompting a move from suburban New Jersey to a poorer neighborhood in New York City.

Later she dropped her father's family name and took her mother's maiden name.

Growing up on Manhattan's Lower East Side, she attended PS 62 on Hester Street, where she was "one of the only gentiles—quite possibly the only—in a class of 3,000 Jews."

"Left on her own while her mother worked, Lange wandered the streets of New York, fascinated by the variety of people she saw. She learned to observe without intruding, a skill she would later use as a documentary photographer."

Lange graduated from the Wadleigh High School for Girls, New York City; by this time, even though she had never owned or operated a camera, she had already decided that she would become a photographer.

Lange began her study of photography at Columbia University under the tutelage of Clarence H. White, and later gained informal apprenticeships with several New York photography studios, including that of Arnold Genthe.

In 1918, Lange left New York with a female friend intending to travel the world, but her plans were disrupted upon being robbed.

She settled in San Francisco where she found work as a 'finisher' in a photographic supply shop.

There, Lange became acquainted with other photographers and met an investor who backed her in establishing a successful portrait studio.

In 1920, she married the noted western painter Maynard Dixon, with whom she had two sons, Daniel, born in 1925, and John, born in 1930.

Lange's studio business supported her family for the next fifteen years.

Lange's early studio work mostly involved shooting portrait photographs of the social elite in San Francisco.

But at the onset of the Great Depression, she turned her lens from the studio to the street.

During the decade of the 1930s some 300,000 men, women, and children migrated west to California, hoping to find work.

Broadly, these migrant families were called by the opprobrium "Okies" (as from Oklahoma) regardless of where they came from.

They traveled in old, dilapidated cars or trucks, wandering from place to place to follow the crops.

Lange began to photograph these luckless folk, leaving her studio to document their lives in the streets and roads of California.

She roamed the byways with her camera, portraying the extent of the social and economic upheaval of the Depression.

It is here that Lange found her purpose and direction as a photographer.

She was no longer a portraitist; but neither was she a photojournalist.

Instead, Lange became known as one of the first of a new kind, a "documentary" photographer.

In the depths of the worldwide depression, in 1933, some fourteen million people in the U.S. were out of work; many were homeless, drifting aimlessly, often without enough food to eat.

In the midwest and southwest, drought and dust storms added to the economic havoc.

Lange's photographic studies of the unemployed and homeless—starting with White Angel Breadline (1933), which depicted a lone man facing away from the crowd in front of a soup kitchen run by a widow known as the White Angel —captured the attention of local photographers and media, and eventually led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

Lange developed personal techniques of talking with her subjects while working, putting them at ease and enabling her to document pertinent remarks to accompany the photography.

The titles and annotations often revealed personal information about her subjects.

Lange and Dixon divorced on October 28, 1935, and on December 6 she married economist Paul Schuster Taylor, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

For the next five years they traveled through the California coast and the midwest.

Throughout their travels they documented rural poverty, in particular the exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers.

Taylor interviewed subjects and gathered economic data while Lange produced photographs and accompanying data.

They lived and worked from Berkeley for the rest of her life.

Working for the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration, Lange's images brought to public attention the plight of the poor and forgotten—particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers.