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 expressed her photographic image interest as the "last ditch:" documenting the poor and dispossessed. Her Migrant Mother image taken in 1936 has become the defining image of the Dust Bowl and is on display at the Art Institute of Chicago. Lange taught fine art photography in her later years at California School of Fine Arts.
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.
In the depths of the worldwide depression, in 1933, some fourteen million people in the U.S. were out of work, about 300,00 of which migrated to California looking for 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. Broadly, these migrant families were called by the opprobrium "Okies" (derived from Oklahoma) regardless of where they came from. They traveled in old, dilapidated cars or trucks, following crops.
Lange began to photograph these people, 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 one of the first of a new kind of photographer, a "documentary photographer."
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. Lange's work was distributed to newspapers across the country, and the poignant images became icons of the era.
One of Lange's most recognized works is Migrant Mother, published in 1936. Lange drove past a encampment of pea-pickers in Nipomo, California on her way home from weeks of traveling and photographing. Something made her turn around and drive back. This is where she took the photograph. The woman in the picture is Florence Owens Thompson. 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.
Lange reported the conditions at the camp to the editor of a San Francisco newspaper, showing him her photographs. The editor informed federal authorities and published an article that included some of the images. In response, the government rushed aid to the camp to prevent starvation.
According to Thompson's son, while Lange got some details of the story wrong, the impact of the photograph came from an image that projected both the strengths and needs of migrant workers. Twenty-two of Lange's photographs produced for the FSA were included in John Steinbeck's The Harvest Gypsies when it was first published in 1936 in The San Francisco News. Lange's photos served as inspiration for the 1940 film adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath. According to an essay by photographer Martha Rosler, Migrant Mother became the most reproduced photograph in the world.
In 1941, Lange became the first woman to be awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for Photography. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the fellowship in order to go on assignment for the War Relocation Authority (WRA) to document the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans from the west coast of the US.