*** Photographers: Dorthea Lange








Photographers: Dorthea Lange (United States, 1895-1965)

Dorthea Lange
Figure 1.-- Lange's photography put faces to the Depression. She took photographs of the men women and children whose lives were affected by the Depression. Those of the mothers and children are probably the most enduring images of the Depression. Here we see a migratory boy in a squatter camp. His family has come to Yakima Valley for the third year to pick hops. His mother told Lange, "You'd be surprised what that boy can pick." We do not know the boy's name or the future he made for himself after the Drpression.

Dorothea Lange is certainly one of America's greatest documentary photographers. Along with Mathew Brady and Lewis Hein, we would put her at the pinacle of American photo journalism. The three worked at different times. As a young woman she planned to be a teacher, one of the few professions available to women. She attended the New York Training School for Teachers (1914-17). While there she changed her mind and decided to become a photographer. Photographer Arnold Genthe influenced her. She signed up for a photography course taught by Clarence H. White at Columbia University. Lange moved to San Francisco (1918). She she set up a portrait studio (1919) and it proved sucessful. One of here best known works during this period is the Clayburgh Children. Although sucessful, she began to see studio photograpjy somewhat boring (late-1920s). She began experimenting with landscape and plant photography, but the results were not what she was after. After the Stock Market crash (1929). Lange decided to begin working with documentary pgotography. Lange is the most famous of the photographers that worked to document the impact of the Depression on ordinary Americans. She captured renounded images of rural America, including share cropers and migrant farm workers, affected by a killer combination of the Drepression and Dust Bowl. She photographed the General Strike in San Francisco (1934). That helped her earn her first one-woman show at the Brockhurst Studio of Willard Van Dyke in Oakland, California (1934). In that same year she met economist Paul Schuster Taylor, under whom she began working for the California State Emergency Relief Administration (1935). She moved to the Resettlement Administration, set up to deal with the problem of the migration of agricultural workers as part of the New Deal. She was one of the noted New Deal photographers, specifically the U.S. Farm Security Administration (FSA). Many of her imdividual photographs are master pieces. And certainly some of the most moving Depression images. She took many powerful photographs of the Oakies espcaping the Dust Bowl and migrating west to California. They survived under dreadful conditions in camps set up there. Her photographs appeared in mass circulation magazines like Life and today are the images of the Great Depression that vividly convey the reality of that economic disaster. Her images vividly depict the impact of the Depression, but unfortunately not what caused it. In 1939, she phographed a country store in North Carolina. Lange later worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). She is particularly know for her photographs of the Japanese Americans intened during World War II. 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 1962-63, 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. >










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Created: 5:18 AM 4/26/2015
Last updated: 5:33 PM 3/8/2024