Dorothea Lange, [May 26, 1895 to October 11, 1965].... [was an] American documentary photographer whose portraits of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary and journalistic photography.
Lange studied photography at Columbia University in New York City under Clarence H. White, a member of the Photo-Secession group. In 1918 she decided to travel around the world, earning money as she went by selling her photographs. Her money ran out by the time she got to San Francisco, so she settled there and obtained a job in a photography studio.
During the Great Depression, Lange began to photograph the unemployed men who wandered the streets of San Francisco. Pictures such as White Angel Breadline (1932), showing the desperate condition of these men, were publicly exhibited and received immediate recognition both from the public and from other photographers, especially members of of Group f.64. These photographs also led to a commission in 1935 from the federal Resettlement Administration... Her photographs of migrant workers, with whom she lived for some time, were often presented with captions featuring the words of the workers themselves. FSA director Roy Styker considered her most famous portrait, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California (1936), to be the iconic representation of the agency’s [FSA] agenda. The work now hangs in the Library of Congress.
Lange’s first exhibition was held in 1934, and thereafter her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer was firmly established. In 1939 she published a collection of her photographs in the book An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion. Two years later she received a Guggenheim fellowship, and in 1942 she recorded the mass evacuation of Japanese Americans to detention camps after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. .... Lange created a number of photo-essays, including Mormon Villages and The Irish Countryman, for Life magazine.
In 1953–54 Lange worked with Edward Steichen on “The Family of Man,” an exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1955. Steichen included several of her photographs in the show. Over the next 10 years she traveled the world, photographically documenting countries throughout Asia, notably South Asia, the Middle East, and South America. Finally, in the year leading up to her death in 1965, Lange spent much of her time working on a retrospective exhibition of her work to be held at MoMA the following year. She died shortly before it opened.....
Lange never got the name of the mother in her most famous photograph.
Dorothea Lange is quoted in Sontag's On Photography: "It is no accident that a photographer becomes a photographer anymore than the lion tamer becomes a lion tamer."
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