Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange

“Migrant Mother”




Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an American documentary photographer with a lot of influence. She studied photography at the Columbia University in New York City. Her teacher was Clarence H. White. In 1918, she moved to San Francisco, where she opened a very successful portrait studio. With the Great Depression (1930’s) she started to change her picture-motives from the studio to the street. She and her husband Maynard Dixon decided to travel and they took pictures of native people.
In 1935 she divorced from her first husband and married Paul Schuster Taylor, who was responsible for most of Lange’s education in social and political matters. The both started to work together. They documented poverty and migrant laborers. Her husband was interviewing and collecting economic data, Lange was taking the pictures.
Her pictures had success and they brought attention to the problems of the population (displaced farm families, migrant workers, and sharecroppers (sharecropping: landowners allow using land but in return they want to share the crop that was produced on the land)).
Lange’s most famous picture is “Migrant Mother” (picture at the top). It was taken in Nipomo, California, March 1938 and it shows a woman with a child whose sons went to get help for their broken car.
All in all, Lange photographed the development of ethnic groups and workers during the Great Depression.

During World War II Dorothea Lange documented the internment of Japanese-Americans in camps and then she turned her objective on women and members of minority groups.But her work wasn’t be seen by a bigger part of the population until 1972 when the Whitney Museum displayed 27 of her photographs in "Executive Order 9066". A reporter from the New York Times (A.D. Coleman) called her pictures: “documents of such a high order that they convey the feelings of the victims as well as the facts of the crime."
Lange traveled a lot during the 1950’s and 1960’s. She was in Vietnam, Ireland, Pakistan and India, and she was writing many photographic essays for Life magazine. Lange’s pictures were printed in books and displayed in museums, the most in the Oakland Museum of California. She said about herself not to be an artist but she said of her own work: “To live a visual life is an enormous undertaking, practically unattainable…But I have only touched it, just touched it.”


My sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Lange
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/Dorothea_Lange.html


Two links to her pictures:
http://artseal.citysearch.com/page/15klg/Figurative__Portraiture__amp__Special_Exhibits/Dorothea_Lange.html
http://www.ocaiw.com/galleria_fotografi/index.php?lang=en&author=lange

by Franziska Bandow