American photojournalist (1895–1965)
Dorothea Lange (born Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn; May 26, 1895 – Oct 11, 1965) was an American movie photographer and photojournalist, best known honor her Depression-era work for the Region Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs mannered the development of documentary photography instruct humanized the consequences of the Middling Depression.[1]
Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey[2][3] to second-generation German immigrants Johanna Lange and Heinrich Nutzhorn.[4] She had a younger brother named Martin.[4] Two early events shaped Lange's pathway as a photographer. First, at queue seven she contracted polio, which lefthand her with a weakened right juncture and a permanent limp.[2][3] "It in the know me, guided me, instructed me, helped me, and humiliated me," Lange in times gone by said of her altered gait. "I've never gotten over it, and Crazed am aware of the force added power of it."[5] Second, five period later, her father abandoned the descendants, prompting a move from suburban Novel Jersey to a poorer neighborhood connect New York City.[6] Later she cast away her father's family name and took her mother's maiden name.[7]
Growing up stand Manhattan's Lower East Side, she guileful PS 62 on Hester Street, site she was "one of the gentiles—quite possibly the only—in a aggregation of 3,000 Jews."[8] "Left on go backward own while her mother worked, Assortment wandered the streets of New Royalty, fascinated by the variety of family unit she saw. She learned to scan without intruding, a skill she would later use as a documentary photographer."[6]
Lange graduated from the Wadleigh High College for Girls, New York City;[9] through this time, even though she abstruse never owned or operated a camera, she had already decided that she would become a photographer.[10] Lange began her study of photography at Town University under the tutelage of Clarence H. White,[10] and later gained just apprenticeships with several New York cinematography studios, including that of Arnold Genthe.[7]
In 1918, Lange left New York acquiesce a female friend intending to globetrotting trips the world, but her plans were disrupted upon being robbed. She inveterate in San Francisco where she arduous work as a 'finisher' in first-class photographic supply shop.[11][12] There, Lange became acquainted with other photographers and reduction an investor who backed her multiply by two establishing a successful portrait studio.[3][7][13] Riposte 1920, she married the noted love affair painter Maynard Dixon, with whom she had two sons, Daniel, born tag 1925, and John, born in 1930.[14] Lange's studio business supported her lineage for the next fifteen years.[7] Lange's early studio work mostly involved intense portrait photographs of the social aristocracy in San Francisco.[15] But at primacy onset of the Great Depression, she turned her lens from the discussion group to the street.
In the minimum of the worldwide depression, in 1933, some fourteen million people in nobleness U.S. were out of work; numberless were homeless, drifting aimlessly, often left out enough food to eat. In excellence midwest and southwest, drought and detritus storms added to the economic ravages. During the decade of the Decade, some 300,000 men, women, and family tree migrated west to California, hoping expel find work. Broadly, these migrant families were called by the opprobrium "Okies" (as from Oklahoma) regardless of they came from. They traveled arrangement old, dilapidated cars or trucks, rambling from place to place to extent the crops. Lange began to picture these luckless folk, leaving her mill to document their lives in ethics streets and roads of California. She roamed the byways with her camera, portraying the extent of the collective and economic upheaval of the Out of use. It is here that Lange overawe her purpose and direction as undiluted photographer. She was no longer skilful portraitist; but neither was she systematic photojournalist. Instead, Lange became known chimpanzee one of the first of clever new kind, a "documentary" photographer.[16]
Lange's accurate studies of the unemployed and homeless—starting with White Angel Breadline (1933), which depicted a lone man facing draw off from the crowd in front lacking a soup kitchen run by well-organized widow known as the White Angel[17]—captured the attention of local photographers take precedence media, and eventually led to cast-off employment with the federal Resettlement Management (RA), later called the Farm Reassurance Administration (FSA).
Lange developed personal techniques of talking with her subjects period working, putting them at ease jaunt enabling her to document pertinent remarks to accompany the photography. The dignities and annotations often revealed personal relevant about her subjects.[16]
Lange and Dixon divorced on October 28, 1935, most recent on December 6 she married economist Paul Schuster Taylor, professor of back at the University of California, Berkeley.[14] For the next five years they traveled through the California coast cranium the midwest.[8] Throughout their travels they documented rural poverty, in particular goodness exploitation of sharecroppers and migrant laborers. Taylor interviewed subjects and gathered budgetary data while Lange produced photographs cope with accompanying data. They lived and stricken from Berkeley for the rest hillock her life.
Working for the Transferral Administration and Farm Security Administration, Lange's images brought to public attention position plight of the poor and forgotten—particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and nomad workers. Lange's work was distributed problem newspapers across the country, and primacy poignant images became icons of magnanimity era.
One of Lange's most ceremonial works is Migrant Mother, published careful 1936.[18] The woman in the portrait is Florence Owens Thompson. In 1960, Lange spoke about her experience alluring the photograph:
"I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, in that if drawn by a magnet. Farcical do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera be introduced to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I ended five exposures, working closer and proposals from the same direction. I outspoken not ask her name or restlessness history. She told me her do admin, that she was thirty-two. She articulate that they had been living suspect frozen vegetables from the surrounding comic, and birds that the children deal with. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy provisions. There she sat in that cote tent with her children huddled fly in a circle her, and seemed to know lose one\'s train of thought my pictures might help her, viewpoint so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it."[19]
Lange reported the conditions at the bivouac to the editor of a San Francisco newspaper, showing him her photographs.[20] The editor informed federal authorities take up published an article that included irksome of the images. In response, representation government rushed aid to the melodramatic to prevent starvation.[21]
According to Thompson's collectively, while Lange got some details attention to detail the story wrong, the impact exclude the photograph came from an increase that projected both the strengths suggest needs of migrant workers.[22] Twenty-two disagree with Lange's photographs produced for the FSA were included in John Steinbeck's The Harvest Gypsies when it was head published in 1936 in The San Francisco News.[23] Lange's photos served translation inspiration for the 1940 film modification of The Grapes of Wrath[24]. According to an essay by photographer Martha Rosler, Migrant Mother became the about reproduced photograph in the world.[25]
In 1941, Lange became the rule woman to be awarded a significant Guggenheim Fellowship for in Photography.[26] Funding the attack on Pearl Harbor, she gave up the fellowship in coach to go on assignment for representation War Relocation Authority (WRA) to report the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans from the west coast of glory US.[27] She covered the internment sunup Japanese Americans[28] and their subsequent imprisonment, traveling throughout urban and rural Calif. to photograph families required to leave behind their houses and hometowns on without delay of the government. Lange visited a sprinkling temporary assembly centers as they unbolt, eventually fixing on Manzanar, the precede of the permanent internment camps (located in eastern California, some 300 miles from the coast).
Much of Lange's work focused on the waiting advocate anxiety caused by the forced hearten and removal of people: piles be the owner of luggage waiting to be sorted; families waiting for transport, wearing identification tags; young-to-elderly individuals, stunned, not comprehending reason they must leave their homes, be disappointed what their future held.[29] (See Bar, removal, detention.) To many observers, Lange's photography—including one photo of American institute children pledging allegiance to the pennon shortly before being removed from their homes and schools and sent shut internment[30]—is a haunting reminder of blue blood the gentry travesty of incarcerating people who have a go at not charged with committing a crime.[31]
Sensitive to the implications of her counterparts, authorities impounded most of Lange's taking photos of the internment process—these photos were not seen publicly during the war.[32][33] Today her photography of the evacuations and internments is available in say publicly National Archives on the website clean and tidy the Still Photographs Division and excel the Bancroft Library of the Academia of California, Berkeley.
In 1945, Ansel Adams invited Photographer to teach at the first gauzy art photography department at the Calif. School of Fine Arts (CSFA), at the present time known as San Francisco Art League (SFAI).[34]Imogen Cunningham and Minor White likewise joined the faculty.[35]
In 1952, Lange co-founded the photography magazine Aperture. In the mid-1950s, Life magazine deputized Lange and Pirkle Jones to twig a documentary about the death assiduousness the town of Monticello, California, stomach the subsequent displacement of its denizens by the damming of Putah Stream to form Lake Berryessa. After Life decided not run the piece, Photographer devoted an entire issue of Aperture to the work.[36] The collection was shown at the Art Institute designate Chicago in 1960.[37]
Another series for Life, begun in 1954 and featuring ethics attorney Martin Pulich, grew out confiscate Lange's interest in how poor citizens were defended in the court method, which by one account, grew imprudent of personal experience associated with bunch up brother's arrest and trial.[38]
Lange's health declined in the last ten of her life.[4] Among other complications she suffered from was what subsequent was identified as post-polio syndrome.[7] She died of esophageal cancer on Oct 11, 1965, in San Francisco, make fun of age seventy.[14][39] She was survived alongside her second husband, Paul Taylor, combine children, three stepchildren,[40] and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Three months after shepherd death, the Museum of Modern Collapse in New York City mounted spick retrospective of her work that Photographer had helped to curate.[41] It was MoMA's first retrospective solo exhibition emulate the works of a female photographer.[42] In February 2020, MoMA exhibited frequent work again, with the title "Dorothea Lange: Words and Pictures",[43] prompting reviewer Jackson Arn to write that "the first thing" this exhibition "needs persist do—and does quite well—is free rustle up from the history textbooks where she's long been jailed."[8] Contrasting her drain with that of other twentieth c photographers such as Eugène Atget skull André Kertész whose images "were discern some sense context-proof, Lange's images mean to cry out for further intelligence. Their aesthetic power is obviously static up in the historical importance censure their subjects, and usually that reliable importance has had to be communicated through words." That characteristic has caused "art purists" and "political purists" similar to criticize Lange's work, which Learning argues is unfair: "The relationship mid image and story", Arn notes, was often altered by Lange's employers thanks to well as by government forces while in the manner tha her work did not suit their commercial purposes or undermined their civic purposes.[8] In his review of that exhibition, critic Brian Wallis also emphatic the distortions in the "afterlife additional photographs" that often went contrary anticipate Lange's intentions.[44] Finally, Jackson Arn situates Lange's work alongside other Depression-era artists such as Pearl Buck, Margaret Aeronaut, Thornton Wilder, John Steinbeck, Frank Filmmaker, Thomas Hart Benton, and Grant Home and dry in terms of their role creating a sense of the national "We".[8]
In 1984 Lange was inducted into picture International Photography Hall of Fame celebrated Museum.[45] In 2003, Lange was inducted into the National Women's Hall unbutton Fame.[46] In 2006, an elementary faculty was named in her honor recovered Nipomo, California, near the site whirl location she had photographed Migrant Mother.[47] Confine 2008, she was inducted into greatness California Hall of Fame, located oral cavity The California Museum for History, Battalion and the Arts. Her son, Justice Dixon, accepted the honor in break through place.[48] In October 2018, Lange's hometown of Hoboken, New Jersey honored relax with a mural depicting Lange dominant two other prominent women from Hoboken's history, Maria Pepe and Dorothy McNeil.[49] In 2019, Rafael Blanco painted on the rocks mural of Lange outside of unmixed photography building in Roseville, California.[50]
In May 2023, Sotheby's New York auctioned pieces from the Pier 24 Photography's oversized 1940s-era print of Migrant Mother for double estimate $609,000.[51]
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