Dorothea Lange

She was an American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best

known for her Depression era work for the farm security administration. Lange's
photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and
influenced the development of documentary photography. During the great
depression Lange began to photograph the unemployed men who wandered the
streets of San Francisco. Pictures such as white Angel Breadline, 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 group f.64 These photographs also led to a commission in
1935 from the federal Resettlement Administration later called the farm security
administration The latter agency, established by the u.s agriculture department ,
hoped that Lange’s powerful images would bring the conditions of the rural poor
to the public’s attention. 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 . to be the iconic representation of
the agency’s 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 That work was celebrated in 2006
with the publication of impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of
Japanese American Internment, edited by historians Linda Gordon and Gary Y.
Okihiro. After World War Il, 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.