Dorothea Lange was born in New Jersey, in 1895, and died in 1965. Her childhood and adolescence were mostly unhappy. At age seven, she contracted polio, which left her with a permanent limp in her right leg. Her father, a lawyer, abandoned the family, leaving her mother Joan as the sole provider and single parent. Dorothea was enrolled in a public school system not far from her mother’s workplace, so that her mother would be able to spend time with her. However, the school was not in the same neighborhood as the house they lived in, so Dorothea was not part of any social group. Further compounding the sense of isolation, the neighborhood surrounding the school was mostly recently arrived Jewish immigrants. Dorothea’s parents were both second-generation German immigrants. During this time, she recalled having only one friend.
After World War I, she moved to San Francisco, where she earned her living as a portrait photographer for more than ten years. By the 1930’s, she had become dissatisfied with commercial portraiture, and began photographing on San Francisco’s streets, where she was drawn to the poor. An exhibition of photos that she took of the city’s dispossessed introduced her to Paul Taylor, economics professor at University of California at Berkeley, and together they began photographing migrants in the Nipomo and Imperial Valleys. She and Taylor married in the winter of 1935, while Lange was working as a photographer for the Resettlement Administration (later renamed the Farm Security Administration).
Migrant workers from Oklahoma and Arkansas were driven to California from the Midwest by unemployment, drought, and the loss of farm tenancy. They were competing for jobs not just with each other, but with immigrants coming from Mexico to find work.
Lange’s photographs were intended to bolster support for migrant camps. Her most captivating images depict moods rather than particular circumstances. When she was photographing someone, she was sensitive to the words people used as well as to their gestures. Her work shows an empathy to the subject and is characterized by a desire to photograph them exactly as she found them. She described her pictures as ammunition for the migrant worker’s cause. The pictures she took went to the head of the California emergency relief office, the Resettlement Administration’s regional office, the Works Progress Administration, and for a report to the Senate. She became the most widely published government photographer of the 1930’s.
Eventually, however, the task of being the voice for the nation’s outcasts began to wear on her, and caused stomach problems. What started as stomach pain progressed into esophageal cancer, which eventually killed her. Her last weeks were spent putting together an exhibit of her life’s work for the Museum of Modern Art. She was only the sixth individual exhibit the Museum had put together, and the first woman to be honored that way.
Sources:
Migrant Workers. Farm Security Administration. Web. accessed 7/17/11. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/fsahtml/fachap03.html
Dorothea Lange. Lee Gallery. accessed 7/17/11. http://www.leegallery.com/dorothea-lange/dorothea-lange-biography
Profile of Dorothea Lange. updated 2003. accessed 7/17/11. http://www.dorothea-lange.org/Resources/AboutLange.htm
