Dorothea Lange

Maddie Williams
per: 2


       Dorothea Lange was born in New Jersey during the year 1895. When she was young she contracted polio which caused her right leg and left foot to be noticeably weaker. Art and photography was a large part of Dorothea's childhood. Her parents were very invested in her education. Therefore creative arts were largely encouraged in the Lange household. After high school she decided to pursue photography. She studied the art form at Columbia University.

      After college she began her career working as an intern and assistant to multiple different big name photographers, such as Arnold Genthe a leading portrait photographer. She was running her own successful photography business and living in San Fransico with her husband and children by 1918. With the Great Depression in the 1930s, she turned her camera on what she started to see in her own San Francisco neighborhoods: labor strikes and breadlines. This was her first taste of documentary photography. She traveled documenting the rural hardship that she encountered for the Farm Security Administration, established by the U.S. Agriculture Department. Lange’s body of work from her adventures included her most famous work of art "Migrant Mother". This photograph is said to have perfectly captured the hardships of the Great Depression. It is subtle and beautiful but yet it is relatable to for thousands of Americans during this time and era.

I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet. I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions. I made five exposures, working closer and closer from the same direction. I did not ask her name or her history. She told me her age, that she was thirty-two. She said that they had been living on frozen vegetables from the surrounding fields, and birds that the children killed. She had just sold the tires from her car to buy food. There she sat in that lean- to tent with her children huddled around her, and seemed to know that my pictures might help her, and so she helped me. There was a sort of equality about it. (From: Popular Photography, Feb. 1960).

        This is a quote from Dorothea Lange that portrays what she was thinking at the time she took her photo. Six different photos were in this set and all helped show the affect that The Great Depression had on most of America’s population. The Great depression took everything from families and caused to move and migrate constantly to where they could find work. After her photos became more noticed she was hired by the government to photograph people in Japanese internment camps. She began to have health problems and she began to get increasingly sick.  She battled these problems for around two decades until she eventually passed away from esophageal cancer in October of 1965.

Sources:
- http://www.biography.com/people/dorothea-lange-9372993#final-years&awesm=~oBqj81H6QofWR0
- http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/list/128_migm.html