Dorothea Lange, the people's photographer

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, CA (1936)

Dorothea Lange was one of the prominent documentary photographers of the Great Depression. Today, "Migrant Mother," shown above, is still a symbol of the economic crises of the 1930s. Lange said of the photograph, "I saw and approached the hungry and desperate mother, as if drawn by a magnet... I did not ask her name or her history... She said 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." 

However, Lange didn't take her camera down to the streets and fields of America from her studio in San Francisco until she was 37, in 1933. 

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Lange had a troubled childhood. Her father had abandoned the family when she was 12, which accounts for her change of name, from Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn, to Dorothea Lange, assuming her mother's maiden name. At 7, Lange also contracted polio, which left her with a permanent limp.

Lange had received photography education from college and had been apprenticed in several photography studios. After being robbed during a trip around the world, she was stuck in San Francisco, where she eventually set up a portrait studio and married painter Maynard Dixon in 1920, with whom she had two sons. 

Lange's accounts on why she decided to photograph the poor -- a significant shift from her portraiture work of wealthier patrons -- vary. According to Daring to Look, by Anne Whiston Spirn, Lange, during an interview in the 1960s, "tells of watching from the upstairs window of her studio as the unemployed drifted past in 1933, and of deciding to take her camera to the street." However, Spirn also notes an interview in the 1950s when Lange cited 1929, the months following the stock market crash, where Lange then said she decided to "concentrate upon people, only people. All kinds of people, people who paid me and people who didn't." 

White Angel Breadline, San Francisco, CA (1933)

Lange then went from her studio to the streets of San Francisco. Her photo "White Angel Breadline," achieved fame depicting the lines of people waiting for food from a soup kitchen. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched the New Deal and issued executive orders for welfare programs, Lange photographed the homeless, unemployed, and working people of San Francisco. Her husband, Dixon, spent most of his time away from home, and Lange became the breadwinner for her household. 

In 1934, strikes erupted in San Francisco, and according to Spirn, Lange lined her studio walls with prints from the demonstrations. Spirn wrote in her book, "...[Lange's] privileged clients asked, 'What are you going to do with [the photos]?' She did not yet know and could not answer.'"

Lange's answer came just a year later when she found a job working for Paul Taylor, an economics professor at Berkeley, under the California Emergency Relief Administration (SERA). Taylor had seen Lange's street photographs in a gallery, and hired Lange to accompany him when he became a field director for rural rehabilitation and was charged with assessing the situation of agricultural laborers. Eventually, Lange divorced Dixon and married Taylor. 

Simultaneously, Lange landed a job with Roosevelt's Farm Security Administration (FSA), and took photos for the government detailing the suffering in the country. From 1935 to 1939, Lange documented rural poverty and sharecroppers for both Taylor and FSA. According to PBS' film "The Dust Bowl," Lange "brought the plight of the nation's poor and forgotten peoples, especially sharecroppers, displaced families, and migrant workers, into the public eyes." It was during this time that Lange took the photo "Migrant Mother." 

For Lange, photographing her subjects required intimacy, and she struck up a conversation with her subjects. According to Spirn, "[Lange] might speak to someone standing at the opening of a tent, on a doorstep, in a field, beside a car: Where had they come from? Where were they going? Who was living or traveling with them? How were they managing? What were their plans? There was no emotional distance between Lange and her subjects." 

"Her method of work was often to just saunter up to the people and look around, and then when she saw something that she wanted to photograph, to quietly take her camera," Taylor said of Lange. "...If she saw that they objected... she would wait until they were used to her... Then she would take the photograph, sometimes talking with them, sometimes not." 

According to "The Dust Bowl," Lange's reports thus included not just photos, but also direct quotations from her subjects and her own observations. One subject said of the country's state, "Somethin' is radical wrong," and another said, "I don't believe the President knows what's happening to us here." Lange said, "The words that come direct from the people are the greatest... If you substitute one out of your own vocabulary, it disappears before your eyes."

In the 1940s, Lange recorded the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans for the War Relocation Authority (WRA). According to "The Dust Bowl," many of photos were "so compelling and so critical of the situation that the Army impounded them; they were seen by no one -- including Lange herself -- for more than twenty years."

In 1941, Lange was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her photography, and in 1945, was invited by Ansel Adams to become part of the fine art photography department at the California School of Fine Arts. Lange also co-founded the photographic magazine Aperture and photographed for many series both for Aperture and Life magazine. 

Lange died of esophageal cancer in 1965. She was to the end a documentarian, and while many of her colleagues went on to commercial careers, she focused on documenting and informing the public of the sufferings around the country.

"We see not only with our eyes but with all that we are and all that our culture is," Lange once said. "The artist is a professional see-er."