March is Women's History Month

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange was an influential American

documentary photographer and photojournalist,

 best known for her Depression-era work

for the Farm Security Administration.

 Lange's photographs humanized the tragic

consequences of the Great Depression and

 profoundly influenced the development of

documentary photography.

Migrant worker

Migrant children

In 1902, Dorothea developed polio in at age 7.

She emerged from the illness  with a weakened

right leg, and a permanent limp. When she was

12 years old, her father abandoned her and

 her mother. She promptly changed her last

name to that of her mother's madien name.

 Lange was educated in photography in

New York City. In 1918, she moved to

San Francisco, and by the following year she

 had opened a successful portrait studio. She lived

across the bay in Berkeley for the rest of her life.

In 1920, she married the noted western painter

Maynard Dixonand had two sons. One, born in 1925,

 was named Daniel Rhoades Dixon. The second child,

born in 1929,was named John Eaglesfeather Dixon.

Migrant girl with umbrella

Migrant girl on crutches traveling from Oklahoma

Depression migrants traveling to California

Another migrant family traveling to find work

Sign says " Cotton Pickers Needed"

With the onset of the Great Depression,

Lange turned her camera lens from the studio

to the street. Her studies of unemployed and

 homeless people captured the attention of

local photographers and led to her employment

with the federal Resettlement Administration,

 later called the Farm Security Administration.

People waiting on their Relief Checks

Destitute Man at a deserted store

Homeles  family of 7 walking to find work picking cotton

In December 1935, she divorced Dixon 

and married agricultural economist

Paul Schuster Taylor, Professor of Economics

at the University of California, Berkeley.

Taylor educated Lange in social and

political matters, and together they documented
rural poverty and the exploitation of sharecroppers
and migrant laborers for the next five years —

Taylor interviewing and gathering economic data,

Lange taking photos.

Abandoned sawmill in Idaho

Poverty of the Sharecroppers

A house being moved through the main street of town

Migrant families living behind this big sign to

keep the wind off of them

Lighthearted migrant children after work

Migrant family playing music after work

From 1935 to 1939, Lange's work for the RA and FSA

 brought the plight of the poor and forgotten —

particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families,

and migrant workers — to public attention.

Distributed free to newspapers across the country,

 her poignant images became icons of the era

Lange's best-known picture is titled "Migrant Mother."

The woman in the photo is Florence Owens Thompson

In 1960,

Lange spoke about

 her experience

taking the photograph:

"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 

notask 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

hadjust 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."

Florence Owens Thompson

In 1941, Lange was awarded a

 Guggenheim Fellowship for excellence

 in photography. After the attack on

 Pearl Harbor, she gave up the prestigious

award to record the forced evacuation of

Japanese Americans to relocation camps,

on assignment for the War Relocation Authority.

  She covered the rounding up of Japanese

 Americans and their internment in relocation camps,

 highlighting Manzanar, the first of the permanent

internment camps. To many observers, her photograph

 of Japanese-American children pledging allegiance

to the flag shortly before they were sent to

 internment camps is a haunting reminder of

this policy of detaining people without charging
them with any crime or affording them any appeal.

Japanese-American children lined up
 to pledge Allegience to the Flag.

Japenese-American Internment Camp

Japanese-American Mochida Family getting

ready to go the the Internment Camp

(1942)

Members of the Shibuya Family before they

 evacuated their home for the Internment Camp

(1942)

Japanese-American children in
school at the Internment Camp


Her images were so obviously critical
that the Army impounded them.
Today her photographs of the internment
are available in the National Archives
on the website of the Still Photographs Division,
 and at the Bancroft Library of the
 University of California, Berkeley.

Dorothea Lange died of esophageal cancer
 on October 11, 1965, age 70.


In 1972 the Whitney Museum used
27 of Lange's photographs in an
exhibit entitled Executive Order 9066.
 This exhibit highlighted theJapanese
 Internment during World War II.



On december 15. 2008,  Dorothea  Lange was
 inducted into the California Hall of Fame,
located at The California Museum
 for  History, Women and the Arts.
  Her son accepted the honor in her place.


***Famous Quotes***

One should really use the camera as though
 tomorrow you'd be stricken blind.To live
 a visual life is an enormous undertaking,
 practically unattainable. I have only touched it,
 just touched it.


Being disabled gave me an immense advantage.
People are kinder to you.
It puts you on a different level than
 if you go into a situation whole and secure.


Photography takes an instant out of time,
altering life by holding it still.



Pick a theme and work it to exhaustion...
the subject must be something
you truly love or truly hate.


While there is perhaps a province in
which the photograph can tell us nothing
 more than what we see with our own eyes, 
there is another in which it proves to
 us how little our eyes permit us to see.




***Credits***

The article about Dorothea Lange  can be found at this link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorothea_Lange


The photographs of  Dorothea Lange can be found a here:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Dorothea_Lange