Dorothea Lange (1895–1965,) originally Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn, was an American documentary photographer. Her depictions of displaced farmers during the Great Depression greatly influenced later documentary and journalistic photography.
Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, Lange studied at Columbia. She established a studio in San Francisco in 1919 but became frustrated with a society photographer’s role.
Lange is best known for her social records of migrant workers, sharecroppers, and tenant farmers throughout the USA’s South and West in the Depression years from 1935.
Lange’s celebrated photographs include ‘White Angel Breadline’ (1932) and ‘Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California’ (1936.) The latter was a portrait of agricultural laborer Florence Owens Thompson—the photograph became a symbol of suffering during the Great Depression.
Lange and her husband, economist Paul Taylor, collaborated on a book, An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939.)
Lange is also known for her photographs of the Japanese American internment camps around 1942. After World War II, she worked as a freelance photo-reporter in South Asia, the Middle East, and South America (1958–63) and published photo-essays, including ‘Mormon Villages’ and ‘The Irish Countryman,’ for Life magazine.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Dorothea Lange
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera.
—Dorothea Lange
Topics: Photography
One should really use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind.
—Dorothea Lange
Topics: Photography
Photography takes an instant out of time, altering life by holding it still.
—Dorothea Lange
Topics: Photography
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.
—Dorothea Lange
Topics: Perspective, Photography
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