Dorothea Lange

Photographer

• Born: May 26, 1895
• Birthplace: Hoboken, New Jersey
• Died: October 11, 1965
• Place of death: San Francisco, California

American photographer

Considered by many to be the country’s most distinguished documentary photographer, Lange brought her photographic vision to bear most memorably on the living conditions of the rural poor of the Depression era and on Japanese Americans detained in World War II internment camps in the western United States.

Area of achievement Photography

Early Life

Dorothea Lange (dawr-eh-THEE-ah lang) was born Dorothea Margretta Nutzhorn in Hoboken, New Jersey. She was named for her father’s mother, Dorothea Fischer. Later in her life, she would drop her middle name and the surname Nutzhorn, using instead her mother’s family name, Lange. Her father was Heinrich (Henry) Martin Nutzhorn, a lawyer and the son of German immigrant parents. Her mother, Joanna (Joan) Caroline Lange, also of German heritage, enjoyed music and worked as a clerk or librarian until the birth of Dorothea, her first child.

In 1902, Lange suffered poliomyelitis, an ailment for which there was not yet a vaccine. As a result, Lange had limited mobility in her right leg, particularly from the knee down. This condition caused her to walk with a limp, and she was teased throughout childhood. In her own accounts, Lange described the experience of illness and subsequent paralysis as being formative in her life. She found people’s reactions to be both humiliating and instructive, and Lange claimed never to have gotten over this experience. Later in life, though, she did report that her physical disability inspired photographic subjects to be open with her.

When Lange was twelve years of age, her father left his wife and children. Details remain uncertain, but it is widely speculated that his departure represented flight from some criminal offense. Throughout her life, however, Lange spoke little of her father. In 1907, Joan Nutzhorn took her children to live with her mother in Hoboken. Joan Nutzhorn began work at the New York Public Library on the lower East Side.

By traveling to New York with her mother and posing as a New York resident, Lange was able to attend Public School No. 62, also on New York’s lower East Side. On February 5, 1909, Lange enrolled at Wadleigh High School in Harlem; later, she attended the nearby New York Training School for Teachers. When Wadleigh failed to hold Lange’s interest, which proved to be often, she would explore the city attending concerts, viewing museum exhibits, and the like. Before launching her career as a photographer, Lange also accompanied her mother on home visits in her new capacity as investigator for a juvenile court judge. Lange’s sensitivity to the plight of others likely had its roots in her exposure to New York’s poverty and its immigrant ghettos. As a result of her experiences in the New York area, Lange knew well the adverse conditions in which many people were forced to live, and her mind filled with these vivid images.

Life’s Work

At about the time of her high school graduation, Lange informed her mother of her plans to become a professional photographer. At that point in her life, however, Lange had never taken a photograph. She began work in the studios of several New York City photographers, though, and one of her first positions was with studio photographer Arnold Genthe. Genthe taught Lange the basic techniques of photography, and Lange continued her photographic apprenticeship in 1917 and 1918 by studying at Columbia University under photographer Clarence H. White. She also worked with a variety of other portrait photographers in the vicinity. Lange abandoned her teacher-training school at this point, finding her experiences in teaching displeasing, and devoted herself to a life in photography.

At age twenty, Lange started to travel, selling photographs along the way to help finance her journey. When her money ran out, Lange found herself in San Francisco, California, where she settled and opened her own portrait studio in 1916. On March 21, 1920, she and the painter Maynard Dixon were married. She spent the 1920’s in San Francisco, working as a society photographer. She and Dixon became known within San Francisco’s bohemian circles. On May 15, 1925, Lange gave birth to her first child: Daniel Rhodes Dixon. The couple’s second child, John Eaglefeather Dixon, arrived on June 12, 1928. After the stock market crash of 1929, Lange and her family ventured to a Taos, New Mexico, art colony presided over by writer Mabel Dodge Luhan. On their return trip, Lange and her family observed America’s homeless, unemployed, and migrant workers.

On returning to California, Lange could not reconcile studio work for those who could afford professional portraits with the poverty she saw around her. In 1932, she left the comfort of her portrait studio and began to make photographs of the social conditions she observed, including soup kitchens and breadlines. A 1933 image of this kind, “White Angel Bread Line,” went a long way toward establishing Lange’s reputation as a documentary photographer. With her images, Lane also made an extensive and change-making chronicle of the plight of California’s migrant workers. Similar images of migrant labor and poverty would later be rendered in fiction by John Steinbeck in the novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

When one of Lange’s photographs of an “agitator” was chosen to accompany a Survey Graphic article by economist Paul Schuster Taylor, Lange and Taylor began a close association. In 1935, Taylor was asked by the Division of Rural Rehabilitation to design a program to assist migrant workers. His first decision was to secure Lange’s services as project photographer, although for official purposes, she was listed on the payroll as a typist. Lange and Taylor were married a short time later, two months after Lange and Dixon divorced. In that same year, Taylor and Lange presented a monograph of their findings in Southern California, entitled Notes from the Field (1935). After a copy of this report arrived in Washington, D.C., it was forwarded by Columbia University economist Rexford Guy Tugwell to Roy Stryker, head of the photographic section of the Resettlement Administration, later renamed the Farm Security Administration (FSA). On seeing Lange’s potential, Stryker hired her to produce government photographs of Depression-era America.

Lange worked chiefly in the southern and southwestern United States. She began government photography in 1935, and her images for the FSA featured California, New Mexico, and Arizona. At times, she photographed as many as five states a month, sometimes traveling from Mississippi to California in a month’s time. Lange used a Berkeley darkroom to hasten the availability of her images, although it was general policy for exposed film to be returned to Washington, D.C., for filing and processing at national headquarters. Lange’s insistence on retaining this California darkroom allowed her to direct immediate aid through the Emergency Relief Administration to Nipoma Valley pea pickers, such as the woman who became the subject of one of her signature photographs, “Migrant Mother.” Lange remained on the staff of the FSA until budgetary concerns led to her firing in October of 1936. By January of 1937, Lange was rehired, released, and rehired again in October of 1938. Her last photographs in the government photographic files date from 1939. In that same year, Lange and Taylor published a collaborative volume entitled An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (1939).

Lange’s release from the FSA did not curtail her productivity. On February 1, 1940, not long after the end of Lange’s association with the FSA, she was hired as head photographer for the Bureau of Agricultural Economics, another division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In 1941, she was offered a Guggenheim Fellowship to make photographic studies of rural communities in the United States. Her proposed work concentrated on the Mormons of Utah, the Hutterites in South Dakota, and the Amana society in Iowa. Before Lange reached the Mormon community, war conditions changed her plans. In the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Lange opted to photograph the relocation camps where Japanese Americans were being detained. For a time, she photographed internees for the government’s War Relocation Authority. She then did photographic work for the Office of War Information. After World War II, she completed numerous photo-essays for Life magazine, including “Mormon Villages” and “The Irish Countrymen.” Her work focused on cooperative religious communities, such as the Shakers, and other dimensions of agrarian America. She also photographed delegates to United Nations conferences.

Illness kept Lange from photography for a few years during the 1940’s. In 1951, she returned to active work as a photographer. She spent the 1950’s creating photo-essays, including some collaborative work with Ansel Adams, and consulting on exhibition designs. She also began teaching seminars in photography. In the late 1950’s, she took photographic trips to Egypt and the Far East. Lange died of cancer on October 11, 1965, a short time before a one-woman show of her work was to open at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Significance

The Women’s Book of World Records and Achievements lists Lange as “The United States’ Greatest Documentary Photographer.” She was the first woman to earn distinction within the field of documentary photography, the first woman to receive a photography grant, and the first woman to be honored with a photographic retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. Perhaps her best-known image, and arguably the most widely recognized of the 270,000 photographs presented by the FSA’s photographic team, “Migrant Mother,” was published throughout the world. In addition to raising awareness of the plight of the poor in the United States, this particular photograph proved to be instrumental in raising funds for medical supplies. Whether working in conjunction with the FSA, California’s Emergency Relief Administration, or the War Relocation Authority, Lange produced striking and memorable images that bore poignant testimony to the historical events she witnessed. With these images, she reached a wide audience who otherwise would have been unfamiliar with the arduous lives of other Americans. Lange’s photographs became evidence for needed reforms as well as valuable historical documents. Her career in documentary photography has inspired photographers in their efforts not only to chronicle conditions but also to change them.

Those wishing to find out more about the career of Lange may explore a variety of archival sources. The Dorothea Lange Collection, including both photographs and writings by Lange, is housed by the Oakland Museum’s Prints and Photographs Division in Oakland, California. Other photographs and notebooks may be found in the Library of Congress and the National Archives.

Bibliography

Becker, Karin E. Dorothea Lange and the Documentary Tradition. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Although Becker does not engage in very much close analysis of specific Lange photographs, she has much to say about Lange’s role within the emerging genre of documentary photography.

Borhan, Pierre. Dorothea Lange: The Heart and Mind of a Photographer. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002. A study of Lange’s work, including previously unpublished photographs from her archives at the Oakland Museum of California.

Curtis, James. Mind’s Eye, Mind’s Truth: FSA Photography Reconsidered. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. The third chapter of this historical treatment of FSA images is devoted to Lange’s most recognized photograph, “Migrant Mother.” Curtis includes a thorough account and critique of the photograph’s origin and reception.

Dorothea Lange. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1966. This exhibition catalog urges viewers to read Lange’s images closely and to return to them for successive review. It comments in some detail on specific photographs, comparing Lange’s portrait work favorably to the streetscapes and architectural photographs of fellow photographer Walker Evans.

Durden, Mark. Dorothea Lange. New York: Phaidon, 2001. An illustrated overview of Lange’s work, documenting fifty-five of her black-and-white photos that were taken between the mid-1930’s and the early 1940’s.

Fisher, Andrea. Let Us Now Praise Famous Women: Women Photographers for the U.S. Government, 1935-1944. New York: Pandora Press, 1987. Fisher argues that Lange is as important to the documentary tradition as her male FSA colleague Walker Evans, and she explores the implications of Lange’s reputation as the modern founder of documentary photography.

Guimond, James. American Photography and the American Dream. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. This volume is especially helpful in its discussion of Lange’s later life, particularly her photographs in internment camps, her blacklisting as a member of the Photo League in the late 1940’s, and her impact on the design of photographer Edward Steichen’s landmark 1955 exhibition “The Family of Man.”

Keller, Judith. Dorothea Lange: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002. Keller, a photography curator at the Getty Museum, discusses fifty of Lange’s photos. The book also contains an edited transcript from a colloquium on Lange.

Meltzer, Milton. Dorothea Lange: A Photographer’s Life. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978. Meltzer supplies a thorough and well-researched biography, including a bibliography of archival sources, writings by Lange, and writings concerning Lange. Of particular interest is the incorporation of Lange’s reflections about her experiences and images, culled from interviews and oral histories.

O’Neal, Hank. A Vision Shared: A Classic Portrait of America and Its People, 1935-1943. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. This volume features thirty-one well-reproduced Lange photographs from the FSA years and includes a brief but solid biographical sketch of the photographer. A helpful introductory section discusses the Farm Security Administration’s Photographic Division.

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