Meet Dorothea Lange

Read About the American Photographer Dorothea Lange

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.Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange was an American photographer who lived from 1895 to 1965. She was born in New Jersey and moved to a low-income neighborhood in New York City at age 12. After high school, she studied photography at Columbia University and apprenticed at several portrait studios. In 1918, she planned to travel around the world with a friend to make her living as a photographer. But after being robbed, she found herself stranded in San Francisco, California. Eventually she opened a photography studio there. She made portraits of wealthy customers to earn an income, but discovered a passion for documenting regular people out in public.

During the extraordinarily difficult time of the Great Depression, Lange took photographs of people struggling with unemployment, displacement, and poverty. Her sensitive and gripping portrayals led to her next job. In 1935 she was hired to work for a federal agency called the Resettlement Administration (later called the Farm Security Administration). During this period, she made her most famous image, Human Erosion in California (Migrant Mother), of Florence Owens Thompson and her children in a peapickers’ camp. Other subjects of her photographs included Japanese incarceration camps and scenes of workers in factories during World War II.

Lange became the first woman awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Photography, and she spent nearly ten years making photo essays for the popular magazine Life and other publications. She also traveled extensively, making photo essays in Vietnam, Ireland, Pakistan, India, and elsewhere.

Questions

Write or discuss your responses.

• What do you think Dorothea Lange meant when she said “use the camera as though tomorrow you’d be stricken blind”? How might this philosophy have shaped the way she took photographs?
• Lange photographed many different subjects—migrant workers, incarceration camps, factory workers, and people in countries around the world. What common thread or purpose do you think connected all of this work?