More About Lange
See Director Dyanna Taylor interviewed about Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange is renowned as the photographer who recorded powerful images of human migration and dislocation, including the iconic photograph “Migrant Mother.” This image - captured in May of 1936 in a pea-pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California - was widely published by national newspapers, prompting an immediate outpouring of public sympathy. As a result, the federal government rushed 20,000 pounds of food supplies to the camp. “Migrant Mother,” one of Lange’s most enduring images, allowed the country to see the plight of the migrant poor.
Yet Lange accomplished a great deal more than the recording of migration in America in the 1930s – she continued to photograph and work until her death in 1965, expressing personal moments with a camera, as well as her political perspective.
Dorothea Lange was born in Hoboken, New Jersey to German immigrants in 1895. Her early determination at the age of 18, was to become a photographer, although she did not own a camera -- in fact she had never taken a photograph. Appeasing her mother, she studied to be a teacher, advancing in her studies until she finally dropped out to fully devote her time to her apprenticeships to well-established portrait photographers in NYC.
At the age of 23, she decided to take a trip around the world with a good friend. They got as far as San Francisco before they were pick pocketed, and lost all but five dollars. So, they changed their plans and both found jobs in San Francisco. In a matter of months, Dorothea moved from working at a photo-finishing counter to establishing her own portrait studio. Entering into the artistic and bohemian world of San Francisco, Dorothea embraced her new community of friends and clients and engaged herself in a busy work-life. Marrying the artist Maynard Dixon in 1920, she soon found herself a mother of two boys and often the primary bread-winner of the family.
After 14 years in the portrait business, the Depression had taken hold in San Francisco, and work had became more sporadic for Lange. Drawn to the drama of the moment, she turned her camera to the street. From that moment, never stopped photographing the world around her. In the streets of San Francisco, in migrant camps, on the dusty back roads of California - recording humanity now became her almost singular passion.
A second marriage to Paul S. Taylor, a prescient, social economist and early human rights advocate, followed in 1935. This relationship opened up new areas of access. Working, often together, for numerous government agencies gave Dorothea both a clear agenda and a goal --the goal to create change from within the system, to get her photographs to the policy-makers. A goal to give voice to the disenfranchised - to let the world see what was happening far from the main roads and out of sight of the decision-makers in California and Washington DC.
Her epic photographs stand today, not only as a document, but as a record of the almost singular desire Lange had to communicate, indeed pierce the viewer with an inescapable desire to act. If not act, then to truly see, or, as Dorothea would say – to see ‘things as they are,” illuminated as if by a hunk of lightning.
As an individual, Lange faced the challenges in her personal life with courage and self-determination - and she had many. Her polio, her marriages, her life as a mother and stepmother, and in her later years, severe illness. Culturally she faced the challenges of her times: attitudes about women, civil strife, natural disasters, periods of war, and at home, rampant land development.
More than four decades of 20th century American history are reflected through the prism of Lange’s life. As young America emerged into a world power, her photography bore witness to poverty and mass migration of the depression, increasing urbanization, and the cost of World War II at home. Her photographs bring the subjects alive while transmitting an emotional, even raw, vitality that captured the human condition. Lange succinctly recounted her photographic goals while working in the field: “See what you can bring home. See what is really there. What does it look like? What does it feel like? What actually is the human condition?”