AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- Photographs of the Great Depression made for the US government, above all Migrant Mother (1936)
- Worked in
- Black and white
- Camera
- A Graflex with 4x5-inch film for Migrant Mother; her first camera was a gift from Arnold Genthe
- Also
- Photographed the forced removal of Japanese Americans in 1942; first major MoMA retrospective in 1966
- Start with
- Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (The Museum of Modern Art, 2020)
Dorothea Lange (1895–1965) was an American documentary photographer. She left a portrait studio in San Francisco to photograph the people of the Great Depression for the US government. Her picture Migrant Mother (1936) is one of the best-known photographs of the twentieth century.
The story
In 1933 Dorothea Lange had a portrait studio in San Francisco. Its window looked over the street. Below, she could see men who were hungry and out of work. One day she left the studio and took her camera down to a breadline. A wealthy man people called the “White Angel” had set it up to feed them. “That’s the first day I ever made a photograph actually on the street,” she said later.
Back in the studio, she put the print on the wall. Her clients came in for their portraits and glanced at it. “And the only comment I ever got was ‘What are you going to do with this kind of thing?’” she remembered.
Since 1919 she had made portraits, usually for San Francisco’s upper classes. Polio in childhood had left her with a limp. Still, the street now pulled at her. In 1934 she met the economist Paul Taylor. A year later the government’s Resettlement Administration hired her as a field photographer, and in December she married Taylor.
On a raw, wet day in March 1936, she was driving home to Berkeley after weeks of work. She passed a sign for a pea pickers’ camp in Nipomo. For about 20 miles she drove on. Then she turned around. In the camp she found a mother of 32 with her children in a lean-to tent. They had been living on frozen vegetables from the fields and on birds the children killed. Lange said she made five exposures, working closer each time.
She rushed the prints to the San Francisco News. The paper ran the story, and the federal government sent 20,000 pounds of food to the workers. By then the family had already moved on.
In 1942 she photographed Japanese American families forced to leave their homes. The army held those pictures back until the war was over. Lange died in October 1965. Three months later the Museum of Modern Art opened her first major retrospective, with about 200 pictures. The clients’ old question had found its answer. “I didn’t know. But I knew that picture was on my wall, and I knew that it was worth doing.”
The work
- 1895Born in Hoboken, New Jersey
- 1902Has polio and walks with a limp for the rest of her life
- 1919Opens her own portrait studio in San Francisco
- 1933Photographs the White Angel breadline, her first picture made on the street
- 1935Joins the Resettlement Administration as a field photographer and marries Paul Taylor
- 1936Makes Migrant Mother at a pea pickers’ camp in Nipomo, California
- 1939Publishes An American Exodus with Paul Taylor
- 1942Photographs the forced removal of Japanese Americans for the War Relocation Authority
- 1965Dies on October 11, three months before her MoMA retrospective opens
Lessons
Go down to the street. She could see the hungry men from her studio window. The picture came only when she went down and stood among them.
Listen to the second thought. She drove about 20 miles past the camp sign before she turned back. Without that U-turn there would be no Migrant Mother.
Step closer. At Nipomo she said she made five exposures, closer and closer, from the same direction.
Try this: find one person or scene and make five frames from the same direction, one step closer each time. Then compare the first frame with the last.
Gear
Few reliable sources name Lange’s cameras. Two facts are well documented.
Graflex camera: the Library of Congress says the Migrant Mother photographs were made with a Graflex, on 4x5-inch film.
Her first camera was a gift from Arnold Genthe, the New York photographer she worked for as a young woman.
Books
Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures (The Museum of Modern Art, 2020). Edited by Sarah Hermanson Meister for a large MoMA exhibition. It has 176 pages and 152 illustrations. The book looks at how Lange paired photographs with words, in captions, books and magazines. Famous pictures like White Angel Breadline and Migrant Mother sit next to rarely seen work, some shown as it was first published. Each picture is answered by a contemporary voice, among them Sally Mann, Rebecca Solnit, Wendy Red Star, Sam Contis and Tess Taylor. A good first book for anyone who knows only Migrant Mother.
An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion (Reynal & Hitchcock, New York, 1939). Made with her husband, the economist Paul Schuster Taylor, who wrote the text. It is a record in photographs and words of farm families pushed out of Oklahoma, Texas and other parts of the Southwest by drought and by tractors. Lange and Taylor worked on it for three years, in California, the Dust Bowl and among tenant farmers in Alabama. It remains a key book for anyone interested in how photographs and text can work together.
Impounded: Dorothea Lange and the Censored Images of Japanese American Internment (W. W. Norton, 2006). Edited by the historians Linda Gordon and Gary Y. Okihiro. In 1942 the War Relocation Authority hired Lange to photograph the removal of Japanese Americans, and she made more than 800 photographs. The military held them back during the war, and almost all of them stayed unpublished for decades. This 224-page book was the first collection of that work, with essays that place it in its historical context. Essential for readers who want to see the side of Lange that was hidden for so long.
Dorothea Lange (The Museum of Modern Art, 1966). The monograph for her first major retrospective, directed by John Szarkowski, which opened at MoMA in January 1966, three months after her death. The essay is by the novelist and critic George P. Elliott, a friend of hers for many years. Beyond the Depression work, the exhibition also showed her later essays on the changing California, on Ireland, Egypt and Asia, and on her own home and family. Look for it in used bookshops if you want to see how her career was first presented as a whole.
In her words
“I do not remember how I explained my presence or my camera to her, but I do remember she asked me no questions.”
“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.”
Did you know that the Migrant Mother which sold for almost 300 thousand USD was almost destroyed when someone from maintenance threw it in the dumpster?