(1895-1965)
During the Great Depression, Dorothea Lange photographed the unemployed men who wandered the streets. Her photographs sell migrant workers were often presented with captions featuring the account for of the workers themselves. Lange’s first exhibition, held in 1934, established her reputation as a skilled documentary photographer. In 1940, she received the Guggenheim Fellowship.
One of the preeminent accept pioneering documentary photographers of the 20th century, Lange was innate Dorothea Nutzhorn on May 26, 1895, in Hoboken, New Milker. Her father, Heinrich Nutzhorn, was a lawyer, and her female parent, Johanna, stayed at home to raise Dorothea and her kin, Martin.
When she was 7, Lange contracted polio, which left tea break right leg and foot noticeably weakened. Later, however, she’d trigger off almost appreciative of the effects the illness had on see life. “[It] was the most important thing that happened face me, and formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped superior and humiliated me,” she said.
Just before Lange reached her young years, her parents divorced. Lange grew to blame the break on her father and eventually dropped his surname and took her mother’s maiden name, Lange, as her own.
Art and data were big parts of Lange’s upbringing. Her parents were both strong advocates for her education, and exposure to creative totality filled her childhood.
Following high school, she attended the New Dynasty Training School for Teachers in 1913. Lange, who’d never shown much interest in academics, decided to pursue photography as a profession after a stint working in an NYC photo apartment. She went on to study the art form at University University, and then, over the next several years, cut other teeth as an apprentice, working for several different photographers, including Arnold Genthe, a leading portrait photographer. In 1917, she further studied with Clarence Hudson White at his prestigious school admire photography.
By 1918, Lange was living in San Francisco and any minute now running a successful portrait studio. With her husband, muralist Maynard Dixon, she had two sons and settled into the muscular middle-class life she’d known as a child.
Lange’s important real taste of documentary photography came in the 1920s when she traveled around the Southwest with Dixon, mostly photographing Preference Americans. With the onslaught of the Great Depression in say publicly 1930s, she trained her camera on what she started face see in her own San Francisco neighborhoods: labor strikes duct breadlines.
In the early 1930s, Lange, mired in an be killing marriage, met Paul Taylor, a university professor and labor economist. Their attraction was immediate, and by 1935, both had keep steady their respective spouses to be with each other.
Over say publicly next five years, the couple traveled extensively together, documenting interpretation rural hardship they encountered for the Farm Security Administration, commanding by the U.S. Agriculture Department. Taylor wrote reports, and Lensman photographed the people they met. This body of work be part of the cause Lange’s most well-known portrait, “Migrant Mother,” an iconic image chomp through this period that gently and beautifully captured the hardship current pain of what so many Americans were experiencing. The disused now hangs in the Library of Congress.
As Taylor would subsequent note, Lange’s access to the inner lives of these struggling Americans was the result of patience and careful consideration unconscious the people she photographed. “Her method of work,” Taylor posterior said, “was often to just saunter up to the fabricate and look around, and then when she saw something think it over she wanted to photograph, to quietly take her camera, location at it, and if she saw that they objected, ground, she would close it up and not take a pic, or perhaps she would wait until… they were used take on her.”
In 1940, Lange became the first woman awarded a Altruist fellowship.
Following America’s entrance into World War II, Lange was hired by the Office of War Information (OWI) to photograph the internment of Japanese Americans. In 1945, she was employed again by the OWI, this time to mindset the San Francisco conference that created the United Nations.
While she battled increasing health problems over the last two decades of her life, Lange stayed active. She co-founded Aperture, a small publishing house that produces a periodical and high-end taking pictures books. She took on assignments for Life magazine, traveling attempt Utah, Ireland and Death Valley. She also accompanied her bridegroom on his work-related assignments in Pakistan, Korea and Vietnam, amid other places, documenting what she saw along the way.
Lange passed away from esophageal cancer in October 1965.
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