Celebrating Women’s History Month: Pioneering Photographer Dorothea Lange

Dorothea Lange in Texas on the Plains, 1935, Photo: Paul S. Taylor

Pioneering American documentary photographer Dorothea Lange (1895-1965) empathized with life's "walking wounded." Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, she contracted polio at the age of seven, leaving her with a permanent limp. Five years later, her father abandoned the family, and she, her mother, and her brother moved from the suburbs to the ethnically diverse Lower East Side. Lange's mother worked as a librarian while her daughter wandered the city observing people. She wanted to record what she saw. After graduating high school, Lange studied photography at Columbia University with Clarence H. White and apprenticed at  Arnold Genthe's studio.

White Angel Bread Line, San Francisco, 1933, Photo: Dorothea Lange

In 1918, at 23, she moved to San Francisco and opened a portrait studio. While Lange photographed the city's social elite during the day, her studio transformed into a bohemian salon for artists at night. One of these was American Western painter Maynard Dixon. The two married in 1920, and Lange continued to operate her studio while raising two sons. With the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, the photographer turned her camera to the unemployed and homeless people on the streets. Lange left commercial photography in 1935 when she secured a position in Roosevelt's Resettlement Administration. 

Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California, 1936, Photo: Dorothea Lange

The president created the RA, later the Farm Security Administration, to combat rural poverty. Along with her new job, Lange acquired a new husband, progressive agricultural economist Paul S. Taylor. Together, they documented American life for the government between 1935 and 1944; Taylor interviewed subjects, and Lange photographed them. They followed US Route 99 in California and the migrant workers who traveled harvest to harvest, desperately seeking employment along the lost highway. Lange's poignant images, such as Migrant Mother, became emblematic of the Great Depression, searing the national psyche, as did John Steinbeck's novel The Grapes of Wrath.

Toward Los Angeles, California, 1939, Photo: Dorothea Lange