Mrs. Dorothea Lange

Hey guys,

(I can’t post her photos in the “My Name Is” section)

My Name Is: Dorothea Lange

Born: Hoboken, New Jersey in 1895

Died: October 11, 1965

Best Known As: American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work. Lange’s photographs humanized the tragic consequences of the Great Depression and profoundly influenced the development of documentary photography. These pictures speak for themselves…

Lange's "Migrant Mother"

Dorothea developed polio at the age of 7 and since treatment was not yet available she came out of it with a rather weak right leg and a life-long limp. She informally apprenticed herself to several well-known New York photography studios in the 1910’s and then moved to San Francisco in 1918. With the onset of the Great Depression, Lange turned her camera lens from the studio to the street. Her studies of unemployed and homeless people captured the attention of local photographers and led to her employment with the federal Resettlement Administration (RA), later called the Farm Security Administration (FSA).

From 1935 to 1939, Lange’s work for the RA and FSA brought the plight of the poor and forgotten — particularly sharecroppers, displaced farm families, and migrant workers — to public attention. Distributed free to newspapers across the country, her poignant images became icons of the era.

In 1941 Lange was awarded a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship for her work but after Pearl Harbor she gave back the award to record the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans to relocation camps. To many observers, her photograph of Japanese-American children pledging allegiance to the flag shortly before they were sent to internment camps is a haunting reminder of this policy of detaining people without charging them with any crime or affording them any appeal.

April 1942, Weill Public School, San Francisco

Her images were so obviously critical that the Army censored them. Today her photographs of the internment are available in the National Archives.

Mississippi Delta Children

Check out more of her pictures with captions